Peking University, Beijing

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the cultural and material exchanges among the major civilizations along the Silk Road. It covers the period between the 2nd and the 15th centuries, during which the forces wielded by the Persians, Chinese, Greeks, Indians, Arabs and Mongols shaped the geopolitical landscape of the vast region that spreads from the Caspian Sea to the Gobi Desert. The course explores the role of the Silk Road in the formation of the religious and ethnic identities of these civilizations, as well as their perceptions towards one other. Through the study of refreshing and up-to-date visual and course readings, the students will explore crosscultural phenomenon such as Sogdian burial practice, Arab accounts of Tang China, Nestorian Christianity at the Mongol court, and influence of Marco Polo in the Latin West. The course begins and concludes with discussion of the contemporary significance of the Silk Road as a historical category.

With the explosive growth of web content (texts, web pages, and images), existing search engines usually return lots of results to users, but useful information and knowledge from the search results is rare. It is feasible to analyze the large and heterogeneous web content from different dimensions, and dig out semantic knowledge by using data mining and natural language processing techniques. Based on the semantic knowledge, users can perform knowledge-based retrieval. This course introduces the fundamental techniques for web data mining and several advanced research topics. Topics include search engines, link analysis and web page ranking, query analysis and expansion, information filtering and recommendation, web information retrieval, question answering, document summarization, machine translation, sentiment analysis and opinion retrieval, object-level vertical search, mobile search, and social network analysis.

The course provides a study of SAS advanced Statistical Analytics and the relative theories. It covers the process of data manipulation, data visualization, and data analysis and modeling. This course covers fundamental theories and applied techniques, necessary SAS programming skills, as well as how to create an analysis project both through SAS EG User Interface and SAS program, and then to analyze to get the final result. Topics in the business intelligence field include high performance computing, big data, and mobile BI.

The course provides a study of economics from a sociological perspective. The objectives of the course are to analyze the research areas that have been developed on the interaction between economics and sociology; use mathematical models to think and analyze social and economic problems; and introduce sociological perspectives into the analysis of economic life.

Folk literature, unlike written literature, is a special literary style carried by oral language which plays irreplaceable role in daily life. This course gives an overview of the basic theories of the folk literature, as well as the classical oral literary works popular with various social classes. Topics include concept and basic characteristics of folklore literature; concept and characteristics of mythology; content and catalog of Chinese folktale; two-part allegorical saying, proverb and riddle; and content and catalog of folk long poem.

This course provides an overview of information technology and the IT field in general. The course is composed of lectures by professors from school of electronics engineering and computer science at Peking University. Topics include introduction of information technology, computer software, computer architecture, computer network and information systems, computer theory, computational linguistics and machine translation, wireless communication, optical communication, physical electronics and nanotechnology, quantum electronics and laser sciences, microelectronic devices and technology, system on a chip, micro-electromechanical systems, machine perception, and multi-media process.

This course utilizes famous professors, investors and the successful entrepreneurial alumni of PKU as teaching team, combining classroom teaching method and case studying method to present the basic concept, theory and method of entrepreneurship. The course integrates entrepreneurial resources, identifies business opportunities, tries to prevent business risk and take timely action to focus on training entrepreneurial ability, sensitive, pioneers of innovation and create value, social service business responsibility.