Hong Kong

This course examines religion in contemporary Chinese society, emphasizing its presence and influence in everyday life. It goes beyond religious texts to immerse students in the richness of Chinese spiritual life, demonstrating how religious traditions in China are not merely philosophical concepts, but living practices that shape the everyday experiences of individuals and communities. A special feature of this course is that we will take students on visits to a variety of religious sites in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area to experience firsthand the diversity and vibrancy of religious life in China. This includes participating in meditation sessions, attending religious festivals, and learning the intricacies of the tea ceremony in a Buddhist setting. In addition to these immersive activities, the course will discuss the broader role of religion in shaping contemporary Chinese society. We will explore how religious beliefs and practices intersect with important social issues such as economics, the environment, gender, sexuality, and politics. 

This course examines the data structures and algorithms useful in programming competitions and technical interviews. Topics include but are not limited to advanced data structures, advanced search algorithms, decomposition techniques, combinational games, basic computational geometry, and basic number theory.

This course examines song writers and performers from the USA. In the process of studying American popular song lyrics, students will learn about such musical genres as “the blues,” “gospel,” “tin pan alley,” “folk,” “country,” and “rock and roll” as well as the elements of American history that give rise to each of these types of musical lyrics. Since one of the course elements is the relationship of musical lyrics to musical sound, we will spend considerable class time listening to popular songs , paying attention to the way a lyric’s meaning is conveyed through such elements as vocal style and musical arrangement.

his course is offered for beginners in Chinese calligraphy. It describes the basic concepts and techniques of Chinese calligraphy, the selection and use of materials and tools, and teaches students the regular, clerical and seal scripts. 

This course examines how comparisons can be made between languages with respect to their sound systems, lexical-semantic structures, sentence patterns, and pragmatic properties. Through systematic analysis, students gain understanding from research findings in language typology, language universals, and language acquisition. This course focuses on the basic characteristics of English and Chinese, and some salient contrasts between them. The approach is largely descriptive without assuming prior knowledge of theoretical syntax. The course also considers how comparisons between languages may help students associated with problems of translation and language teaching/learning. 

A time series consists of a set of observations on a random variable taken over time. Time series arise naturally in climatology, economics, environment studies, finance and many other disciplines. The observations in a time series are usually correlated; the course establishes a framework to discuss this. This course distinguishes different type of time series, investigates various representations for the processes and studies the relative merits of different forecasting procedures. Students will analyze real time-series data on the computer. Topics: Stationary and the autocorrelation functions; linear stationary models; linear non-stationary models; model identification; estimation and diagnostic checking; seasonal models and forecasting methods for time series. 

This course examines the roles of logistics in supply chain management. It covers business of production; business environment; transport fundamentals and transport decisions; storage and handling systems and decisions; inventory policies; forecasting logistics requirements; facility location analysis; network planning process; purchasing scope and objectives; purchasing structure and organization; purchasing variables – price, time and quality; buying commodities; buying capital goods; buying services; purchasing systems. 

This course examines critical and creative texts that engage with narrative ethics as they appear in different cultural and linguistic traditions. This focus on ethics will simultaneously redirect us back to narrativity and the constructedness of texts.

This course examines Big Data computing systems and programming models. It covers the architecture and components of Hadoop and Spark, data processing with Spark, and advanced topics such as Spark Streaming, graph processing, and machine learning. Students will learn to develop operational and programming tools for data collection, serialization, migration, and workflow coordination in Big Data pipelines. 

This course examines the essential areas in biomedical engineering, including technologies and applications in life sciences and medicine. The course is broadly divided into 4 areas: biomechanics and biomaterial; cell and tissue engineering; biomedical instrumentations and signals, and medical imaging. The global development and other issues, such as safety, ethics and industry will also be addressed.