University of Bologna

This course provides an in depth overview of Data Mining, Commercial data, Administrative data, survey data, Factor Analysis, Cluster Analysis, Predictive Models (decision trees, discriminant analysis, regression). The course content is delivered through theoretical lectures and practical laboratory works using SAS software; it focuses on the application of SAS programming for market research and consumer behavior analysis, combining statistical rigor with practical implementation. The curriculum emphasizes advanced techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), Discriminant Analysis, and clustering methods. Topics for this course include:

1. Advanced SAS Programming for Market Data
2. Statistical Foundations for Market Research
3. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for Market Research
4. Clustering Methods for Market Segmentation
5. Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) for Categorical Data
6. Discriminant Analysis for Predictive Modeling
7. Advanced Data Handling and Preparation
8. Capstone Project: CRM and Consumer Behavior Analysis

By the end of the course, students learn to define their research topic, edit the questionnaire, treat distortion effects generated by the opinion scale, build statistical models using the SAS software, and draft of research report. Students will conduct a psychographic Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capstone project, which must apply the data analysis strategies addressed during lectures; they produce a final written report with clear and logical description of the analysis process and methodological choices. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. Art and literature can be seen weaving around each other, influencing one and another, and being used as a tool to teach students about liberal arts and humanity; this course explores various ways in which words and images have interacted and shaped Italian culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is divided into two modules.

Module 1: Literature and Visual Culture explores the relations between the Italian novel and comic strip fiction between the 20th and 21st centuries, highlighting the fundamental role played by comics in the personal formation and creative activity of some writers. Tracing the development and diffusion of comic strip fiction in Italy starting from the second half of the 20th century, this module focuses in particular on how much the experience of comic strip readers influenced the narrative and non-fiction production of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, shaping their imagery and writing methods. The module analyzes and discusses interpretations of comic book characters and serial stories, as well as the different ways in which comics are incorporated into their texts.

Module 2: Literature and the Arts provides students with themes and areas for in-depth study: 1) the interaction between literature and photography; 2) the issue of the gaze in literature; 3) iconology, the visual turn and the pictorial turn; 4) literature and visual arts facing the crisis of modernity and postmodernity. In particular, the course delves into these specific forms of interaction between literature and photography: 1) the photographer as a character; 2) photography as a theme in literature; 3) photography as a way of writing or the role of photographic gaze in literature; 4) phototexts. At the end of the course, students are able to develop a general vision of the relationships between Italian Literature and other Arts, from the nineteenth century to nowadays, with a focus on painting. Students acquire knowledge on the most relevant works of literature which interact with images and they will be capable of analyzing critical, theoretical, and literary texts regarding visual arts.

This course provides students with the fundamental tools to understand financial decision-making in the modern corporation. Topics include: capital budgeting/corporate investment, capital structure, corporate sources of funding, dividend policy, corporate contingent claims for financial risk management. The course frames these topics within the standard theories of risk and return, valuation of assets, and market structure.

The course focuses on the following topics:

• Financial Planning and Analyzing financial performance
• Capital budgeting (NPV, IRR and payback period)
• Capital budgeting and risk (asset beta and equity beta)
• Financing decisions and the firm cost of capital
• Capital issuing (seasoned equity offers, IPOs and venture capital)
• Corporate risk management

The course focuses on North American literature (USA and Canada) written in English, with a special emphasis on identity issues and the making of "national" literatures. Classic and funding texts are compared to outline the symbolic and mythological patterns that have shaped the US and the Canadian realities, from the European colonization till the end of the 19th century. In this class, literature is investigated through a constant dialogue with other arts, including media, cinema, photography, and the visual arts. The concepts of identity, memory, community, inner/outer landscape constitute the thematic paradigms to approach the evolving mentalities underpinning the evolution of complex identity processes in the so-called New World. This course features a series of guest scholars to encourage the dialogue between literature and civic society so to widen our knowledge of learning and training opportunities available nationally or internationally. The list of featured guests will be available when classes start. Students learn the literary history of the period at stake; they acquire useful literary tools to analyze fictional productions and question them in relation to the complex and heterogeneous North American realities.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The aim of the course is to illustrate the diversity of the world's languages and the implications of this diversity for a general theory of language and its use, discussing the main methods and results of the typological-functionalist approach and of the approaches developed in the pragmatic field. Through the comparison of different languages, belonging to the various families attested in the world, the theoretical and methodological bases for the analysis of structural, semantic and pragmatic diversity of human languages are discussed in detail, also in relation to cultural diversity. At the end of the course, students are able to trace different languages back to different 'linguistic types' and have an up-to-date knowledge of threatened and endangered languages; have a thorough knowledge of the notions of linguistic and pragmatic universals; be able to set up and carry out autonomously an interlinguistic comparison with respect to single linguistic and pragmatic phenomena; be familiar with the main techniques of data collection and linguistic documentation; and be able to orient themselves within the descriptive grammars of different languages.

The course is organized in five parts. For each topic, different perspectives and theoretical proposals are compared, in the light of the most recent scientific debate:

1. Introduction to linguistic diversity
2. The world's languages and their health status.
3. Analyzing linguistic diversity: data collection and methods of analysis
4. Linguistic typology: seeking order in chaos
5. Explorations of linguistic diversity

The topics addressed in the second part of the course are listed below. The list may be subject to change depending on the specific interests of the attending students.

