English

This course introduces political philosophy. It covers the main concepts, issues, and questions raised in political philosophy, to acquire a general and analytic understanding of the central topics in political philosophy.

The course offers a variety of approaches to the practice of drawing the figure through the study of both technical and expressive skills. Students make studies from the nude figure (male and female) promoting a basic understanding of human anatomy and look at different aspects of drawing such as line, tone, and structure. Learning about methods of measurement and analysis, materials and techniques, providing a solid foundation of knowledge, skill and confidence on which you can build in your chosen way. Suitable for beginners and those with limited experience.

This course examines the physical processes involved with the formation and evolution of mountain glaciers and seasonal snow, including processes such as surface mass balance, dynamics and hydrology. 

This course analyzes current aspects of digital markets and the relationships between market participants - suppliers, consumers, and digital platforms. It examines the implications on consumer protection that arise within digital environments. Special focus will be on European law with emphasis on comparative aspects with US law. Topics include: consumer protections, consumer law, and behavior problems in consumer law; European Data Protection; E-marketplaces; technology and digital markets; contracts and data.

The serialization of Wilkie Collins’s mystery novel The Woman in White in Charles Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round from 1859 to 1860 is often regarded as the birth of a new type of fiction in Victorian England that came to dominate the literary market in the 1860s: the sensation novel. Even though recent criticism has widened the remit of the genre to include examples from earlier decades, Collins’s novel of mystery, deception and murder exerted an unprecedented cultural influence: readers (like the seasoned novelist W. M. Thackeray) are reported to have sat up all night ploughing through the pages of Collins’s doorstopper in a frenzy to find out what happened next. The novel became a singular object of consumption in other respects as well: ladies with money to spare could treat themselves to Woman-in-White fashion and Woman-in-White perfume, and music lovers could dance to Woman-in-White waltzes. Other novelists followed Collins and created ever more exciting ‘novels with a secret’, and the 1860s alone saw two further genre-shaping examples with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861). This overwhelming popular success prompted conservative critics to rail against these titillating productions: the novelist Margaret Oliphant was appalled by the representation of sensation fiction’s heroines as “fleshly and unlovely”, and the Dean of St Paul’s, Henry L. Mansel, condemned sensation authors like Collins, Braddon and Charles Reade for offering cheap literary fare and – more dangerously – for “preaching to the nerves” of their readers. In this seminar, students will read two long sensation novels (The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret) and one shorter example taken from the genre of detective fiction (Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles) – a form that can be fruitfully traced to the sensation novels of the 1860s. We will place these novels in their rich historical and cultural contexts and engage with the immediate responses to the genre. We will study sensation fiction’s generic predecessors (such as the Gothic romance and the silver-fork-novel) and weigh its significance for modern forms like the crime novel and the psychological thriller.

The course examines how Ireland’s landscape has changed in the period 1850-present, and examines the sources and methods we can use to understand the history of landscape. Throughout this course students try to make sense of the overlapping influences of conflict, economic change, and social life on the making of the landscape and explore the impact that place and land has had on the creation of modern Ireland.

This seminar examines the role of diasporas as non-state actors in the transnational realm. We will look at conceptual and theoretical approaches to diaspora policies as well as empirical cases of diaspora engagement in international policies. A special focus will be laid on postcolonial perspectives on diasporas as political agents and challenges they might pose for the study of international relations as well as for policy practices.

Motion planning is a fundamental building block for autonomous systems, with applications in robotics, industrial automation, and autonomous driving. After completion of the course, students will have a detailed understanding of: Formalization of geometric, kinodynamic, and optimal motion planning; Sampling-based approaches: Rapidly-exploring random trees (RRT), probabilistic roadmaps (PRM), and variants; Search-based approaches: State-lattice based A* and variants; Optimization-based approaches: Differential Flatness and Sequential convex programming (SCP); The theoretical properties relevant to these algorithms (completeness, optimality, and complexity). Students will be able to: Decide (theoretically and empirically) which algorithm(s) to use for a given problem; Implement (basic versions) of the algorithms themselves; • Use current academic and industrial tools such as the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL).

It provides a unified perspective on motion planning and includes topics from different research and industry communities. The goal is not only to learn the foundations and theory of currently used approaches, but also to be able to pick and compare the different methods for specific motion planning needs. An important emphasis is the consideration of both geometric and kinodynamic motion planning for the major algorithm types.

This course explores industrial security and current geopolitical aspects minimizing the influence of fake news and corruption and providing efficient tools through intelligence analysis. It offers an introduction to the activities and attitudes of intelligence analysts in the field of business, non-governmental institutions and administration.

Who has felt authorized to narrate their life history and what has compelled them to tell explanatory stories that make sense of their lives? How accurate is it to call autobiography the history of the self? Do we encounter other histories or selves in autobiography? What is the history of autobiography and how do we read it? Historians reading autobiography for documentary evidence of the past and endeavoring to write about it objectively will find that their task is complicated by the autobiographer’s subjective and often highly creative engagement with memory, experience, identity, embodiment, and agency. This course is intended for students who wish to explore the interdisciplinary links between autobiography, history, literature, and personal narrative, and to acquire strategic theories and cultural understanding for reading these texts.