Sweden

The course explores development gaps, the relationships between per capita income and other measures of development, theories of economic growth, and the development process. It focuses on the role of physical, human, and social capital, as well as economic growth in regards to technology and population. The course reviews problems of externalities, coordination failure, and path dependence. Specific attention is paid to the relationships between inequality, poverty, and economic growth. Development strategies and policies related to agriculture, industry, trade and services, and infrastructure are discussed together with the role of the state, market, and other institutions. A specific gender perspective is taken up in the discussion on population issues, human capital, and poverty.

The course introduces theories and techniques of natural language processing and language technology. It covers the whole field, from speech recognition and synthesis to semantics and dialogue. The course focuses on industrial and laboratory applications, such as document retrieval on the Internet, information extraction, conversational agents, and verbal interaction in virtual worlds. Fundamental algorithms are described using Prolog or regular expressions. Topics covered in this course include an overview of language processing (applications, disciplines of linguistics, examples); Corpus and word processing (regular expressions, automata, an introduction to Perl, concordances, tokenization, counting words, collocations); morphology, transducers, and part-of-speech tagging; Prolog to write phrase-structure grammars (constituents, trees, using Prolog to do natural language analysis, DCG rules, variables, getting the syntactic structure, compositional analysis to get the semantic structure); syntactic formalisms (constituency and dependency, chart parsing, statistical parsing, functions, dependency parsing); semantics (formal semantics, lambda-calculus, compositionality such as nouns, verbs, determiners, words and meaning, lexical semantics, case grammars, semantic grammars); discourse and dialogue (rhetoric, anaphora, structure, RST, automata, pairs, speech acts, multimodality); and an overview of speech synthesis and speech recognition.

The goal of this course is to introduce the operation of computer systems at the level of Instruction Set Architectures (ISA). It provides a basic understanding of the design principles that govern modern computer architectures and their components. Special attention is paid to (super scalar) pipelining and memory hierarchy techniques including caches. Implementation and efficiency issues are exemplified. Metrical performance analysis methods are discussed to evaluate architectural alternatives. The course introduces the foundations of low-level computer functioning. The main topics include computer systems, low-level programming techniques, the techniques of RISC processors and pipelining, cache memory, and virtual memory. The course also illuminates the alternative design principles of modern computer architectures in order to provide an understanding of their impact on performance. Quantitative methods to evaluate design principles for performance constitute an important subject of the course.