Trinity College Dublin

This course presents a practical and theoretical introduction to modern autonomous mobile robot systems. It gives students a broad introduction to the field spanning topics including hardware, software, AI and machine learning, and human-robot interaction and robot ethics. Students study the technology and methods underlying a robot’s ability to sense and act in its environment. Through a series of labs and assignments, students gain a proficiency in developing applications for robots in both simulation and real-world settings  The course has the following key components: an introduction to mobile robots – sensors, actuators, and control paradigms; the fundamental theory for autonomous mobile robots (kinematics, localization, mapping, and path planning); the scientific methods for evaluating robot performance; an introduction to the field of human-robot interaction; and robots-in-the-wild: case studies of real-world robots and their ethical implications.

The course is an interdisciplinary course drawing on political science, law, and history. Although the major focus of the course is on the European Court of Justice, the politics and law of other courts and international tribunals are also discussed, certainly including the United States Supreme Court and the politics of the US constitution, but also perhaps including the Supreme Court of Ireland and the German Bundesverfassungsgericht as well as international dispute settlement tribunals such as the World Trade Organization, Investor-State Dispute Settlement systems, and the European Convention on Human Rights. Students also study alternative approaches to understanding and investigating court decision-making, including through a focus on legal texts, use of the comparative method, archival research, judicial biography, and quantitative approaches.

Topics include regular languages, context-free languages, feature structures, and brief introductions to probabilistic methods in natural language processing and recursive computation of semantic values from grammatical structures.

The problems facing less developed countries are among the greatest challenges facing the world today. This course focuses on the diverse structures and common characteristics of less developed countries and offers an evaluation of policies being pursued. It begins by discussing the idea of economic development before moving onto sources of and barriers to development. It uses contemporary models of economic development to investigate why some countries are rich and others are poor.

Students learn to express knowledge, understanding and critical appreciation of the practice of film writing. Students describe the different approaches to writing about film and the respective purpose, audiences, and outlets for them shows the development of original thought. They demonstrate independence of thought and creative expression in the synthesis of research and ideas in seminar debates and through assessments. The course teaches students how to use critical thinking to produce a piece of film writing that investigates or reflects contemporary culture. 

The course focuses on the ethical issues involved with innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and critically examines the role played by social, political, cultural, and human factors when designing, introducing, and using technologies.  This course therefore contributes to the broader program outcomes related to ethics, reasoning, and moral inquiry. The course links most strongly with the SDGs which can be addressed by new, disruptive, and innovative approaches and technologies.  This course focuses on the SDGs which can be addressed by smaller, community-level and citizen-led technology-based initiatives.  Examples of this include designing innovative ways of leveraging the ubiquity of mobile phones in the Global South for healthcare and education, and the design, evaluation, and implementation of innovative techniques which are designed to be ethically, socially, and culturally appropriate for their particular context. The course content includes relevant, authentic, situated cases from the Global South and Europe that have been developed specifically for the course.  These multimedia-enhanced cases focus on projects from Ireland, India, Uganda, and Ethiopia. 

This course explores the art of Europe in the long 15th century (approximately 1380-1520) with particular attention to religious culture and belief; how gender and the body were understood and expressed; the role of pilgrimage, suffrages and the saints; the differences of artistic expressions between northern Europe (e.g. Flanders) and southern (Italy); the art of crises such as witchcraft, plague and religious reform; and the ways in which naturalism and humanism challenged existing modes of artistic expression. Students also look at whether the view of the period as one steeped in pessimism, the macabre and thoughts of decay, known according to the formulation of Jan Huizinga as the "waning of the Middle Ages" is still useful. The dominant centers to be examined are the cities of Flanders and Italy, but the art of northern France, England, Germany, and elsewhere is also drawn on.

The course educates students in the area of medical device design. This is a broad course and its focus does not solely revolve around the engineering challenges associated with designing a medical device, lectures focus on many aspects: understanding clinical trial data, understanding the anatomical fundamentals associated with the device area, developing intellectual property strategies, regulation of medical devices, risk analysis, manufacturing techniques and requirements, reimbursement, and case studies of successful and unsuccessful medical device development.

Political leaders use architecture to convey power, to express political ideas, and to influence how people think and act. In 20th-century Europe, political ideologies including fascism, communism, colonialism, and democracy influenced the creation of new buildings and cities. Students explore those ideologies through the spaces that they produced, and a selection of examples spanning between Hitler’s plans to transform Berlin to public swimming pools in post-war Britain. Under the banner of democracy, students also explore how forces within Irish politics impacted the Dublin cityscape. This is a history of modern Europe told through the mark left by political actors upon architecture and cities.