Chinese University of Hong Kong

This course examines practices of urbanism across a range of contexts from antiquity to the present day. By doing so it allows students to develop insights into the social relations and human struggles that have been produced by, and continue to produce, particular types of built forms in different places over time. In the broadest sense, the course uses urbanism as a lens to understand the relationship between urban forms and the complex, multiple processes that constitute cities and their urban milieus.

This course explores cultural heritage definitions and relevant conceptualizations in the local context. It introduces the historical development of cultural heritage in the contemporary world. It then further discusses the current legal and policy framework of local heritage selection and conservation. It requires students to reflect on what heritage is and how heritage shall be selected and defined. Students will explore the social relation between cultural heritage and the local community through various local case studies. They will debate how cultural heritage shall be interpreted from a local perspective but could be operated sustainably.

Creative economy and cultural industries have been considered crucial strategies for driving the urban development of global cities. The dynamic landscape of the global cultural scene, where culture converges with the economy, community, heritage, and innovative technologies, has created an impetus for many cities to adopt innovative approaches in utilizing urban spaces and cultural resources, enabling citizens to vividly reimagine their urban and cultural life. These approaches are envisioned as and manifested in the form of the development of large-scale urban regions and city clusters, where major cultural facilities such as museums, art districts, performance venues, and festivals significantly contribute to social well-being and intercultural dialogue. This course is designed to provide students with an opportunity to explore the interface among culture, urban space, and the economy with an eye towards the radically changing cultural landscape of Hong Kong. By offering students both theoretical knowledge and first- hand field experience, this course examines museums, galleries, and various cultural institutions as exemplary cases of how different forms of cultural activities can be turned into powerhouses of creative synergies and economic growth.

This course introduces students to key social, economic, and political current issues—such as climate change, economic liberalization, transnational migrations, terrorism, pandemics—and how different stakeholders—municipalities, nation-states, civil societies, as well as regional and international organizations—measure up to these issues and challenges. The course will also emphasize the connection and the articulation of these current affairs and public policies between the global and local levels. The course will thus make room for guest-speakers from local NGOs, news agencies or institutions to present their own take on global matters. While some of the topics addressed in this class have been covered at length by the literature, some will reflect immediate concerns as they arise from current affairs. 

This course enables students with no technical background to have a general understanding and a taste of hands-on exploration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). The course covers the basic concepts, problems, approaches and applications of AI components and systems. It provides an introduction to various topics in AI systems and technologies, e.g., an overview of AI, data representation and visualization, basics of ML, ethical and legal issues with AI, etc. It discusses the applications of engineering principles to selected AI and ML problems, including image classification, machine translation, and voice cloning. It also explores the future possibilities and challenges of AI.

This course will focus on sensitive but essential topics central to the psychology of globalization, such as colonialism and how it shaped our psychological understanding of ourselves and others; how racism and stereotyping are psychological phenomena that interfere with successful globalization today; or how cultures’ different set of moral values often conflict with one another. This course is an introduction to cultural psychology and focuses on how it is relevant in an increasingly globalized world. The first part of the course will introduce students to some fundamental concepts and findings in the field of cultural psychology. The second part of this course will apply this body of knowledge to our era of rapid globalization, one of the most important developments in the twenty-first century.

This course examines handling and analyzing business data, including learning R, which is rapidly becoming the default analytics platform as it supports diverse set of analytic tools and statistical methods. Specifically, it looks at basic concepts in business analytics, and techniques and skills related to data exploration, data utilities, conducting statistical tests, data mining and modeling.