United Kingdom - England

This course develops an understanding of the theory and methods involved in the creation, storage, analysis, and presentation of geospatial data. Using industry standard software, the course provides the knowledge and skills to tackle advanced problem solving using Geographic Information Systems. This knowledge is fundamental not only to research in physical geography, environmental science, and many other disciplines, but provides a critical skill set used widely within a range of industries (including environmental management, local and national government, the utilities, and the insurance sector).

Project management practices are increasingly important to organizations across a range of sectors. Projects are the main vehicles by which organizations (public and private) embark on deliberate and proactive strategic change. This course explores the practicalities of managing projects from a value creation and lifecycle perspective.

This course explores the international history of the post-Cold War era. It examines the principal theme in contemporary international relations through a historical lens. The course covers the making of the post-Cold War international system, the causes of continued international wars and interventions, and why geopolitical competition between major powers has re-emerged as a central concern of international relations. 

The course equips students with a basic knowledge of management which can be used as a foundation for personal development. The course also is an introduction to future courses in management. 

Domesticated animals have been identified in many societies across the world, but rarely have archaeologists considered how livestock management has shaped (and continues to shape) human societies.  In the past, archaeologists have tended to assume that once established livestock can be disregarded as a dynamic factor.  Such studies focus on the narrow confines of the economic significance of livestock produce, often associated with the animal's death.  This course considers the agency of livestock and its importance in transforming human relationships.  Examples and case studies are drawn from archaeology, but also from anthropology, history, and geography

This course covers basic notions of information theory. Entropy as measure of uncertainty. Constrained optimization with Lagrange multipliers. Maximum entropy inference with constraints. Partition function, free energy as generating function. Collective behavior in spin systems: from independent voters to the tight-knit model (or Curie-Weiss ferromagnet); phase transitions and spontaneous symmetry breaking.  Distributions of functions of random variables using Kronecker delta.  Laplace's approximation for integrals. Bolzmann distribution and 1d Ising chain: exact calculation for free energy. Variational approximations and trial (factorized) distributions. Time permitting: multi-party voters, stochastic dynamics and Markov Chains, models on social networks, traffic flow and epidemic models.

In this course, student learn to process XML (with XSLT and Java), to model data with XML (XML native, RDF), and to query XML data (XQuery). The course teaches many concepts of data modelling and knowledge representation that are beyond the syntactic issues of XML or RDF. The knowledge students acquire in the course is fundamental to the many data design and data analytics tasks occurring in todays IT and business landscapes. The second part of the course is dedicates to advanced DB concepts including active databases, mobile databases, spatial and temporal databases, triggers, performance tuning, distributed databases, and indexing and query optimization. The third part of the course covers the modern, agile world of data processing: NoSQL. It is about the processing of semi-structured data, transforming data streams into formats (triplets, JSON) to be processed by new DB systems (e.g. MongoDB, CouchDB). 

This course focuses on the engineering problems specific to the regions of the ocean both offshore and near the coastline. It covers practical approaches for designing offshore and coastal structures and underlying physical processes such as waves, tides, erosion, and other coastal and offshore processes. The coursework project relates to topics such as the design of coastal or offshore structures, design of offshore renewable energy facilities, and coastal defense planning.

In this course students develop an understanding of film, television, and digital media history. They look at how and where digital media intersect and converge with these moving image forms, examining media from the late 19th century through to the present. Students consider how even "old" technologies were "new" at some point, and analyze the relationship between technological, social, and aesthetic developments in new media forms.

This course introduces the economic analysis of the labor market. It presents both traditional topics in the labor economics literature (e.g. demand, supply, human capital, discrimination and compensating wage differentials) as well as recent developments (e.g. early childhood education, migration, non-competitive labor markets and alternative work arrangements). The focus in the course are the fundamental models of labor economics, while basic empirical methods and empirical applications in contemporary labor economics are also discussed. Students apply the economic concepts to real world empirical problems.