English

This course uses uses feminist, decolonizing, and multispecies frameworks to explore our contemporary environmental crisis. Drawing on examples such as climate change, toxic contamination, resource extraction, and biodiversity loss, this course examines the material and conceptual links between human and non-human natures, and cultural, political, economic and social forces.

This course explores the key aspects of the rise of Europe: concentrating on its environmental resources, aspects of power including rulership, community formation (including gender as a constituent of social relations), its belief and thought and its encounters with surrounding religions and cultures.

The course introduces game theory and its applications in political science to students. Topics include How to Think about Strategic Games, Games with Sequential Moves, Simultaneous-Move Games, Combining Sequential and Simultaneous Moves, Strategic Moves, Uncertainty and Information, The Prisoners' Dilemma and Repeated Games, Collective-Action Games, and Applications to Specific Strategic Situations.

This course explores various ethical questions related to engineering. Examples include: What is the relationship between ethical and social responsibilities in engineering? What is considered ethical? What is considered legal? Who decides that? etc. It discusses the idea that the essence of ethics is not to set up barriers to technical progress, but, rather, to indicate in which direction progress should move. Key topics include: algorithmic fairness, the rationality of ethics, and strategies for engineers to maintain ethical integrity while working in complex systems and organizations. 

With the development of Internet, multimedia data have become increasingly accessible, such as images, audios, videos, texts, etc.; the advances of artificial neural networks (e.g. large multi-modal model GPT4) have also made multimodal fusion a general trend in Al. This course covers applications including image/video processing generation, audio/ speech processing and generation, natural language processing and generation. It introduces popular signal processing and machine learning techniques in the artificial intelligence field, such as data representation, data compression, sequence models, data synthesis, multimodal fusion, etc. Through lectures and course projects, students learn about the features of different signals, and their common ground. 

This course examines the global politics of trade, development, and the environment against the background of continued economic globalization and the emergence of new forms of global governance. 

This course covers key Concepts of Hermeneutics: Dialogue, Fusion of Horizons, Crossover, 2nd Person, and Naturalism and Deconstructionism. This course is a survey of the ideas of Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer, which make up most of what is known as hermeneutics, or the philosophy of interpretation. 

This course examines the sociology of family life. It covers key theoretical perspectives on the family and personal life and examines the political and cultural context of family life. A key theme of the course will be to identify the ways in which family life is changing and exploring the implications of those changes for individuals, society and social policy. It examines social and demographic trends in marriage, fertility, cohabitation, singlehood and the organization of paid and unpaid work in families and households. Other issues and topics that will be addressed including: gender and family life, dating and relationship formation, the impact of reproductive technologies, same-sex relationships, 'boomerang' kids and fatherhood.

This course introduces students to the principal findings, models, and research methods in the field of second language acquisition. The course surveys general issues such as the role of the native language, the effects on the second language on the first, universals, age, input and interaction, and processing, as well as characteristics of the acquisition of phonology, lexicon, and syntax in second language learners. The empirical component of the course provides students with experience in designing and carrying out studies in second language acquisition.