English

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.

This course examines the ways that crime is constructed and popularized. Given the localized context of colonial Australia, it pays particular attention to crime as a settler colonial construct. The course requires that students read and think critically about their own assumptions, media representations, and the ways that powerful groups define, measure and regulate crime. By examining a range of topics including youth crime, street crime, crime in the home and crimes of the powerful, this course will consider how understandings of crime inform and produce a range of state responses and varied experiences of justice/injustice.

This course gives students a thorough introduction to the field of behavioral organizational economics. Students discuss seminal as well as current research papers in the field, featuring empirical studies as well as lab and field experiments. Students study employment relationships between workers and organizations and get to know key factors that shape them in a positive way.  They focus on the two concepts of motivation and selection. When it comes to the question of how to motivate workers on their jobs, students discuss desired as well as unexpected effects incentives can have and examine the interplay between incentives, on the one hand, and cultural and psychological factors on the other. When it comes to selection and hiring, students tackle the question of how to best match candidates to jobs. Students also find out more about how to detect discrimination in the hiring process – and discuss measures that can help to mitigate or even eliminate it.

This course introduces students to the analysis of science and technology from a social and cultural standpoint. It also introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology and Society (STS) – also called Science and Technology Studies – which seeks to understand how science and technology shape society and culture, and how society and culture, in turn, shape the development of science and technology.