University of Bologna

This intensive language course is conducted in Italian and is designed to provide students with basic knowledge of Italian. The course follows the language proficiency guidelines set up by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).  Students in this course generally have an entrance exam that places them between the AB and A.1 levels. At the end of the four-week intensive program, students are expected to be able to express themselves in a simple, fluid, and clear manner and to be able to describe events that have taken place in the past and express personal preferences. The course covers the present tense (regular and irregular verbs as well as the past tense (regular and irregular) and the use of the correct auxiliary verb and the concordance. The course is designed to cover the first semester of Italian, roughly akin to Italian 1 and a portion of Italian 2 in the quarter system. All four abilities including speaking, listening, reading, and writing are emphasized with the support of authentic materials (videos) and real-life situations such as visits to local venues and cultural sites. The course follows a communicative approach to language acquisition and involves opportunities for role playing, group activities, games, class discussions, and exchanges with local University of Bologna students. Activities outside the classroom are organized in order to reinforce observation and communication skills that facilitate immersion in Italian culture. The course includes a major field trip. Students select the number of quarter units from a minimum of 3 to a maximum of 6. The course is organized by Inlingua with supervision from the Study Center. Course materials are provided by Inlingua. The basic text for the course is: NUOVO CONTATTO A1 (Loescher, 2018).

The course focuses on the philosophy of contemporary language. This course includes an introduction to contemporary philosophy of language and focuses on truth and relativism and logical reasoning and rational argumentation on the topic of post-truth. The course includes lectures, quizzes on the e-learning materials, and peer instruction based on the Kahoot model. Assessment is based on a final research paper on a pre-approved topic and an oral exam on class lectures, required readings, and special materials.

This course is part of the LM degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course is organized into two highly interactive modules which discuss how to address business communication challenges and develop crucial skills to effectively navigate the workplace environment. These include (but are not limited to) such skills as: team building, public speaking, management of team dynamics, and professional business writing. This course is graded pass/no pass only.

