London School of Economics

This course focuses on data about connections, forming structures known as networks. Networks and network data describe an increasingly vast part of the modern world, through connections on social media, communications, financial transactions, and other ties. The course covers the fundamentals of network structures, network data structures, and the analysis and presentation of network data. Students work directly with network data and structure, and analyze these data using R.

This course provides an introduction to the management accounting and financial control concepts that are used in strategic decision-making, in order to effectively perform in a competitive business environment. Covering issues such as technology and digitalization, corporate strategy, marketing, and modern cost management tools, students critically analyze how these tools can be used to increase performance.

This course introduces students to the study and history of these economic inequalities. It is a detailed survey of the key evidence on inequality, both contemporary and historical, and the sources and methods used to measure it. Students learn how to critically interrogate the quality of inferences from such evidence. They explore the dimensions of inequality along historical, contemporary, spatial, ethnic, and gender lines, drawing on research in economic history, economic geography, and sociology. 

This course introduces students to the core ethics concepts needed to build better technology and reason about its impact on the economy, civil society, and government. In the first half of the course, students consider ethical questions raised by different steps in the data science pipeline, such as: What is data, and how can we design better (ethical?) data governance regimes? Can technology discriminate? If so, what are promising strategies for promoting fairness and mitigating algorithmic bias? Can we understand black-box AI systems and explain their decisions? Why is it morally important that we do so? In the second half of the class, students consider ethical questions raised by the use of AI systems to manage our work, political, and social lives.

The course familiarizes students with the basic principles of law, so that they can apply them to a wide range of commercial transactions, in the light of the policy objectives that legal regulation pursues, and with an understanding of the context of commercial transactions in which the law operates. 

This course outlines the structures of the European Union, its law-making processes, judicial architecture, and its most important policy domains. It does so by focusing on both the law of European integration and the political, social, and cultural context within which it operates. Students tackle questions about the dynamics and direction of integration, including the existential challenges posed by Brexit, the rule of law crisis and the refugee crisis.

The primary focus of this course is on the core machine learning techniques in the context of high-dimensional or large datasets (i.e. big data). The first part of the course covers elementary and important statistical methods including nearest neighbors, linear regression, logistic regression, regularization, cross-validation, and variable selection. The second part of the course deals with more advanced machine learning methods including regression and classification trees, random forests, bagging, boosting, deep neural networks, k-means clustering and hierarchical clustering. The course will also introduce causal inference motivated by analogy between double machine learning and two-stage least squares. All the topics are delivered using illustrative real data examples. Students also gain hands-on experience using R or Python (programming languages and software environments for data analysis, computing and visualization).

This course covers the following: 1. study of 20th-century British literature (prose, poetry, and drama) in its socio-political context; study of individual authors (in weekly lectures) 2. study of major cultural themes running through the century, e.g., literature of war; imperialism; feminism; modernism; postmodernism; political writing, 3. several trips to theatre productions during the year, 4. extensive use of archive recordings of authors, and video.

This course discusses some central empirical and theoretical questions in the field. It begins by examining classic comparative debates about the relationship between the development of states and nations on the one hand, and the rise of capitalism and democracy on the other. The course examines the impact that social cleavages have on parties, elections and other political institutions in a number of different countries. It also examines the strength and political impact of both labor movements and other important social movements. Additionally, the course examines why similar countries can develop very different social and economic policies. In addition students examine some of the founding writings of Marx and Weber and critically assess the use of political concepts. Throughout the course students consider some of the main theoretical approaches that are used in the study of political sociology.

This course examines, from a philosophical perspective, the ways in which recent developments in genetics and neuroscience challenge our conceptions of what we are — and what we could become.