English

This course enables students to work strategically with sustainability and environmental communication in organizations. It introduces key theoretical approaches of special relevance to the topics of environment and sustainability and applies these in order to critically analyze and assess how organizations use communication both to develop a sense of self in relation to the topic of sustainability and to engage in the public space. Students learn to understand, explain, and use discourses as a strategic and tactical resource in order to establish and put credible messages into perspective which may affect the views and opinions of various target groups in relation to the important themes related to sustainability and the environment. The course addresses current practical issues by focusing on the approaches to sustainability and environmental communication that companies, NGOs, mass media, and political organizations use when they enter into dialogue with different stakeholders, including customers, government agencies and institutions, and the general public.

Automatic methods of Information Retrieval (IR) have gained greater significance in recent years due to the dramatic increase in the amount of data available on the Web. The data is often present in multiple forms (such as text, image, video) and hence it is necessary that the IR techniques being deployed on the web are able to perform various operations such as search and retrieval across all these different data formats. In this course, the study of IR is focused on the methodologies of indexing, processing, and querying of primary textual data and extended to video and image data in the latter part of the course.

This course examines the concepts, theories and techniques required to describe dynamic environmental systems and to develop mathematical models to explore their behavior. Systems thinking and modelling approaches are applied to several important environmental systems and processes including chemical and biological transformations in water and air pollution applications, ecological models and population dynamics, global climate change, water balances in lakes and reservoirs, and energy and mass transfer. 

This course examines plant biology, with a focus on Australia's native flora. The course blends theoretical study with practical experience through lab work and field trips to Sydney's regional national parks. Key topics include plant identification, edible botany, plant ecology, and biogeography.

In the context of the current level of globalization, this course explores Africa’s position in and relations with other parts of the globalizing world. The course highlights Africa’s experience of globalization, focusing on the challenges and opportunities that globalization presents, particularly on cultures and identities in the continent.

This course examines the chemical and biological basis of the material properties of wood, how forestry can control these and the concept of wood quality. It also covers various wood processing industries, ranging from sawmilling over engineered wood products to pulping and biofuels. Reference will be made to the most suitable resource for individual products and how forest management can impact on the value of the timber.

This course focuses on the advanced operation of smart grids with an emphasis on the management of electricity networks through the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).

This course introduces basic concepts in linguistics from the perspective of language documentation. Based on data from less-studied languages, the course explore subfields of linguistics, including but not limited to phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. Most data will come from fieldwork conducted by the instructor using authentic data. Target languages are Xitsonga and Tshivenda (South Africa), Kiribati (Kiribati), Drenjongke (India), Burmese (Myanmar), Zhuang and Yi (China) as well as Japanese dialects spoken in Tohoku and Okinawa.

The course covers the following topics:

-Introduction to language documentation
-Issues concerning endangered languages
-Phonetic and phonological documentation
-Documenting cultural materials (Mid-term presentation)
-Morphological documentation
-Syntactic and prosodic documentation

This course introduces students to the geography of Thailand, its natural resources, its flora and fauna and the human response to it. It covers the physical, topographical, and administrative geography of the Thai nation-state and the importance of spatial analysis.

This course aims at providing the basic theoretical and applied tools for a rigorous statistical analysis. Specifically, the course focuses on techniques to summarize and visualize data of different types and their possible relations, as well as on basic sampling and inferential procedures, and on the assessment of the risk associated to extrapolation and inference. In particular, students learn how to extract information from data and how to assess the reliability of such information. The course covers the following topics: collection, management, and summary of data using frequency distributions, graphical representations, and summaries; study of the relationship between two variables; statistical inference and sampling variability; theory of point estimation and confidence intervals; hypothesis testing; and simple and multiple regression models. All the descriptive and inferential tools introduced during the course are applied to data using the statistical software R - and in particular the integrated development environment (IDE) RStudio. Prerequisites: understanding of the concepts of probability theory and random variables.