English

The course familiarizes students with India’s topographical, linguistic, and cultural heritage. Given the diversity of the subject, this course will only be giving an overview. Topics include an overview of India’s physical profile, tangible sites and intangible elements inscribed on UNESCO’s world heritage list, Indian music, major dance forms, and yoga.

This is an advanced-level Data Science course, focusing on deep learning, which has witnessed great success over the past decade. Two of the most successful fields of deep learning are image processing and natural language processing. 

Some of the most successful applications of deep learning in image processing include object detection, image segmentation, and image classification. In natural language processing, deep learning has been used to develop applications such as machine translation, text classification, automatic summarization and question answering.  

The course begins with an overview of deep learning, and a review class for Python and the PyTorch library respectively. Then, the course studies linear algebra and calculus from numerical perspectives. The course also reviews the basics of statistics and information theory for deep learning and the basics of machine learning, including topics like overfitting, supervised and unsupervised learning, and stochastic gradient descent.  

The course introduces neural network models using the familiar linear and softmax regression, as well as the concept of multilayer perceptrons and the essential technique of backward propagation.  The course also studies various ways to regularize deep neural networks, such as putting norm penalties or allowing dropout, and how to do optimization for training these regularized deep neural networks. The latter half of the course focuses on convolutional neural networks for image processing and recurrent and recursive neural networks for natural language processing. Last, the recent important topic of fine-tuning a pre-trained large language model will also be covered. 

The course provides an introduction to the science of the natural environment and gives an overview of the processes that shape the evolution of our environment. Topics include (1) global cycles that operate in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere, and the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, water, and energy; (2) natural hazards and their impacts on human society and how these are monitored, assessed, and mitigated; and (3) natural resources exploitation focused on water, minerals, and fossil fuels, and the environmental issues associated with their extraction and use.

The Asia Workshop is a dynamic working space where students and instructors work together to discuss emerging issues in Asia. Topics for discussion changes every year to keep up with changes at both regional and global scales.
 

This workshop discusses the following questions: What is Asia? Is Asia just a group of countries with different cultures, histories, and economies? What is so unique about Asia? What, in addition to its geographical location, makes Asia “Asian” and remain “Asian” in the context of globalization? 

The workshop provides an answer to these questions through a series of guest-speaker lectures on Asia and its member countries and presents fieldwork activities to engage students in intensive observation of what is around their living environment. Immersive technologies will be introduced to facilitate students’ first-hand observations.

This course uses PS1001 and PS1002 (taught at the University of St Andrews), as the foundation for a more advanced treatment of a number of areas in psychology. Course PS2001 complements PS2002; together, the two courses involve advanced treatment of the following areas of psychology: the relations between brain and behavior; cognition; perception; comparative aspects of behavior; social and health psychology. It also contains a methodology component covering laboratory and field techniques; no methodological grounding beyond PS1001 and PS1002 will be assumed.

This course examines the main elements of natural language processing (NLP), text analytics, and text mining, providing students with a foundation in collecting, managing, and analyzing textual data with financial and economic applications in mind, such as FinTech. Examples of potential applications include understanding and responding to sentiment in financial newspapers and social media, using social media to improve performance in asset/investment management, due diligence, Fed watching, monitoring of company events, and detecting insider trading. Although students write their own computer programs in this course, they are not required to implement most algorithms from scratch. Instead, the focus of this course is on how to use existing state-of-the-art open-source software libraries and how to apply them in a financial context. This course consists of three parts. In the first part, we work with real-world textual data sets to obtain proficiency in collecting, importing, organizing, and cleaning textual data from sources related to finance and economics. Among others, we cover web scraping, textual corpora, text processing, tokenization, stemming, and stop word removal. In the second part we delve into a more detailed analysis of NLP, text analytics, and machine learning with a particular focus on FinTech. For instance, we examine bag-of-words, word weighting schemes, document classification, document clustering, sentiment analysis, and topic models. The third part consists of summarizing, displaying, and visualizing results obtained from NLP and text analytics for applications in finance and economics.

This course focuses on the critical reading of narrative texts in English. 

Cells are the structural and functional units of living organisms. Understanding the basics of cell biology is essential for studying all areas of life sciences and any related branches of natural sciences. The main objective of this course is to learn the essential principles of cell biology by learning how the living cells are made and operating from a molecular perspective: especially, how DNA, RNA and proteins cooperatively work inside the cells to allow the maintenance, replication, and responses to stimuli. This course covers the textbook Essential Cell Biology together with Biology B, which will be held in the spring semester. 

Upon finishing this course, students will have a solid grasp of the structure of cells and how they replicate themselves, exert cellular functions and communicate with each other. More concretely, the course introduces intracellular structure and molecular dynamics inside cells, mechanisms of DNA replication, repair and recombination, gene expression and its regulation, and cellular signaling. In addition, the course also features the research topics of the instructors, all of whom are young biologists/biochemists in FRIS, so that students can get a glimpse of cutting-edge sciences. 

While this course is based around primary Victorian comic texts, it allows students to understand and apply key concepts in the wider study of comedy: these include forms such as irony, satire, farce, comedy of manners, parody, and black comedy; and theoretical concepts in comedy, such as superiority, incongruity, and relief theories. Students also have the opportunity to study the work of key comedy theorists such as Freud, Bakhtin, and Bergson.
 

The seminar gives an introduction into the different ideas around sex and gender in the Hebrew Bible. It discusses matters such as the creation of man and woman, the connection of sexuality and male struggles for power and honor, laws about sexuality in the Pentateuch, and the use of the marriage metaphor for the relationship between Yhwh and Israel.