English

This course requires permission from the UCEAP Faculty Director to enroll. The course addresses four main topics (climate change and health, urbanization and health, water and health, and food and health) strictly linked to UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2030 and related to distal and proximal determinants of health. The course provides the basis of systemic thinking for the improvement of surveillance programs, timely response to emergencies, and economic savings by applying the One Health (OH) approach. The course demonstrates the need for an integrated and cross-sectoral approach toward the achievement of the Agenda 2030 SDGs and provides basic knowledge on the main issues related to health at the human/animal/environment interfaces. The course asserts that health is a precondition, an outcome and an indicator of sustainable development.

This course explores the relationship between collective and individual behavior, society, and technology. It is especially concerned with how technologies evolve in relation to organizational, collective, and individual behavior, and vice versa. Students evaluate how technologies deliver (and fail to deliver) profitable, effective and valuable products services processes and activities. The course explores in detail the relationship between society and technology, especially in terms of how and why technologies succeed and fail; the value that technologies deliver (and do not deliver); and the wider position of technology in society. Students examine also the relationship between individuals and technology, and how behavior influences how technologies are developed, and how technologies influence and shape behavior.

“Cancer” is among the most encountered terms in our daily lives, but few beyond the biomedical profession truly understand what cancer is. This course helps students understand this complex disease. The course starts from the era of the ancient Greeks, through the world wars and their role in advancing cancer treatment, to the most cutting-edge research ongoing today and what the future holds. Students also learn about important techniques involved in modern day research, including gene editing, cancer modelling, and computational biology. They also discuss key scientific publications in the field of cancer biology.  

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. This course aims to study classic topics in Public Economics and Policy, including taxation, education, and policy instruments but accounting for the shortcomings of the standard neoclassical model and supplementing the neoclassical treatment of these topics with insights from behavioral economics. The course begins each topic of the course with an introduction to the neoclassical treatment of the topic. The course then explores the implications of the neoclassical model and asks what identifies potential limitations of the assumptions of the standard model. The course then identifies a current public policy related to the topic and discusses how to analyze its effectiveness. The course covers both theoretical foundations in behavioral public economics and the design and testing of public policies. The course also highlights the link between theory and practice. The course achieves this with one or two guest lectures from individuals who span this divide between academia and real-world policy design. The course discusses topics include: introduction to behavioral public economics; theory of welfare; theory of policy interventions: taxation and nudges; health issues and policies; environmental issues and policies; savings and retirement; education and labor market (e.g., minimum wage policies, discrimination); and experimental design, RCTs, and policy evaluation. A solid foundation in microeconomics and applied mircoeconometrics is a prerequisite for attending the course.

Antibiotics were once regarded as miracle drugs. However, they are becoming less effective as bacteria develop resistance against them. The increasing occurrence of micro-organisms that are resistant to multiple antibiotics constitutes a serious threat to human health. The course addresses fundamental questions and problems concerning antibiotics such as what is the role of antibiotics in nature? How are they synthesized? What are their modes of action? How can new antibiotics be discovered? How can we attack problems with antibiotic-resistant microorganisms? The course brings a comprehensive understanding of the biology and chemistry of antibiotics. It provides insight into bacterial physiology and also industrial and clinical aspects of antibiotics and the evolution of antibiotic resistance.

This course takes students with zero knowledge of Xhosa to a good, basic competency in the language. The course actively engages students in acquiring the language through a series of well-developed modules with an integrated approach to acquiring speaking, writing, and comprehension skills in Xhosa. Grammar is taught in context and students are expected to apply their grammatical knowledge in task-based communication situations. Students are taught about different varieties of Xhosa and how to use these appropriately in social contexts. Tests, assignments, and portfolio activities counts 35%; orals count 15%; one two-hour examination counts 50% of the final mark.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course starts with introductions into the concept of monumentality and memory in archaeology. The topics are addressed and discussed into detail mainly using examples from Pharaonic Egypt (3000 B.C.E – 300 B.C.E.), a culture which is due to its long duration and the long-lasting traditions on the one hand, and the presence of a large monumental record, especially well suited as a case study. While the major focus is laid upon the emic perspective, presenting and interpreting processes within the Egyptian culture, the course also includes the etic perspective from antiquity until today. The course shows how ancient monumentality and the cultural memory are still being used and how they affected and still affect archaeology. Topics covered include: monumentality – What does it mean and why does it matter; an introduction to the concept of memory within archaeology; monuments of Pharaonic Egypt; what makes a monument a monument in Pharaonic Egypt, the concept of the monumental discourse; cities and residences as expressions of monumentality; the heydays of monumentalism: the pyramids of the Old Kingdom and the time of Ramesses II; Damnatio Memoriae: the Amarna Period and its reception; the structure of the Ancient Egyptian history: how monumental records shaped the later idea of Ancient Egypt; reuse and usurpation; Archaism in Ancient Egypt; monumentality and memory in the Mayan Culture; the construction of memory and identities in the European prehistory: monuments and megalithism; the memory and monuments of Ancient Egypt from Roman times until the decipherment of the hieroglyphs in 1822: what remained without the knowledge of the Ancient Egyptian language; and the memory and monuments of Ancient Egypt today.

The course introduces students to basic principles of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. By AI, we refer to machines (or computers) that mimic cognitive functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as learning and problem solving. The course takes a practical approach, explaining the main principles and methods used in the design of AI systems. The course provides an introduction to main principles of deep learning, covering topics of neural nets as universal approximators, design of neural network architectures, backpropagation and optimization methods for training neural networks, and some special deep neural network architectures commonly used for solving AI tasks such as image classification, sequence modelling, natural language processing and generative models. If time allows, this course also provides an introduction to reinforcement learning problem formulation. Students gain practical knowledge to learn and evaluate deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms (if time allows) using Python and open-source software libraries.

This course explores the influence of advertising discourse and the effects these messages have on society. Topics include: advertising language, audience and impact of advertising strategies, memory, persuasion, attitudes towards advertising, and advertising campaigns in audiovisual format.

This course traces the blues from its birth in the late 19th century to the present day. Sweeping through America in the early 1910s, the genre was a pervasive influence on the popular mainstream until the 1970s and continues to be played and heard today. The course draws on social history, cultural studies, and musicology. Topics include the blues’ musical characteristics, its verbal lexicon, its performance standards, its ties with African-American culture, and its intersection with other popular music genres. Alongside a historical approach, lectures also consider some of the blues’ regional variants (Chicago, Mississippi, Memphis), along with its most significant artists, such as pre-eminent pre-war performers like Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith, stars of the electric era like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and the genre’s most notable acolytes in the 60s and beyond.