English

This course covers essential analytical and conceptual tools for examining foreign policy processes. It equips students to identify and critically assess differences, similarities, changes, and continuities in the foreign policies of states worldwide. Through diverse historical case studies, the course highlights key theoretical debates while addressing the connect/disconnect between theoretical frameworks and practical decision-making in foreign policy. Along with a midterm and final exam, students participate in a team debate. 

This course focuses on advanced algorithms and architectures for deep learning with neural networks. The course provides an introduction to how deep learning techniques can be used to design important parts of advanced autonomous systems that exist in physical and cyber environments.

This course examines the ways in which Pacific peoples frame their contemporary world in the context of globalization. It also examines factors which shape contemporary Pacific life and popular culture as well as some of the challenges emanating from how Pacific peoples construct and make sense of their own and others’ historical, political, socio-cultural, economic and religious worlds.

This course examines the interconnectedness of environment and society. It highlights the importance of understanding how different views and attitudes influence people's interactions with the environment. Key themes include governance, management and development, which are addressed through issues such as conservation, climate change adaptation, disasters and resource use. 

This course examines the global condition of women and girls through a feminist lens, discussing this condition as political and sexual. It canvasses topics that exemplify global sexual politics and discusses the harmful results for women and girls. The course aims to cultivate theoretical insight and critical analysis skills that exercise knowledge and examples specifically from feminist scholarship. It aims to promote comprehension of feminist frameworks as well as contemporary problems affecting women and girls globally. 

This course explores texts for children and young adults in a historical and contemporary perspective. Students are introduced to children’s literature studies as an interdisciplinary field, related to theory, concepts, and analytical strategies from comparative literature, childhood studies, book history, and media studies. It analyzes works by canonical authors such as Astrid Lindgren, Hans Christian Andersen, and Lewis Caroll, as well as contemporary texts and media, and relates them to transnational and transmedial interpretations and adaptations. The relationship between children’s literature and changing concepts of childhood and youth is discussed, also in relation to different aspects of identity formation in local and global contexts.

This course includes a theoretical and practical introduction to the reflection seismic and acoustic method and to interpretation of geophysical well logs and geotechnical measurements. Teaching consists of integrated lectures and exercises and a one-day fieldtrip with the research vessel Aurora. Lectures include: acquisition and processing of reflection seismic data and other acoustic data; the physical principles of geophysical well logs and geotechnical measurements; the workflow in an integrated interpretation. The theoretical introduction is succeeded by interpretation of seismic data and qualitative and quantitative interpretation of well logs and geotechnical measurements and how such data are used for analyzing the geological structure and development of both shallow and deep sediments with focus on the industrial applications and the green transition.

In this course, students study time and space complexity classes; identify the complexity classes associated with computational problems; prove that problems are complete for particular complexity classes; develop the ability to fit a particular problem into a class of related problems, and so to appreciate the efficiency attainable by algorithms to solve the particular problem; study circuit complexity and the class NC of parallelizable problems; study randomized computation and the associated complexity classes; and explore how the P=NP problem is related to cryptography.  

This course provides instruction and practice in the art of philosophical reflection and the skill of critical argument through the study of some of the core (Western) texts in the humanities and social sciences. While the focus is on analytical reading and critical thinking, there is an equal emphasis on expressing and presenting one’s ideas in writing, as well as engaging in dialogue on how to interpret and explain concepts and the practices they capture. 

This course introduces the principles of evolution and the major events in the history of life, while providing a basic understanding of how scientific methods are used in the field of evolutionary biology and how evolutionary thinking is applied to issues in biological diversity, animal behavior and modern human biology. The goal of the course is to develop a scientific way of thinking about the facts of life, including the evolution of human beings. 

Preferred prerequisites: Introductory/intermediate biology courses.