Lund University

This course introduces the concept "Design for X" (DfX), which is well established within product development. In any product development project, it is essential to ensure that the product satisfies the functions it is designed for. But many other issues are caused by, or affect the properties of the product: is the product reliable, sustainable, is it easy to assemble, and inexpensive to manufacture? In this course, the following "design for Xs" are included: design for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA), design for additive manufacturing (DFAM), robust design, design for environment (DFE), and design to cost (DtC).

The course aims to extend the student’s Swedish vocabulary and to provide students with the opportunity to practice oral and written proficiency. The skills training also includes a presentation of the typical features of Swedish grammar and phonetics. The course also provides information on Swedish social life and institutions and glimpses of modern Swedish literature. The students extend their productive and receptive vocabulary through reading. It also includes pronunciation exercises with a particular focus on prosodic features.

This course examines environmental change as a problem of governance. It scrutinizes major governance dimensions - such as actors, institutions, and problem structures - at multiple levels and across domains. This includes the interplay of government, market, and civil society in efforts to mitigate and adapt to environmental change. The course critically approaches the changing institutional architecture of environmental governance, including the rise of alternative forms of governance beyond the state. Actors like regions, cities, international organizations, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and social movements are studied. Cases of environmental governance on various levels are contrasted and compared, together with overlaps between environmental issues and other domains like trade and security. The course allows reflecting on these cases in relation to central political scientific concepts like democracy, justice, legitimacy, and effectiveness.

The course provides an introduction to statistical analysis of text. Methods based on classic statistical approaches (including Bayesian models) and modern approaches such as deep learning (recurrent neural networks) are studied. Topics covered include preprocessing of textual data; text representation; text classification; text clustering; topic modeling; sentiment analysis; and text summarization.

The focus of the course is on Intellectual Property Right (in a global perspective) since they are considered a growing part of the value adding process in companies and at the same time are a more important mean of competition, but also related rights such as rules and regulations of marketing and competition, secrecy, and IT rights. Other issues regarding the commercialization of an invention will be discussed in the course, such as questions regarding license agreements. The course also deals with areas such as IPR-strategies for companies, how to search and utilize the information in patent databases, and how to interpret agreements relating to intellectual property.

The course provides an introduction to the rapidly growing field of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for social science students. Some of the most important theories and practices of GIS, within social sciences are presented. The course also addresses some key conceptual debates and developments in GIS. Practical tasks include exercises in a computer lab environment, and common analytical methods and tools within GIS are introduced. The course makes aware of the potential uses of GIS as well as its application within various fields of study.

Psycholinguistics tests different theories of the production, perception, and acquisition of language by using various methods, such as reaction time experiments, brain activity measurements, misarticulation analysis, and corpus analysis. This course provides an introduction to these theories and methods. Furthermore, the factors that affect our perception, production, and acquisition of a first or second language are studied. The course introduces the principles for conducting and assessing a psycholinguistic experiment and includes an exercise in conducting such an experiment.

The course covers sufficient statistics, factorization criteria, exponential families, Rao-Blackwells theorem, ancillary statistics, Cramér-Rao's bound, Neyman-Pearson's lemma, permutation test, and connection between hypothesis testing and confidence intervals. Asymptotic methods: maximum likelihood estimation, profile, conditional and penalized likelihood as well as hypothesis testing with likelihood ratio-, Wald- and score-method. Bayesian inference: estimation, hypothesis testing, and confidence interval and the difference compared to frequentist interpretation.

This course reviews the basic theory and understanding of the most important molecular genetic methods used in modern ecological and evolutionary research projects. The course is mainly based on practical learning through wet labs (DNA extraction, PCR, DNA sequencing) and computer exercises (editing of DNA sequences that you obtain during the course, phylogeny, and various programs for analysis of DNA sequences) and leads to mastery of different methods used to detect and analyze variation at gene, genome and protein levels within and between individuals, populations, and species. Emphasis is also placed on improving one's ability to assimilate and critically review scientific articles based on molecular genetic data and analyses. The course ends with a research project that is carried out in small groups.

The course deals with current interdisciplinary research on the origins of language. Focus is placed on the relationship between biological and cultural evolution and physiological and neural conditions for language from the perspective of evolution. Furthermore, the course addresses animal communication, experiments on language acquisition in primates and other animals, the relationship between mind and language and different hypotheses on the origins of language and evaluation of these on the basis of empirical evidence.