University of Edinburgh

The course addresses contemporary issues facing business, through the lenses of different disciplines (ways of thinking). Disciplines may include popular culture, literature, evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, politics, history, religion and statistics. Students leave the course with an understanding of how to think creatively about business and how to think critically about propositions within it.

Reinforcement learning (RL) refers to a collection of machine learning techniques which solve sequential decision making problems using a process of trial-and-error. It is a core area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and provides one of the most powerful approaches to solving decision problems. This course covers foundational models and algorithms used in RL, as well as advanced topics such as scalable function approximation using neural network representations and concurrent interactive learning of multiple RL agents.

Humans are a vital component of secure and private systems, they are also one of the most expensive components and the most challenging to reason about. In this course, students learn about how to create systems that are usable while still fulfilling their primary security or privacy mission. Students also learn about research topics such as designing user studies to critically evaluate interfaces and reading academic papers to create an academically-informed view of the topic.

The main theme of the course is the interplay between Number Theory and rings. Students need to be familiar with the basics of prime numbers, unique factorization of integers and modular arithmetic. This is an advanced course with Fundamentals of Pure Mathematics as a prerequisite. 

This course promotes an understanding of core concepts in microbial growth and form, with an emphasis on diversity of function. It explores microbes, their major properties, and how they influence processes, such as global warming, acid rain, and nutrient cycling in the world. It examines how microbes interact with plants to influence crop production and spoilage, or affect the safety of the food we eat. The course also explores how microbes are exploited in the biotechnology industry, as well as how we might make new products in the future, using cutting edge technology, such as synthetic biology.

The course looks at developing models that are motivated by empirical evidence of individual behavior rather than assumptions about rationality. Students look at leading academic papers in the area to assess the empirical evidence (field and experimental) and the implications for standard assumptions on rationality and to look at how the theory has been developed in the light of this evidence. Topics covered include decision making under certainty, decision making under uncertainty including prospect theory, experimental economics and/or neuroeconomics, intertemporal choice, self-control, behavioral game theory, case studies on saving and obesity, and the economics of happiness. 

Celtic languages are presently spoken in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, on the Isle of Man, in Cornwall and in Brittany, as well as in a small number of diasporic communities. This course explores the emergence of these Celtic speech communities into the historical record in the Middle Ages, the social, political and cultural forces which have shaped their development, and their current prospects for survival. The impact of the development of central state authorities, the protestant Reformation, wider British and French politics, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the emergence of the modern nation-state, contemporary minority discourses will be considered. Literary and other sources in the various Celtic languages (in translation) will be used to explore these themes. While the focus will be sociolinguistic and literary, linguistic characteristics of the languages will be referred to from time to time.

This course complements PRINCIPLES OF FINANCE, which is a theoretical and conceptual course that introduces core ideas of finance. APPLICATIONS OF FINANCE focuses on empirical and practical applications of these concepts and theories. The course introduces students to some of the practical aspects of finance, for example, valuation, trading strategies based on derivatives, and new finance applications, such as blockchain and high-frequency trading.

This course provides an introduction to the scientific basis of modern medicine and the role of biological sciences in the understanding and treatment of disease. This is delivered through a series of lectures, facilitated group discussions, a practical class and assessed written reports. The course provides a basic understanding of practical material relevant to biological sciences and enables students to develop personal skills in interpreting basic scientific research and communicating scientific ideas and information in a clear, accurate, and well-organized manner.

The course familiarizes students with the issues involved in designing, implementing, and applying parallel programming systems. Initial motivation is provided by consideration of a number of typical high performance applications and parallel architectures. This highlights the role of parallel software systems as a means of bridging the gap between these and allows abstraction of the issues which must be addressed by any such system (partitioning, communication, agglomeration, scheduling). It explores the ways in which these challenges have been addressed by a range of systems, including both de facto standards and more adventurous research projects.