University of Bologna

The course offers an introduction to Italian culture and history and focuses on both the city of Bologna and Italy as a nation. The course emphasizes basic knowledge of crucial aspects of the Italian cultural heritage across different disciplines and an awareness of the complexities of Italian history and society. The course is interdisciplinary in nature with weekly guest lectures on a variety of topics. The course is graded pass/no pass only.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. At the end of the course, the student has a deep knowledge of industrial applications that benefit from the use of machine learning, optimization, and simulation. The student has a domain-specific knowledge of practical use cases discussed in collaboration with industrial experts in a variety of domains such as manufacturing, automotive, and multi-media. The course is primarily delivered as a series of simplified industrial use cases. The goal is to provide examples of challenges that typically arise when solving industrial problems. Use cases may cover topics such as: anomaly detection; Remaining Useful Life (RUL) estimation; RUL based maintenance policies; resource management planning; recommendation systems with fairness constraints; power network; management problems; epidemic control; and production planning. The course emphasizes the ability to view problems in their entirety and adapt to their peculiarities. This frequently requires to combine heterogeneous solution techniques, using integration schemes both simple and advanced. The employed methods include: mathematical modeling of industrial problems; predictive and diagnostic models for time series; Combinatorial Optimization; integration methods for Probabilistic Models and Machine Learning; integration methods for constraints and Machine Learning; and integration methods for combinatorial optimization and Machine Learning. The course includes seminars on real-world use cases, from industry experts. The course contents may be (and typically are) subject to changes, so as to adapt to some degree to the interests and characteristics of the attending students.

The course is part of the Laurea Magistrale Program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course aims at developing an encompassing knowledge of the outcomes that social mobilizations have at the level of politics and policies. At the end of the course, students are able to: critically discuss the main approaches related to the outcomes of social mobilizations at the level of politics and policies; compare the political effects of social mobilizations across different countries and different territorial levels; and valuate specific cases of social mobilizations with regard to their intended and unintended political effects. The course focuses on both theories and practices related to the political effects of social mobilizations.

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 theoretical skills necessary for placing twentieth-century Italian poetry within the context of European history of thought and ideas. Special attention is placed on the appropriate methodology for analyzing modern and contemporary poetry. The course emphasizes the role of rhetoric, stylistics, and linguistics and favors intertextual and interdisciplinary comparisons. The topic for the Spring 2018 semester is: Origins, Poetry, Verticality, and Perception. This course focuses on a selection of Italian poetry from the second half of the twentieth century that highlights the idea of origin, and in particular the feelings of unbridgeable distance, and loss. The idea of distance and loss is also analyzed through the formal choices that shape the texts as well as their friction and opposition to the literary codes of the time. Prerequisite for the course is basic knowledge of twentieth-century Italian literature at the undergraduate level. Poetry selections are from the following sources: ORAMAI and DICIASSETTE VARIAZIONI SU TEMI PROPOSTI PER UNA PURA IDEOLOGIA FONETICA by Emilio Villa, LA BUFERA E ALTRO and SATURA by Eugenio Montale, LABORINTUS and POSTKARTEN by Edoardo Sanguineti, IL SEME DEL PIANGERE and IL MURO DELLA TERRA by Giorgio Caproni, SU FONDAMENTI INVISIBILI and PER IL BATTESIMO DEI NOSTRI FRAMMENTI by Mario Luzi.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and is intended for advanced level students only. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on how a conflict as an “event,” along with its representations, is a semiotic and cultural phenomenon. In other words, it is also a conflict on the significance to be attributed to events and to the actors participating in it as, for example, when mediated discourse labels or sanctions one of the concerned parties as “the barbarian,” “the oppressed,” or “the oppressor,” “the victim,” or “the perpetrator,” “the bystander," and “the implicated subject,” thus influencing the effects and the affects that international public opinion lives and feels in confronting and interpreting the conflict itself. The course focuses on how conflicts – their regulation, repression, and particularly their visual representations – constitute privileged loci for a semiotic analysis, arguing how conflicts challenge and rearrange pre-existing systems of cultural control, not only in the first explosive moments of violence or spontaneous civil disobedience, but also, subsequently, when they encounter modes of historicization linked closely to unifying discourses of national identity. Focus is given to the relationship between still and moving images (photograph, cinema) and conflict; on how and to what extent images and icons inspired by the examination of issues of memory and oblivion experienced in the last century respond to the challenges imposed by 21st-century conflicts.