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. This course analyzes the way the western media covers the developing world and the humanitarian emergencies. Specifically the course explores the emerging and historical humanitarian narratives, with particular reference to the way in which the activities of NGOs are reported; how we understand and explain faraway disasters; how the media representations of suffering and violence has changed in the post-cold war period and in the digital era; the relationship between media, aid, corporate communication, and branding; and the relationship between power, media, and migration. This course encourages students to think sociologically about a range of issues and “social problems” related to the different ways in which media is used to report on humanitarian situations, and what impact this has. It also serves as an introduction to some important themes and issues within humanitarianism and migration. Areas under study include: the construction of “social problems,” media, ethics, human rights, disaster relief, war, famine, refugee camps, social movements, and NGOs.  A special focus is dedicated to the mediated performances that contribute to create the spectacle of the humanitarian border, which is physically and symbolically enacted by the different actors involved in contemporary management of migration. Moving from the assumption that our awareness of nearly all humanitarian issues is defined by the media, this course looks at the literature associated with humanitarian organizations and the NGO narratives, tracing the imagined and real encounters between solidarity, participation, and citizenship in the context of larger social processes of mediation and globalization. Examining humanitarian communication through various forms of aesthetic activism - documentary, photojournalism, benefit concerts, celebrities, and live blogging, the course explores how the circulation of humanitarian images and narratives impact the peoples it aims to serve, and what can be learned about global inequality from the stories associated with it. The course also focuses on how several news media framed Covid-19 as an invisible enemy, using metaphor of war to describe the current situation. The definition of the emergency as a war conducts inevitably to the identification of an enemy. The hyper-visibility of the war against this invisible enemy leads to a generalized fear of ‘the others’ and to the identification of this invisibility in visible bodies. Finally, the course reflects on long-term implications of the pandemic on mobility justice and what Mbembe (2020) has defined the “right to breath.” There are two versions of this course; this course, UCEAP Course Number 169A and Bologna course number 81782, is associated with the LM in Language, Society and Communication degree programme. The other version, UCEAP Course Number 169B and Bologna course number 75073, is associated with the LM in Sociology and Social Work and LM in Local and Global Development degree programmes.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. This course addresses topics and texts in moral philosophy at an advanced level. At the end of the course students are expected to possess the main abilities required from a professional moral philosopher. These include being able to: appraise theories and justify one's own position about them; critically analyze philosophical texts, both from classical and recent authors; elaborate on them; and in an original manner, provide fresh points of view and good working hypotheses to address them. Students are expected to be able to analyze knowledge received in the ethical and meta-ethical field, and to reconstruct it on an original basis. Moreover, they are expected to be able to write on moral topics in a professional, opinionated, and thorough way, and to effectively communicate their views to an audience. The topic for the course varies each term. For the most up to date topic, access the University of Bologna Online Course Catalog. The topic for fall 2023 is: J.M. COETZEE’S FICTION. The course explores the philosophical significance of novelist and essayist John Maxwell Coetzee’s oeuvre, especially in connection with his ethical stance on the treatment of animals. Students have the opportunity to discuss, more generally, his critical attitude toward philosophical argument and toward reason as an exclusive tool for moral guidance and intelligent experience of our environment. After introducing, in broad outline, Coetzee’s personality and published work, the course devotes a few lessons to the philosophical subfield of animal ethics. The main philosophical approaches are outlined. Once equipped with some conceptual and historical background, the course turns to analyzing some of the key texts in this connection, especially Coetzee’s 1999 “novella of ideas” THE LIVES OF ANIMALS, and his subsequent and related novel ELIZABETH COSTELLO. Secondary literature is reviewed and put to use.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course deals with the analysis of the models of public intervention in the financing, commissioning and supply of welfare services–such as the health care and social care services–that are facing deep demographic, technological and socio-economic changes. The course follows a comparative perspective and focuses on the transformation from a setting in which financing, commissioning, and supply of services are all performed by vertically integrated public organizations, to a setting in which governmental bodies limit themselves to the financing, allowing other private or public bodies to manage the services under a regulatory framework. Using a case-study approach, students are led to investigate the distributive and allocative implications of adopting tools to imitate the working of markets (vouchers, auctions, contracting-out) or of other competitive frameworks (pay for performance schemes, incentives, information disclosure mechanisms). At the end of the course, students are able to critically evaluate the aforesaid mechanisms not only in terms of their distributive and allocative effects or their long term financial sustainability, but also with regards to the coherence of such effects with their institutional objectives. Course topics: the rationale for public intervention in the financing and supply of welfare services; classic models of financing and supply; recent problems of financial and political sustainability for the welfare services; new public management tools: public reporting, evaluation and incentives; private provision of publicly financed services: regulation of quasi markets, contestability, and freedom of choice.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. At the end of the course students know the basic principles of computer vision and image processing algorithms. Thus, they are able to understand and apply a variety of algorithms and operators aimed at either extracting relevant semantic information from digital images or improving image quality. They also understand the diverse challenges and design choices characterizing the main applications and acquire familiarity with software tools widely adopted in these scenarios. Course topics: Basic definitions related to image processing and computer vision–an overview across major application domains: Image Formation and Acquisition–geometry of image formation, pinhole camera and perspective projection, geometry of stereopsis, using lenses, field of view and depth of field, projective coordinates and perspective projection matrix; Camera calibration: intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, lens distortion, camera calibration based on planar targets and homography estimation (Zhang's algorithm); Image rectification and stereo calibration, basic notions on image sensing, sampling, and quantization; Intensity Transformations–image histogram, linear and non-linear contrast stretching, histogram equalization; Spatial Filtering– linear shift-invariant operators, convolution, and correlation; mean and Gaussian filtering, median filtering, bilateral filtering, non-local means; Image Segmentation–binarization by global thresholding, automatic threshold estimation, spatially adaptive binarization, color-based segmentation; Binary Morphology–dilation and erosion, opening and closing- hit-and-miss; Blob Analysis–distances on the image plane and connectivity, labeling of connected components, basic descriptors: area, perimeter, compactness, circularity, orientation and bounding-box, form factor and related descriptors, Euler number, image moments, invariant moments; Edge Detection–image gradient. smooth derivatives: Prewitt, Sobel, Frei-Chen, non-maxima suppression, Laplacian of Gaussion, canny edge detector; Local Invariant Features–detectors and descriptors, Harris Corners, scale invariant features, SIFT features, efficient feature matching by kd-trees; Object Detection–pattern matching by SSD, SAD, NCC and ZNCC, fast pattern matching, shape-based matching, Hough Transform for analytic shapes, Generalized Hough Transform, object detection by local invariant features, Hough-based voting, least-squares similarity estimation. The theoretical part of the course is complemented with assisted hands-on lab sessions based on Python and the OpenCV library. Lab sessions cover selected topics such as intensity transformations, spatial filtering, camera calibration, motion estimation and local invariant features.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on the location and design of wastewater treatment plants together with main rules of outfall discipline. Special attention is placed on the preliminary designs for main urban wastewater treatment plants and their outfall effects on water volumes. The course is split into three parts. Part one discusses wastewater; sewage characteristics; technical laws; industrial, agriculture, and domestic discharge; Hygiene Municipal Regulation; water outfall discipline; wastewater reuse regulations; variations in flowrate and characteristics of domestic and industrial wastewater; and treatability in rainy weather conditions. Part two discusses wastewater treatment: Kinetics and biochemistry of bacterial and algal biomass; growth and death in suspended and attached biomasses; septic tanks and Imhoff tanks design; the project of a full-scale domestic wastewater treatment plant operating in steady state; choice and location; raw and fine screens; sand removal; primary sedimentation; biodegradability and biological phases for secondary treatment; secondary sedimentation; active sludge plants upgrading to obtain phosphorous and nitrogen removal; separate scheme; Wuhrmann scheme; Ludzack-Ettinger scheme; Bardenpho scheme; A2/O process; Phoredox process; trickling filters; granular settling biofilters; wastewater disinfection; treatment and disposal of sludge; active sludge models.; sequencing batch reactors; natural system design for wastewater treatment or finishing; biological ponds. FWS and SFS phytotreatment; “on site” treatment for domestic wastewater coming from small communities; building and managing costs; and functional test. The third part of the course discusses outfalls in water volumes: water volumes protection and sanitary reclamation plans; wastewater discharge in rivers; effects of natural and domestic organic loadings on low exchange basin; ocean and river disposal of treated and untreated wastewater; offshore pipes.; diffusers; and aquatic ecosystem modeling criteria. The course includes lectures and practical exercises. The exercises focus on different real-scale biologic wastewater treatment plant projects based on attached and suspended biomass and natural appropriate treatment systems. The course requires students to have basic understanding of hydraulics and chemistry as well as a basic course in environmental sanitation engineering as a prerequisite.