• Different languages construct words differently: morphological types
• Subject and object in world’s languages: syntactic types
• The categorization of time and reality: languages without time markers, time and reality of nouns and adjectives
• Noun categories: genders (how many?) and number (beyond singular and plural...)
• Parts of speech: how are people, things, and events categorized? Are there languages without adjectives?
• The expression of gratitude in the world's languages: is saying 'thank you' a universal phenomenon or does it depend on education and culture?
• How to communicate misunderstanding? The expression of error and its repair in world languages
• Languages without AND and languages without OR: connectives beyond logical distinctions

A basic knowledge of general linguistics is required. Those who have never taken a basic linguistics exam will have to recover independently, by studying a basic manual (Berruto & Cerruti 2011 is suggested).

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. At the end of the course the student knows and understands: - the motivation and the components of the Data Mining process; - the general concepts, technologies and methodologies of Data Warehouse, OLAP and Data Lake, as enabling factors of the Data Mining process; - the principles and the most relevant use cases of a wide set of Machine Learning algorithms which are used to extract relevant and actionable information from large amounts of data. At the end of the course the student is able to: - design the main steps of a Data Mining process - choose the Machine Learning methods best suited for the process - evaluate the quality of the result in order to support strategic and operational decisions. The course is divided into two parts: Data Mining and Machine Learning.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course offers students a multidimensional perspective on the dynamic links between human societies and the environment, using insights from environmental, resource and ecological economics. After presenting the historical background of the discipline, the course provides a broad overview of how economic theory conceptualizes the problems of optimal pollution control and the efficient use of exhaustible and renewable natural resources. Several key sub-fields of environmental economics are analyzed and discussed, including the valuation of environmental goods, the measurement of sustainability, the links between economic growth and environmental degradation, the role of technological innovation as well as the behavioral aspects of environmental protection. Climate economic modelling is the main applied focus of the course. At the end of the course, students have a comprehensive understanding of the most relevant research areas in environmental and resource economics.

Specific topics covered:

• Weak and strong sustainability; environmental and ecological economics
• Economic growth and the environment
• Measures of sustainability
• Static and dynamic efficiency
• Cost-benefit analysis
• Depletable resource economics
• Renewable resource economics
• Climate change economics
• Environmental policy
• International environmental agreements

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course is organized in two sections:

Section A: lectures that introduce students to the key conceptual tools. This section analyzes the relationship between the countries of sub-Saharan Africa and the international community within the framework of the prevailing development issues in the following periods: independence and the Cold War; Washington consensus; democratization; the third millennium; and the new international consensus on 'stability' and 'security'.

Section B: seminar classes for in-depth discussions of the Part A framework in view of a selection of country case-studies in sub-Saharan Africa, and for debating the new research questions that will come to light during classes. The main focus is the challenge of democracy in the 2000s: they are examined considering the local and international political priorities, the emphasis on security and the role of international cooperation policies.

At the end of the course, the student has acquired, in a critical manner and with reference to international academic research literature, a good knowledge of the political history of contemporary Africa in its international dimension. In particular, the student is able to: A) analyze and discuss the main elements of the political development and transformations of the political systems of contemporary Africa considering the internal, regional, and international context; B) analyze and discuss the main factors defining the role and location of Africa in contemporary global politics and international relations; C) analyze and evaluate empirically the development strategies and governance reforms, also in relation to the role of the international policies of the major donors; D) find and arrange documentary and bibliographic sources using libraries, databases, and websites, and organize, both verbally and by written essays, the knowledge acquired during the course.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course content includes:

1) Introduction to the use of clinical interviewing for well-being interventions.

2) Attending and listening skills for clinical interviewing.

3) The use of questions during clinical interviewing.

4) Well-being interventions based on person-centered approaches: theoretical principles and methodological recommendations.

5) Conceptual and methodological principles of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT).

6) Conceptual and methodological principles of Cognitive-Behavior Therapy (CBT).

7) The Well-Being Therapy (WBT): the conceptual background, the methodological framework, and its main clinical applications.

8) An introduction to the Schema Therapy.

9) The clinician and the soul: an introduction to Logotherapy.

10) The inferiority feeling and striving for superiority: an introduction to Individual Psychology and Adlerian Psychotherapy.

By the end of the course, students: know evidence-based interventions aimed at improving well-being, their mechanisms of action, potential beneficial and adverse effects; are able to evaluate the efficacy of well-being interventions and plan research and intervention projects to reduce risk in populations with unhealthy lifestyle and promote adaptation and self-management in patients with chronic and progressive diseases.

This course primarily focuses on the identification of financial assets' fair prices. First, the course introduces the main theories of portfolio choice and risk-expected return trade-off in financial markets: the mean-variance portfolio choice, CAPM, APT, Fama-French models. Second, the course introduces the main models and techniques that are used to analyze fixed income securities. Starting from basic concepts such as the yield curve, yield-to-maturity, duration, convexity, the course introduces portfolio hedging strategies based on duration-matching or asset liability management. The course is divided into four parts. First, the course introduces the students to the problem of managing a portfolio. Second, the course introduces the students to the main models and techniques that are used to analyze fixed income securities. Third, the course introduces options pricing. Fourth, the course expose the students to the main behavioral finance findings in the current literature.