Please note that the course extends into January, available for year students only. The course focuses on the following topics: the geological evolution of the planet earth and the formation of sea basins; the physical and chemical characteristics of the water masses; physiography and geomorphology of the seabed, genesis, and characteristics of rocks and sediments; sedimentological processes and distribution of benthic environments; the interactions between marine organisms and the abiotic environment; the main types of marine ecosystems and their functional characteristics; and the processes of formation of populations and their distribution in space and time. The course is divided into lectures and practical sessions, in the field and/or in the laboratory, with collection and analysis of samples/data and interpretation of results. Visits to the ISMAR (Institute of Marine Sciences) of the CNR of Bologna where the tools used in oceanographic and marine biology campaigns and the principles and techniques for the analysis and interpretation of the acquired data are presented. Visit to the Environmental Sciences Laboratories, of the Master's Degree in Marine Biology, at the Ravenna Campus.

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 covers molecular, cellular, and “-omics” aspects of the following topics (considering both theoretical and methodological points of view): 1) Cell-cell communication in bacteria (quorum sensing): basic principles and components of quorum sensing (QS); role of the QS in microbial pathogenicity, genome plasticity (horizontal gene transfer), stress response, and microbial interaction with the host; and application of quorum sensing circuits in biotechnology and synthetic biology of single bacteria and microbial communities. 2) Microbial biofilms: distribution and diversity of biofilms; mechanisms of biofilm formation and persistence; microbial metabolism and physiology in biofilm; role of QS in biofilm formation; biofilm resistance and tolerance; in vitro systems to grow and study the microbial biofilm; and the role/importance of biofilms in medical and industrial fields. 3) Bacterial second messengers: molecular mechanisms of the nucleotide second messenger (NSM)-based intracellular signaling in bacteria; the different components involved in the NSM-based signaling; and essential and emerging roles of NSMs in bacterial sensing and cellular response, biofilm formation, and microbial interactions. 4) Signaling and interactions within microbial communities: “-omics” to study microbial communities and microbial interactions; and designing and construction of synthetic microbial communities for the application in medical, industrial, and environmental fields.

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. Students who complete a research paper on a pre-approved topic are awarded 1 extra unit. Maximum units for this course are 8. The course has 2 parts: A & B. Students must take both parts. No partial credit is possible. Part A of the course focuses on the history and development of non-European literature in French, with particular attention to the relationship between literary texts and the historical, artistic, and linguistic context. Special attention is placed on the different methodologies useful for the analysis and interpretation of literary texts. Part B of the course focuses on the issues of diversity and inclusion in French-speaking migrant literatures with particular attention to Quebec, Lebanese, and Senegalese literatures. Special attention is placed on literature written  by migrant authors and literature written by those born in exile. Voluntary or forced mobility generates a literature with a dual focus: towards the country of origin and towards the country of adoption. Migrant writings, in a French-speaking context, give rise to a third space in which identity is renegotiated through writing, a space for the elaboration of diversity in search of similarities. Principal texts by Marco Micone, Antonio D'Alfonso, Fulvio Caccia, Amin Maalouf, and Wajdi Mouawad.

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 founding principles of international criminal law and justice; the historical evolution of international criminal justice and their current mechanisms; how to critically assess the impact and effectiveness of the different responses to international crimes. Students are expected to acquire the skills necessary to identify the problematic issues of criminal law, both from a political and juridical viewpoint, arising in different contexts and related to different mechanisms (whether retributive or restorative and both at the national or international levels). The objective of the course is to provide students, through a comparative and international perspective, with an understanding of: the criminal justice system and its changes introduced through the processes of internationalization and Europeanisation, at the same time highlighting the importance of the comparative approach; the constitutional principles in criminal matters and the foundational concepts of criminal law, the structure of its main principles and categories, the punishment and the classification of different penalties; the European criminal law developments, both regarding the legislation and the case law, as well as its influence on national criminal justice and law systems. Throughout this course, the theoretical framework is analyzed in the light of judicial decisions of national Constitutional Courts, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and, finally, the International Criminal Court. The course has 3 Parts. Part I: Internationalization of Criminal Law; Part II: International Criminal Law; Part III: Leading Case Law Analysis.