English

Sustainable development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are broad, context dependent, and interdisciplinary. This is at the heart of this course. Through short, pre-recorded lecturers from experts in different disciplines, to critical discussions of the Universities' own policies, this course breaks down this complex area into core principles, academic skills, and authentic case studies. The SDGs guide activity around the world, and this too is at the center of this course - critically exploring these goals from different epistemic, political, and cultural perspectives and giving students room to bring their experiences to debates and discussions.

 

This course introduces the basic concepts of Cybersecurity. It explores the challenges that the interconnectedness of cyberspace poses to computer networks; the concept of risk; typical patterns of vulnerabilities, as well as attacks and mitigation strategies.  

The course introduces, in a non-technical fashion, the basic concepts of cryptography, and the typical cryptographic building blocks: encryption, digital signatures, authentication codes, public key and secret key infrastructures. The course discusses how these building blocks are used to construct secure networks and the legal frameworks handling cyber-attacks. Finally, the course analyzes cybersecurity in the context of Japan and East Asia. 

This course aims to explore a set of important issues about the theory and practice of democracy. The first part of the course will examine the challenge of meritocracy and various justifications of democracy, including those offered by Mill, Rousseau, Schumpeter, and others. The second part will address some of the most pressing problems facing liberal democracies today: how to improve the quality of public deliberation in the age of social media? How to overcome the challenges posed by populism? How to maintain the efficacy of democratic institutions in a global capitalist economy?

The goal of this course is to familiarize students with the key analytical methods and leading applications in the field of game theory. At the end of the course, students should be able to identify and formalize problems that involve strategic interaction between different economic agents, and to analyze them with game-theoretical thinking.

This course examines the implications of a finite biosphere and the complexities inherent in environmental decision-making.

This course is systematically organized around the creation of new value, processes of innovation management, and operation of new and emerging ventures in global environments. It covers major aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship strategy in countries such as U.S., Europe, Australia, China, and other emerging countries. 

The course explores various aspects of cinema in Egypt and the Arab World in order to understand its history and determine the themes, styles, and character of this cinema which has been historically among the most influential in national world cinemas. It covers selected films by a number of auteurs from Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine. Special attention is paid to form and style, as well as recurrent themes; for example, the civil war and Israeli invasions in the case of Lebanon, and the Israeli occupation in the case of Palestine. Additional topics include areas such as New Arab Cinemas, classical Egyptian cinema, the Arab film industry, and independent Arab cinema.

This course surveys the paradoxical (sometimes productive) neuro-psychological phenomena that can be observed after lesions of the central or peripheral nervous system, or by non-invasive (transcranial) brain stimulation. These phenomena contrast with the more common functional deficits of brain lesions or brain stimulation, and are used as windows to detail current concepts in cognitive neuroscience, brain plasticity, and rehabilitation. Each lecture begins with case descriptions of patients with paradoxical (sometimes productive) effects of stimulation/lesions on behavior. Examples include hyper-attention; an anarchic hand; the experience of leaving one's own body; or the integration of phantom limbs into one's own body scheme. The lectures explore how these phenomena fit or inform models of cognitive processes and plasticity in different domains (e.g. attention, motor control, interhemispheric interactions, multisensory integration) and point to implications for neurorehabilitation. 

This course offers an introduction to the general laws of mechanics, thermodynamics, fields, waves, electromagnetism, and their application to the resolution of engineering problems. Pre-requisites: calculus and linear algebra.

This course examines the political thought of tumultuous times in ancient China covering the late Spring and Autumns (770-476 BC) and Warring State (476-221 BC) periods. It focuses on the following questions: what is, for ancient thinkers, the common good for All Under Heaven? How can the ruler deliver good governance? What is the standard of political legitimacy? What role do scholars play in political order? What is the relationship between domestic and international order? How do all of these bear on the understanding of human nature?