National Taiwan University

This course rests on the premise that the nineteenth century matters today, for it unleashed and solidified the main forces and ideologies shaping our lives as 21st-century global citizens: Capitalism, Marxism, Feminism, White Supremacy, Anti-racism, Environmentalism, etc. Course readings enable us to grapple with the complexity of this period as well as to rethink contemporary conflicts and crises: Is Whitman’s vision of democracy applicable today? What does the #MeToo movement owe to Charlotte Perkins Gillman? Do we live and work like Bartleby? What do we learn about freedom today by reading a slave narrative published 150 years ago? 

The course introduces East Asia and its political and economic foundation. The course is divided into two parts. First, the course introduces developmental state models and conceptualizes state transformation in East Asia. Second, the course discusses cases of state transformation in contemporary Asia. 

This course offers a survey of Southeast Asian history from the second half of the early modern period to the early twentieth century. The course is centered on a key problem that characterizes the region — the tension between the region's distinctiveness on one hand and its well-known openness to “external” influences on the other. Using updated historical scholarship on the region, the course situates Southeast Asia in the context of developments in world history. The following key themes in Southeast Asian history are presented: (1) indigenous social, cultural and religious systems and their interaction with “extra-regional” influences (2) intra-regional, Asian trade systems and mercantilism (3) “state” and imperial formations (4) European colonization and its effects on local societies (5) local responses to colonialism during the early twentieth century.

The course covers financial statements mainly from an investor's perspective. It provides the information in financial statements and technical tools for analyzing and valuing companies and communication. This course is designed to take the students beyond the routine filling of boxes with standard financial ratios. The primary focus of the course is not on the accounting rules, but the use of accounting information. We will use firms' publicly available financial statements to assess current performance, forecast future performance and estimate fundamentals of the firm.

This course provides the ability to analyze businesses focusing on their yielding cash flow. To conduct more reasonable analyses, the appropriate balance between quantitative analyses (e.g., financial ratio analyses) and qualitative analyses (e.g., strategy analyses) is essential. Furthermore, the course covers topics regarding financial forecasting, investment analysis, and business valuation. For the sake of a better understanding of the theories needed and the techniques in practice, cases are provided in the proper classes. Assessment: final exam (40%), group presentation (25%), class assignments (20%), quiz (15%). Prerequisite: Intermediate accounting knowledge

In recent decades, research in the field of neuroscience has suggested new interventions and applications in social domains such as law, education, and economics, and challenged us to redefine our understandings of responsibility, choice, and what it is to be human. One of the applications, consumer neuroscience, is an important step in the analysis and understanding of consumer behavior through the rigorous application of the knowledge and techniques of neurosciences, and appears as a new fundamental tool for the present and future of market research. This course addresses challenges in advancing scientific understanding of the biological basis of decision-making, and translational applications of this knowledge to the areas of marketing and consumer behavior.

This course provides a basic introduction to the study of economics in a practical way, looking at the application of economic theory in the modern world, emphasizing recent trends and developments and putting them in a historical perspective. Material is presented and discussed in seminar sessions, with one-to-one tutorials to develop ideas and understanding. Simulations are introduced as a way of developing awareness of economic issues.

This seminar critically overviews the intellectual genealogies of what are now called popular music studies, popular musicology, etc., and attempts to contemplate the dialectical relationship between the socio-culture dimensions of music and the musical dimensions of society and culture. This seminar consists of the three major parts. Part one deals with key concepts and definitions surrounding the very notion of popular music and with the interdisciplinary origins and intellectual trajectories of the study of popular music. Part II and Part III are both concerned with diverse theoretical positions regarding the inter-relatedness between musical text and soocio-cultural context, with an analytical and critical stress on studying popular music in/as/through culture and society and on studying culture and society in/as/through popular music respectively.

This course introduces the modern study of neurobiology, starting with the physiological and biochemical characteristics of nerve cells, synaptic transmission and neurotransmitter systems, and the structure of the nervous system. In addition, the course covers the sensory and motor functions as well as the development and modifications of the nervous system. This course also discusses higher neural functions such as behavior, emotion, attention, and memory. Text: Bear, Connors and Paradiso, NEUROSCIENC: EXPLORING THE BRAIN.

The course examines machine learning with a specific focus on deep learning technology. It will include the latest and state of the art technologies. Topics include self-attention, transformer, generative model, explainable AI, adversarial attack, privacy, domain adaptation, quantum ML, compression, and meta-learning.