English

This course examines Chinese leadership. Topics to be covered include the Chinese leadership structure, the characteristics of the party-state, the dynamics between individuals and institutions, the channels of elite recruitment, the educational and occupational characteristics of Chinese officials, the relationship between various elite groups (political, economic, and military), and factional politics. 

This course examines the influence and impact that magic and myth have in Southeast Asian society. Students examine the duality of magic as a norm and a taboo, and explore magic’s role in righting injustices, recording denied history, and gender inequality. Students conduct a comparative study between aspects of magic and mythmaking between Southeast Asia and other regions in the world. The course applies themes and theories from academic material to the real world. 

This course provides a comprehensive perspective on large language models. Specifically, in the first half, it covers the fundamentals of language models, including network structures, training, inference, and evaluation. In the second half, the course focuses on the interpretation of large language models, alignment, and their applications beyond simple text generation. Through this approach, the course equips students with foundational knowledge of the technologies behind large language models, helping them smoothly engage in research or practical applications in this field. Topics include Introduction and basics of large language models, Preprocessing: tokenization and data curation, Pre-training of large language models, Scaling laws and emergent behavior, Alignment: instruction tuning and preference learning, Learning from AI feedback, Decoding algorithms, Reasoning with test-time inference methods, Retrieval-augmented generation, AI agents, and Extension to multi-modality. 

Prerequisites: Machine learning, Deep learning

This course introduces Asian, European, and American material from the late nineteenth century to nearly the present day, concentrating on social and cultural themes such as industrialization, colonialism, science and race, technology and war, computers and global telecommunications and biotechnology and the human genome project. It is taught as a series of cases illustrating important events and multiple themes. The proposition that modern science and technology have been 'socially constructed', reflecting political and cultural values as well as the state of nature, is examined closely. The course includes theoretical material and an empirical focus.

This course looks at ways of writing throughout the long history of experimentation with critical form: from essays and auto-fictions to critical fabulations and diaries, the "personal" and the "political" in writing have often deeply intermeshed. The course considers ways of thinking about the relationship of formal innovation and structure to the content or air of the text; to ways writers enact performative relationships with their real or imagined interlocutors; and to ways we ourselves can examine and reinvent our own manners of shaping written thought. Affect, race, gender, aesthetics, and politics, as well as archives and documents occupy students' attention, as they navigate some radical and long-lasting experiments in the history of critical thought. 

This course introduces students to public health, a discipline which seeks to prevent disease and promote the health of populations through the organized efforts of society. Public health addresses complex health and social problems that are influenced by social, cultural, political, environmental, organizational, and economic factors. Students explore determinants that shape inequalities in health and explore how the organized efforts of communities and governments can help to ameliorate these. Students learn how different theories support public health practice and develop their skills in critically appraising evidence. They explore a breadth of public health topics – from sexual health to mental health - and include examples from low-, middle-, and high-income countries.

This course provides students with an in-depth understanding of electronic device operation as well as the fabrication techniques used in their manufacture, and it introduces students to the design and manufacture of electronic products and the importance of quality control and design for manufacture. It covers the basics of semiconductor physics, the important building blocks of the p-n junction and MOS capacitor, and the operation and fabrication of MOS and bipolar transistors. Students are also introduced to electronics industry relevant materials relating to product design and manufacture as well as the important developments that are driving future technologies.

This course studies future-defining themes such as Food, Water, Energy, Engineering, and Health both from an academic and real-life perspective. While learning about contemporary efforts and policies to address climate change, inequality, and globalization, the course also explores what these phenomena really entail and how they can be addressed through thinking and actions. The course discusses the thoughts of our greatest philosophers as well as site visits, interviews with leading policymakers, entrepreneurs, and scientists, and an exploration of real life. Understanding the essence of entrepreneurship in the realm of globally interconnected markets, production, and supply chains is a continuous thread throughout the course. Seeking to understand human behavior through the lens of consumption and lifestyles, key elements of positive psychology are studied. 

In this unit, students study five major authors working in a range of genres and offering radically different outlooks and outputs. Students explore the conditions in which their work was produced, and the social and political contexts in which it was consumed, reflecting critically throughout on the category of the "woman writer," and the history of scholarship thereon.