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on basic notions of complexity and network sciences and the identification, formulation, modelling, and analysis of new problems that arise in modern computing systems. The course requires basic notions of computer system architecture, computer networks, operating systems, and probability theory as a prerequisite. Modern information systems and services often rely on large numbers of independent interacting components to provide their functions. Under certain conditions, the behavior that results from these interactions can be unexpected and surprising. Complexity Science is an interdisciplinary field for studying global behaviors resulting from many simple local interactions in an effort to characterize and control them. Networks allow us to formalize the structure of interactions. They play a central role in the transmission of information, transportation of goods, spread of diseases, diffusion of innovation, formation of opinions and adoption of new technologies. Network Science is an interdisciplinary field for studying the interconnectedness of modern life by exploring fundamental properties that govern the structure and dynamic evolution of networks. The course discusses topics including: Complex systems: definitions, methodologies; Dynamical systems, Nonlinear dynamics; Chaos, Bifurcations and Feigenbaum constant, Predictability, Randomness and Chaos; Models of complex systems, Cellular automata, Wolfram's classification, Game of life; Autonomous agents, Flocking, Schooling, Synchronization, Formation creation; Cooperation and Competition, Game theory basics, Nash equilibrium; Game theory: Prisoner's Dilemma, Coordination games, Mixed strategy games; Adaptation, Evolution, Genetic algorithms, Evolutionary games; Network Science: Definitions and examples; Graph theory, Basic concepts and definitions; Diameter, Path length, Clustering, Centrality metrics; Structure of real networks, Degree distribution, Power-laws, Popularity; Models of network formation; The Erdos-Renyi random model; Clustered models; Models of network growth, Preferential attachment; Small-world networks, Network navigation; Peer-to-peer systems and overlay networks; Structured overlays, DHTs, Key-based routing, Chord; Distributed network formation: Newscast, Cyclon, T-Man; Processes on networks: Aggregation; Rational dynamics: Cooperation in selfish environments, Homophily, Segregation; Diffusion, Percolation, Tipping points, Peer-effects, Cascades.