University of Copenhagen

This pre-semester course offers an exciting and comprehensive introduction to the history of Copenhagen and to the Danish language. This course is a perfect introduction for students who wish to gain a solid understanding of the cultural, political, economic, and social history of the Danish capital. The course consists of a series of lectures supplemented with excursions out in the streets of Copenhagen. Over three weeks, students learn about the city’s history from its foundation in the early Middle Ages, when Copenhagen was just a fishing village, through a millennium of history up to modern Copenhagen, often ranked as one of the best cities in the world when measured by the quality of life. As well as covering the rich history of Copenhagen, the course also includes several lessons in Danish for beginners to introduce the basics of the Danish language including conversation, grammar, and pronunciation. Students learn to present themselves, describe where they live, and learn how to order coffee in Danish. It also covers some of the Danish terminology related to the cultural content of the course. This intensive three-week course is open to all international students and assumes no prior knowledge of Danish history or language. 

This course focuses on the technical solutions needed to improve the fairness, accountability, and transparency of machine learning models. It reflects on the benefits and risks of machine learning models to develop methods to detect and mitigate biases and create solutions to make the inner workings of models more transparent. Topics include statistical notions of fairness and bias; the intended usage of machine learning models; learning fair representations; model interpretability and transparency; generating and evaluating model explanations; and probing representations for bias. Knowledge of machine learning (probability theory, linear algebra, classification) and programming is a prerequisite.

This course examines recent developments in the contentious electoral politics of three Southeast Asian countries: Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, with some comparative references to Burma/Myanmar. Following a brief review of the case countries, the course adopts a thematic approach, first reviewing the character of the state, including national mythologies and the historical role of the military. It then explores aspects of transition, including the changing political economy, the rise of electoral politics, the role of religion and media, and the phenomenon of rally politics. Challenges to national elites from the regions is also closely scrutinized. These themes and issues have a broader relevance to wider debates in comparative politics which students explore in their written assessment.

This course provides an overview of the development of economic theory, primarily emphasized as a science in evolution and fostered by the debate on the main economic issues of the time as a response to economic reality. The course focuses on major writers and economic issues central to the development of what is considered standard economic theory, as well as lesser-known contributions, to account for the historical and theoretical preconditions for contemporary economic theory.

This course offers a study of migration research through an anthropological lens. New analytical and methodological perspectives raise important questions concerning the social organization of migration as well as our understanding of the processes of socio-cultural continuity and change. The course examines how anthropological theory could potentially contribute to the conceptualization of the spatially and temporally extended processes that are set in motion by migratory movements. The course discusses the possibility of the creation of an ethnographic research practice that can encompass these complex processes. 

This course builds up a toolbox of numerical optimization methods for building solutions in future studies, thereby making it an ideal supplement for students from many different fields in science. The course is taught both at a theoretical level that goes into deriving the math, and also on an implementation level with focus on computer science and good programming practice. Students participate in weekly programming exercises where they implement the algorithms and methods introduced from theory, and apply their own implementations to case-study problems like computing the motion of a robot hand or fitting a model to highly non-linear data. Topics include: first order optimality conditions, Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions, Taylors theorem, mean value theorem, nonlinear equation solving, linear search methods, trust region methods, linear least-squares fitting, regression problems, and normal equations.

This course introduces the sub-discipline of economic sociology and discusses how this field is related both to other branches of sociology and to economics. It introduces core concepts and approaches in contemporary economic sociology, particularly sociological perspectives on markets, money, and the social embeddedness of these phenomena. The course also analyzes various types of social and economic phenomena by means of economic sociological concepts and theories. It is structured around the reading of Mark Granovetter’s SOCIETY AND ECONOMY: FRAMEWORK AND PRINCIPLES (2017), which in an exemplary fashion rehearses many of the key concepts in contemporary economic sociology. The readings are supplemented with research papers that exemplify some of the issues dealt with in the book as well as additional concepts and perspectives in economic sociology. In parallel with the reading of course literature, students develop an economic sociological analysis of a case of their own choosing, applying and discussing core concepts in economic sociology.