University of Edinburgh

This course covers almost 1400 years of the history of art, from c.500 to c.1700, from the Early Medieval period to the Baroque. The course (though it follows a roughly chronological sequence) is not a chronological survey and does not pretend to provide comprehensive coverage of this vast and complex subject. Instead the work of prominent artists, important types, key periods and diverse geographies of art are selected to provide representative examples for study. All teaching considers the visual arts as a reflection of the societies in which they were produced.

This course brings together as a coherent body of knowledge the game theoretic algorithms and models that underpin several flourishing subjects at the intersection of computer science, economics, e-commerce, and AI.

The course examines key aspects of popular religious culture during the early modern period in Europe which witnessed the transformation of religious life associated with the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. It deals specifically with religious ideas and devotional practices at a popular level and the changes introduced by both Protestant and Catholic reformers. As part of the spectrum of belief it examines ideas concerning magic and witchcraft and it includes a study of the witch hunting which swept through Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Throughout the course particular attention will be given to the role of women in churches and society and how they were affected by the religious upheavals of the period. 

This course focuses on approaches relating to representation, reasoning, and planning for solving real world inference. The course illustrates the importance of using a smart representation of knowledge such that it is conducive to efficient reasoning, and the need for exploiting task constraints for intelligent search and planning. The notion of representing action, space, and time is formalized in the context of agents capable of sensing the environment and taking actions that affect the current state. There is also a strong emphasis on the ability to deal with uncertain data in real world scenarios, and the planning and reasoning methods needed for inference in probabilistic domains. 

On this course, students read a range of Buddhist literature from different historical and geographical contexts, and use this literature to explore key Buddhist ideas, themes, and literary forms.