English

This course introduces students to the key ideas of Game Theory and strategic thinking, allowing them to use game theoretic tools to analyze real world problems. Students see applications in industrial organization, auctions, competition and cooperation, voting, solving environment problems, and arms races.

This course introduces students to geographical scholarship that has sought to explain, understand, and critically analyze the manifold relationships between space and society in different contexts. The course familiarizes students with innovative geographical research exploring issues such as, for example, environment and uneven development; culture, the global, and the local; transnationalism and migration; gender, race, identity; politics, the state, and regions; empire, colonialism, and postcolonialism; nature, materiality, and non-human agencies.

This introduction to Natural Resource Economics examines the scarcity and optimal allocation of freshwater resources in the Western Cape, South Africa. The theoretical framework is neo-classical microeconomics, market failure, and climate change are being addressed. Assessment: tests and essays (40%), final examination (60%).

The course presents an application-focused and hands-on approach to learning neural networks and reinforcement learning. It is an introduction to deep learning methods, presenting a wide range of connectionist models that represent the current state-of-the-art. Topics include the fundamentals of machine learning and the mathematical and computational prerequisites for deep learning; feed-forward neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and the recurrent connections to a feed-forward neural network; a brief history of artificial intelligence and neural networks, and reviews open research problems in deep learning and connectionism.  Entry requirements include 90 credits in statistics and a course in linear algebra.

In this course, students learn how to use a range of marketing analytics techniques to analyze, visualize, and interpret data from various sources such as surveys, transaction data, and data from social media platforms. To effectively analyze these data, students learn how to use typical software packages to develop practical solutions to specific marketing problems. In contrast to other marketing courses, particular emphasis is placed in guiding students step-by-step on how to conduct specific data analyses using suitable software. Students learn how various marketing analytical techniques, tools, metrics, and data sources can be used to address fundamental challenges marketing managers face today in the age of Big Data. 

Today’s businesses need to continuously develop their ways of organizing and leading, as well as understand how to manage innovation to secure the development and growth of the companies. This course develops a theoretical knowledge base and practical ability in innovation management. The objective is also to increase the knowledge of how considering the conditions and processes of innovation management can contribute to long-lasting advantages and an increase in company competitiveness.

This course examines to marketing in the international marketplace. Topics covered include the cultural, economic, political and ethical environments within which global marketing occurs; drivers toward globalization; foreign market assessment, selection and analysis; international product policy; international advertising and promotion; channel management; and coordinating global marketing.

Students examine the legal standards that govern the state’s power to control, coerce, and punish those suspected (or proven) to have committed crimes. Students also explore how these laws are exercised by legal actors, including police, prosecutors and judges in their routine decisions and practices. The course speaks directly to the real-world issues and controversies encountered by criminal justice systems in many developed democracies today – racial injustices, abuses of police power, mass incarceration, penal populism, law’s potential to reform organizations, to name but a few.

The course educates students in the main features of the art form, how to achieve them on the page, and how to recognize and appreciate the literary contexts out of which they emerge. Students work through their notebooks and workshops to recognize their own poetic impulses and render them with greater precision in what they write. Students are encouraged to write poems in the workshops, to be discussed by the group. 

This course offers anyone new to creative writing a chance to learn about different types of writing and to try them out with encouragement, support, and guidance. Students read and discuss inspiring examples of writing (such as poetry, short story, novel, non-fiction and drama) to find literary techniques, craft, and skills that they can apply to their own work. Writing exercises allow students to practice these skills and share their work for feedback. Students also discuss habits and ideas that help them write. Overall, this course offers a welcoming first step to the art of writing creatively.