English

This course provides a deeper understanding of the integrated project organization and execution models with a focus on integrated project delivery methods like partnering, IPD, or Alliancing. Students learn how the tools and techniques provided enrich options to consult clients and to set up planning and constructions projects in a more efficient and suitable way. The course is a blend of theoretical basic information combined with the application in specific case study situations. Students examine how an increasing complexity of building projects requires new skill sets and a deeper understanding of the relationships of the project participants on various levels in the construction industry. Topics include the traditional contractual project execution models like design and built or design-bid-built suffer on various levels in terms of time, cost, and quality (user requirements and satisfaction) for large scale and complex construction projects and how integrated project organization and execution models have become more prominent in Germany in recent years.

This course introduces the five core “pillars” of public health practice: biostatistics, epidemiology, environmental health, health policy and management, and social and behavioral sciences. While many public health professionals specialize in one of these areas, a well-rounded understanding across these pillars is essential to public health practice. Lectures and seminars cover key concepts and real-world examples with seminars focusing on the critical evaluation of real studies within each core area. The second part of the course focuses on applying these skills to case studies covering key public health issues from around the world.

For the past two centuries, historians have focused their work on understanding the political, economic and social developments that created the modern world. Debates over the growth of trade, the development of institutions, the causes of war and ways to achieve peace, the creation of health systems, and the evolution of ideas formed the basis of the field. History, for most of history, was considered a purely human endeavor. In the past few decades, however, climate change and human impact on Earth's biosphere have demonstrated that this framework is incomplete. Humanity has always been part of and dependent on the non-human world and now, as the Anthropocene debate suggests, the human race is undoubtedly a major cause of changes to Earth systems. The future of humanity and the planet can no longer be separated, which forces us to reconsider the role of non-human environments in the development of modern human societies. To do so, this course relies on the tools of environmental history, a relatively new and rapidly growing historical subfield that studies the human relationship with the natural world. Each session addresses a specific feature of our modern era through an environmental lens, including globalization, industrialization, empires, warfare, food production, and energy use. Sessions are a combination of lectures, source analysis and group discussions. At the end of the course, students are familiar with the broad themes of the environmental history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are able to apply this historical methodology to their own interests.

British living standards have stagnated for almost fifteen years, and on present trends will be the same as Poland's by 2030. What has gone "wrong" with the quality of Government in Britain? What errors and mistakes have its governments made? What lessons can be learned for other nations? Is relative British decline reversible? This interdisciplinary course draws on intellectual traditions in history, political science, economic history and economics to explore how the Academy explains the perpetual British crisis, drawing on the course leader's research in modern British history and politics at the University of Oxford. Its method is case study-based, beginning with the First World War (the conceptual, introductory topic) and passing through other "failures" of the British State since 1914, including Appeasement; the Suez Crisis; Concorde, the Community Charge (the "Poll Tax"); Rail Privatization; the Iraq War; and the Great Financial Crisis of 2007/8. An overview of "public policy failure" literature is integral to the course.

The course provides students with a survey of foundational topics in metaphysics. Topics include ontology (categories of being), the persistence and identity of material objects, the nature of properties, substances, events and absences, accounts of causation, time, personal identity, and free will. An emphasis is placed on critical examination of arguments for and against competing metaphysical views. 

In this course, students examine a range of family forms: family functioning, family relationships, and child development. They explore individual, dyadic, family, and cultural-level factors that influence the development and functioning of family relationships. The course covers the main theoretical approaches to the study of the family but emphasizes recent empirical research. A focus on diverse family forms runs throughout the course, such as LGBTQ+ families, and families formed through third-party assisted reproduction.

This is an interdisciplinary, project‑based course designed to introduce the principles, methods, and communication practices of modern scientific research. Through a flipped‑classroom approach, the course actively explores how different disciplines—such as biology, informatics, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computer science—intersect to address complex scientific questions. Throughout the course, students work in small subgroups to build and communicate a scientific project. They learn how to identify and evaluate scientific literature, analyze research methodologies across fields, and critically assess the validity, reproducibility, and interpretation of results. Students develop strong skills in teamwork, scientific reasoning, and oral communication as they prepare an interdisciplinary presentation aimed at both specialists and non‑specialists. A major component of the course is the construction of a final oral presentation based on recent scientific publications. Students progressively refine their project through guided tutorials led by instructors from multiple disciplines. They also practice writing concise research abstracts, critically reading scientific articles, and using research tools such as PubMed and AI‑assisted platforms—while assessing their benefits and limitations. By the end of the course, students gain practical experience in the entire scientific communication pipeline: exploring a topic, building a multidisciplinary understanding of its methods, and presenting their findings clearly and rigorously to a diverse scientific audience.

The course begins with a theoretical review of the concepts of nationalism and communism – the predominant ideological concepts of twentieth-century Central Europe, i.e. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. This is followed by study of the origins, development, and present-day heritage of nationalism and communism in the region. The topics described and problematized include concrete manifestations of nationalism and communism in Central Europe, such as the creation of new nation states after World War I, the introduction of communist regimes after 1945 and the impact of these regimes on political, economic, social and cultural development. The course is concluded with a general discussion of the heritage and consequences of nationalism and communism in present-day Central Europe.

This course introduces unsupervised learning and clustering algorithms, before exploring generative adversarial networks and deep generative models. It examines self-supervised learning, anomaly detection, flow-based models, and unsupervised representation learning. The final part of the course focuses on clustering in high-dimensional spaces, semi-supervised learning, energy-based models, and unsupervised learning for reinforcement. This intensive course offers theoretical understanding and practical experience with a focus throughout on real-world applications of deep unsupervised learning across various domains, offering career skills as well as excellent foundations for future research.

This course covers how modern computers operate and how to program them efficiently by making optimal use of their capabilities. The lectures introduce the internal functioning of computers through a progressive approach to fundamental concepts, organized into three main stages. First, it introduces machine‑level programming, including binary and hexadecimal arithmetic (signed and unsigned), and the use of registers, memory, and the stack. The second stage focuses on digital electronics, covering Boolean algebra and logic functions, as well as the design of memory circuits and data paths. The final stage examines processor design, including instruction encoding and the wiring of the processor data path. Tutorial sessions deepen understanding through paper‑based problem solving, emphasizing conceptual reasoning without the need for a physical computer. Practical sessions provide hands‑on experience using educational simulators that correspond to the three phases of the course: execution of simplified machine‑language programs, design of digital electronic circuits, and processor wiring simulation, allowing students to modify and experiment with instruction sets.