University of Hong Kong

This course examines the transformation of identity in Hong Kong through the analysis of the tropes of crises, home, and “border-crossing” in contemporary Hong Kong literary, filmic and other cultural texts. It explores how various crucial moments of transition in Hong Kong history have produced identity crises in the people of Hong Kong. Some of these intriguing moments include the communist takeover in 1949, the 1997 handover, as well as more recently the SARS outbreak, the urban redevelopment debates, and other current issues. It will also explore the possibility of understanding one’s sense of self/selves through the various practices of writing Hong Kong. It discusses critically the relation between nation and home, self and other, the individual and the collective, memory and forgetting to critique the cultural problems bound up in a space of flows called “Hong Kong.”

This course examines Buddhist writing culture from the perspectives of religious art and history of Chinese calligraphy. It will guide students to explore the theories, research methods and practice of Buddhist calligraphy through examining the calligraphy of Dunhuang manuscripts, Buddhist stone sutras, stone stele inscriptions from various ancient archaeological sites. The master calligraphers and Buddhist scribes will be examined. In addition to workshop demonstrations by the teacher, students will acquire the basic techniques, methods and practice of writing with brush. It will enable students learning how to write calligraphy mindfully with tranquility as the quintessence of Buddhist mental cultivation and modalities of writing cultures. They will also appreciate the essence of Buddhist texts, such as the Heart-sūtra and Diamond-sūtra.

This course studies experimental zoology describing interactions between animals and the environment. Emphasis is given to how living organisms obtain resources from the environment, gather information of environmental changes via sensory structures, and respond to adversities of environmental changes by adjusting their body physiology and biochemistry. Topics include energy metabolism, respiration, circulation, photoreception, color change and background adaptation, thermal regulation, muscle contraction and animal movement, and environmental stress and stress responses. 

This course examines concepts of system analysis and design. 

When you talk to ChatGPT, does it talk back? Does it really understand, or is it just a sophisticated sort of autocomplete? When DALL*E makes an image from your description, in the style of an author you like, is it plagiarizing that artist? Could a machine be conscious? Will AI revolutionize the economy? These are among the most interesting questions to ask at the moment. In this class, we'll ask them. We'll take a tour through 70 or so years of philosophical thought about artificial intelligence, from Turing to OpenAI, learning the concepts and theories that have been used to make sense of artificial intelligence. In the first part of the course, we'll look at more 'technical' material, about the nature of meaning and mind; in the second part, we'll turn to applied ethical and social issues. 

This course provides a solid foundation of organic chemistry. It focuses primarily on the basic principles to understand the structure and reactivity of organic molecules, with examples illustrating the role of organic chemistry in daily life and industry. Topics: chemistry of common organic functional groups: ketones and aldehydes; carboxylic acids and their derivatives; amines; aromatic compounds. Principles of organic synthesis. Detailed considerations of reaction mechanisms. Spectroscopic tools (UV-Vis, IR, NMR, and MS) for characterization and identification of organic compounds. 

This course introduces the principles of investments and major issues currently of interest to all investors. It focuses on stock markets, portfolio theory and practice, equilibrium in capital markets, efficient market hypothesis, and behavior and portfolio performance evaluations. The course explores intuition and practical applications of investment theory and analytical analysis. 

We are entering the “Age of Big Data” – an extremely large amount of information is created every day, which is revolutionizing science and technology, governments, economy, and international development. A variety of sources contribute to the Big Data, including the Internet, Wikipedia, social networks (e.g. Facebook), micro blogs, mobile phones, and cameras. This era of “information burst” has brought convenience to our daily lives. More recently, the emergence of foundation models (e.g., GPT) is also an outcome of big data, massive high-quality is the fuel to the success training of these large machine learning models. However, the availability of such a vast amount of information has also created many problems. For example, reported incidents of leakage of private data, due to the use of the Foxy software, and the loss of USB drives that contain thousands of patients’ records, have raised serious legal and social concerns. The goal of this course is to engage students in examining the critical issues that they could encounter in the Age of Big Data. They will examine how Big Data is affecting our society and daily lives and how Big Data is used in our daily life. They will study the security and credibility issues of Big Data. They will also address the issues of organizing and exploring Big Data. Solutions proposed in legal, technological, and education domains will be explored and discussed.

This course examines the study of global climate systems and climate change. It covers the controls of temporal and spatial variations in earth's climate and its histories of past climates preserved in the geological record, as well as modern research methods that are used in paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental reconstructions.

This course studies hormones and the regulation of metabolism, reproduction and water/salt homeostasis in our body. Topics include: adrenal medulla; adrenal cortex, ACTH, renin-angiotensin, and atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP); the thyroid; hypothalamus releasing and inhibitory factors; pituitary gland; neurohypophysis; growth hormones; prolactin; and gastro-entero-pancreatric peptides.