English

This course examines the connection of global and local environments. Case studies will include historical responses to climate change in Europe and North America, the transformation of indigenous foodways and the urban development of Vancouver. 

This course explores the relationship between language and the human mind, studying how the mind, as a cognitive system, processes language. Utilizing the perspective of cognitive psychology, the course covers topics such as lexical knowledge and semantic processing of words, sentence processing, and text comprehension. It presents an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of language processing and learn methodologies of the psychology of language through experimental projects.

This interdisciplinary course provides a modern history of AI from a global perspective and describes AI's complex and multifaceted relationship with its social and economic surroundings. It discusses legal issues concerning artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which include addressing harm from robotics and other autonomous systems; fairness and transparency of classification models; fair machine learning; explainable AI; privacy-preserving data mining and analysis; pricing agents and the market mechanism; lethal autonomous weapons; interplay with digital service laws; the systematization of the legal system through AI; AI as methodology of legal research, etc.

This course examines the economic transformation of less-developed countries from microeconomic and macroeconomic perspectives. It covers applied topics such as education, health, nutrition, demographics, labor, agriculture and the private sector, focusing on how policies attempt to overcome market and institutional failures that are particularly acute in the developing world. 

This course explores the complexity of current international society and social inequalities through social indicators, demographic and environmental data, political and economic indicators, and life stories. It analyzes the social policies of Western countries, developing countries, and underdeveloped countries. This course discusses the main international and European programs and organizations fighting and preventing social inequality as well as Catalonia and Spain within the context of European and international social policy.

This course examines the scientific basis for, impacts of, and law and policy responses to climate change.

This course presents how to recognize and appreciate the importance and values of cultural heritages in Hong Kong, China and around the world, and to understand how digital technologies can be used to conserve and preserve cultural heritage worldwide. Three digital preservation projects serve as running examples throughout this course: one from Hong Kong (King Yin Lei virtual reality website), one from Mainland China (e-Dunhuang online gallery), and one from Europe (European digital collections). The course also gives a broad understanding on how economic development and heritage preservation impact us as global citizens in this information age. The capstone of the course is a group project where each group of students uses an off-the-shelf and easy-to-use Web application to create a digital gallery for a cultural heritage in Hong Kong or their own places of origin. The digital gallery is a unique contribution to preserving cultural heritage of the world!

This course examines ecological processes, urban resilience and growth in an urban context. It explores how urban planning systems can work in sympathy with, or in contradiction to, such processes, and the implications of this for urban planning practice.

This course examines the use of economic tools to assess and develop environmental protection strategies. This includes methods for evaluating “environmentally friendly” products, projects and policies in terms of their benefits and costs. Benefits considered include marketed benefits, such as energy savings and avoided property losses, and non-marketed benefits, such as improvements in human health and conservation of biological diversity. Economic tools for solving environmental problems that will be considered in the subject include taxes on environmentally harmful activities, tax deductions for “environmentally friendly” activities, making polluters or “risk creators” pay for environmental damages, and allowing private ownership of environmental assets.

The purpose of this course is to teach relevant domain knowledge of the acquisition of firms for pursuing synergistic or undervalued targets worldwide. Before or after mergers and acquisitions (M&A), asset restructuring can be a must to achieve strategic renewal and organizational reinvention for legitimacy and profitability. This course observes how acquisitions and restructuring have played out in the global business field and in Taiwan. 

This is an inter-disciplinary course that lays its groundwork on entry-level courses in management, finance, and organization. Thus, basic knowledge in these subjects (or equivalent), though not regarded as pre-requisites, contribute to effective learning.