Germany

In this course, the fundamentals of Python are covered, with a special focus on the skills necessary for in-depth data analyses and data visualization. These two skills are fundamental in a wide range of disciplines, including but not limited to STEM (Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and Humanities fields of study. This course will cover the following: data types and compound data structures, conditional statements and loops, Python functions, importing, exporting and analyzing different types of data using pandas, visualizing data using Matplotlib and Seaborn, and developing interactive plots with Plotly. At the end of the two weeks course, students will work and present a final personal data analytics and visualization project.

The primary objective of this course is to introduce students to the main theories and contemporary debates regarding globalization processes. The course is interdisciplinary and consists of sessions hosted by different members of the institute, providing perspectives on the intersection of global, regional, and transregional processes. These processes are set in a historical perspective, and students become familiarized with perspectives from different areas of the world.

In this course we want to explore together how German music changes and which historical contexts are reflected in popular music. We will look at selected artists and songs from German music history and discuss their cultural and musicological meanings. The course deals with German music history and its most formative works. The focus is on the period from 1920 to the present. The aim is to bring together historical developments with their manifestations music and to discuss which changes, especially in popular music, can be identified and analyzed musicologically. We will look at compositions, song lyrics and historical backgrounds in order to gain an understanding of the developments that led us to the forms of contemporary German music.

This seminar focuses on interpersonal attraction and close relationships. These topics, introduced in the Social Psychology lecture, are examined in more depth in this seminar and enhanced by discussions based on the students’ perspectives and experiences.

The serialization of Wilkie Collins’s mystery novel The Woman in White in Charles Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round from 1859 to 1860 is often regarded as the birth of a new type of fiction in Victorian England that came to dominate the literary market in the 1860s: the sensation novel. Even though recent criticism has widened the remit of the genre to include examples from earlier decades, Collins’s novel of mystery, deception and murder exerted an unprecedented cultural influence: readers (like the seasoned novelist W. M. Thackeray) are reported to have sat up all night ploughing through the pages of Collins’s doorstopper in a frenzy to find out what happened next. The novel became a singular object of consumption in other respects as well: ladies with money to spare could treat themselves to Woman-in-White fashion and Woman-in-White perfume, and music lovers could dance to Woman-in-White waltzes. Other novelists followed Collins and created ever more exciting ‘novels with a secret’, and the 1860s alone saw two further genre-shaping examples with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861). This overwhelming popular success prompted conservative critics to rail against these titillating productions: the novelist Margaret Oliphant was appalled by the representation of sensation fiction’s heroines as “fleshly and unlovely”, and the Dean of St Paul’s, Henry L. Mansel, condemned sensation authors like Collins, Braddon and Charles Reade for offering cheap literary fare and – more dangerously – for “preaching to the nerves” of their readers. In this seminar, students will read two long sensation novels (The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret) and one shorter example taken from the genre of detective fiction (Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles) – a form that can be fruitfully traced to the sensation novels of the 1860s. We will place these novels in their rich historical and cultural contexts and engage with the immediate responses to the genre. We will study sensation fiction’s generic predecessors (such as the Gothic romance and the silver-fork-novel) and weigh its significance for modern forms like the crime novel and the psychological thriller.

This seminar examines the role of diasporas as non-state actors in the transnational realm. We will look at conceptual and theoretical approaches to diaspora policies as well as empirical cases of diaspora engagement in international policies. A special focus will be laid on postcolonial perspectives on diasporas as political agents and challenges they might pose for the study of international relations as well as for policy practices.

Motion planning is a fundamental building block for autonomous systems, with applications in robotics, industrial automation, and autonomous driving. After completion of the course, students will have a detailed understanding of: Formalization of geometric, kinodynamic, and optimal motion planning; Sampling-based approaches: Rapidly-exploring random trees (RRT), probabilistic roadmaps (PRM), and variants; Search-based approaches: State-lattice based A* and variants; Optimization-based approaches: Differential Flatness and Sequential convex programming (SCP); The theoretical properties relevant to these algorithms (completeness, optimality, and complexity). Students will be able to: Decide (theoretically and empirically) which algorithm(s) to use for a given problem; Implement (basic versions) of the algorithms themselves; • Use current academic and industrial tools such as the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL).

It provides a unified perspective on motion planning and includes topics from different research and industry communities. The goal is not only to learn the foundations and theory of currently used approaches, but also to be able to pick and compare the different methods for specific motion planning needs. An important emphasis is the consideration of both geometric and kinodynamic motion planning for the major algorithm types.

This course provides a broad survey of contemporary methods, approaches, and thematic concerns within the expansive and internally differentiated field of Critical Geography, emphasizing its stakes for grappling with a “long twentieth century” (in Giovanni Arrighi’s words) profoundly shaped by the rise and fall of U.S. hegemony. How might questions of space, time, and cartography need to be rethought, not only in the twilight of the historical period Henry Luce famously dubbed “the American Century,” but in light of the so-called Anthropocene, wherein the geological force of humanity threatens to unfold across a timescale that exceeds even human existence? How might a critical geographic imagination illuminate the uneven prospects and perils of this time of uncertainty and transition? In exploring such questions, we will engage Marxist, feminist, Black, Indigenous, postcolonial, posthuman, environmentalist, affective, and abolitionist geographical traditions, drawing on thinkers such as Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Natchee Blu Barnd, Neil Smith, Katherine McKittrick, Anna Tsing, André Mesquita, William Cronon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Lauren Berlant, among others.

More and more companies and government agencies find themselves in the press and courtrooms for data privacy and security law violations. Given the rapidly increasing technological options to collect and commercialize personal data, this area of the law is rapidly growing. This course will prepare law students for the challenges and opportunities of international data privacy law, with a particular focus on United States Federal / California privacy law and European Union / German data protection law. Objective of the lectures is to familiarize students with the typical legal problems arising from the conflicting interests in data and privacy in today's global economy and society, in particular in the areas of law enforcement, commerce, media and employment. The significance and practical relevance of domestic, international and foreign national laws is rapidly increasing for individuals, government officials, business people, attorneys, judges, and legislators around the world. We will look at how data processing and laws affect individual privacy in the various areas, including government and private surveillance, press reporting, commercial treatment of financial, health and communications information, and direct marketing. Topics covered include common law, constitutional and statutory rights and obligations regarding data privacy, data security and legal protection for databases under California, U.S. Federal, European Union, public international and other countries' laws, including, for example, the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, rules on spamming, wiretapping, homeland security surveillance, and employee monitoring.

This course explores the grammar of German verbs - regular or irregular, separable or non-separable, active or passive, with or without prepositions. With verbs we live in different times, in yesterday and today, with verbs we also look into the future. But the verb also helps us to expand our vocabulary and make our style more versatile. The course is aimed at students who want to deepen their grammar knowledge and expand their vocabulary at the same time, based on the motto: (Almost) nothing works in the German language without a verb!