English

This course introduces students to the study of comparative literature through plays written in the 20th and 21st century from France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Russia, Spain, the UK, and the USA. All texts are read in English translation. The course introduces students to a representative and canonical range of fictional works, with focus on one literary genre - drama - and one over-arching theme. The theme is currently "Staging the Political," but may change depending on staff availability. 

This course provides key legal skills necessary to enable compliant, effective and sustainable public procurement contracting. The course engages with different policy objectives for the public procurement life cycle including contracting specifications, evaluation criteria, conflicts of interest and dispute settlement. This course includes two negotiating exercises addressing procurement contracts and procurement agreements to provide students with the skills to communicate and understand the legal parameters as well as the different trade-offs involved.

This course consists of six focused seminars with an accompanying discussion/workshop. Each workshop focuses on one of the SCMMS (School of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine & Sciences) research focus. Each formal lecture is given by academics in the school who review some of their work including clinical problem, research background, hypothesis and aims, methodology, outcomes, and application. These are not high level conference lectures but firmly set in level 5 level of understanding.

The course covers core areas of biomolecular sciences, in particular the genetic, molecular, and cellular processes that underpin biological systems. The course equips students with a general knowledge and understanding of the fundamental concepts that form the basis of these subject areas, revealing the complexity of biological systems, aspects of the molecular basis of life, and how molecular mechanisms are regulated in healthy organisms but may fail in disease. The thematic areas of the course are genetics, environmental perception, developmental biology and energetics, enzymes and proteins. They cover topics as diverse as the control of genetic information, the use of model organisms, the control of cell shape, cell division and movement, organogenesis and the development of drugs. The course also teaches basic experimental approaches and specific laboratory skills. 

There are several languages for programming quantum protocols. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. This course surveys current platforms (OpenQAsm, Qiskit, Q#, Quipper, Quantomatic, and PyZX) and analyzes their respective features semantically. The theoretical analysis uses category theory, a powerful mathematical tool in logic and informatics, that has influenced the design of many modern programming languages. It enables a powerful graphical calculus that lets you draw pictures instead of writing algebraic expressions. This technique is visually extremely insightful, yet completely rigorous. For example, correctness of protocols often comes down to whether a picture is connected or disconnected, whether there is information flow from one end to another. In a practical way, this course investigates the conceptual reasons why quantum protocols and quantum computing work, rather than their algorithmic and complexity-theoretic aspects.

Western philosophy, although often concerned with practical questions such as how one ought to live, almost invariably restricts itself to theoretical methods of enquiry. This course examines other philosophical traditions, such as Zen Buddhism, that instead give great prominence to practical methods in the pursuit of their enquiries, most notably, breathing techniques and various forms of meditation. The course focuses on key philosophical issues raised by the adoption of non-theoretical modes of enquiry, including epistemological questions such as the justificatory status of non-alethic modes of knowledge-acquisition (e.g. meditation), and questions in the philosophy of mind concerning the conception of the Self developed and disclosed through meditation. The course also discusses ethical questions raised by a philosophical practice that appears to privilege individual attainment over socially shared commitments.

In this course, students who are already familiar with the key theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence and machine learning dive deeper into the exciting capabilities of this area of research and its applications. The course begins with computer vision algorithms for classification, recognition, detection, and their implementation in deep learning libraries, before exploring autoencoders and variational autoencoders, and gaining insights into the training and application of generative adversarial networks. It then proceeds to an in-depth examination of diffusion models, including score-based diffusion models, latent diffusion models, and Stable Diffusion. The final part of the course explores even more advanced topics, including the representation of 3D objects, vision transformers, video classification, and text to image generation.

This course teaches students how to evaluate the dynamic response requirements of a proposed machine design and to produce workable proposals for its safe and effective operation. It builds on the second year Mechatronics and Solid Mechanics courses, introducing a greater range of examples where the dynamic response of a machine must be controlled and making the link between vibration and fatigue failure. This involves some new subject matter in the vibration of continuous systems, rotor dynamics, signal processing and control analysis. A key aspect of the course is to demonstrate practical vibration measurements and to compare them to solutions of an idealized system in MATLAB. 

Through theoretical studies and practical exercises, the course conveys knowledge about the structure and function of the brain and key areas of modern cognitive neuroscience, such as attention, memory, language, and cognitive control, as well as emotions and social interaction. The understanding of normal function is the primary focus of the course, but clinical examples are also used as they provide substantial illustrations of normal functioning. Furthermore, the course provides knowledge about relevant research methods within the area, and major emphasis is placed on the interdisciplinary nature of the subject. This module includes a literature review but can also consist of a short empirical oriented project (within the field of Cognitive Neuroscience).

This courses explores the causes and consequences of corruption and the ways to combat it. Corruption is a complex problem, requiring an approach from several disciplines. This course relates corruption to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) while describing the anti-corruption mechanisms and participants in Mexico.