United Kingdom - England

This course looks at various candidates for the "Great American Novel," a term for fictional narratives that seem to capture the essence of the United States. The course examines the concept's origins following the American Civil War, evolution throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and enduring appeal in the popular imagination. Selected fiction is considered in relation to US national identity, the ideal of the American dream, notions of authorship, and anxieties toward social issues such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexual orientation.

This course teaches students to evaluate geometric machine learning as a tool to model common learning frameworks. Students design optimizers on Riemannian manifolds to implement smooth constrained optimization; synthesize discrete operators on graphs from their continuous versions; and modify learning models to operate on constrained domains and outcomes. As part of the course, students implement deep learning on unstructured domains such as graphs, point sets, and meshes, as well as mechanisms to yield structured output from learning models.

This course extends the statistical ideas introduced in the first year to more complex settings. Mathematically, the central concept is the linear model, a framework for statistical modelling that accommodates multiple predictor variables, continuous and categorial, in a unified way. There is a focus on fitting models to real data from a variety of problem domains, using R to perform computations. 

This course serves as a starting point to develop an engineer’s ability to select a material based on cost and performance, understand limitations and how properties change in service and the ability to critically assess new materials for a given application. Furthermore, this course provides an introduction to materials engineering and materials science. It also introduces the primary classes of materials, and to develop an understanding of types of interatomic, crystal, and molecular bonding in engineering materials and their influence on mechanical properties. Students develop an understanding of the modes of failure for different classes of materials. This course introduces brittle fracture, and to develop an understanding of the ways in which a flaw within a material can influence its response to loading.

The course teaches quantitative techniques that guide evidence-based managerial decision-making. Students examine whether the predictions of managerial, social, or economic theory are supported by empirical evidence. Particular emphasis is on (a) the many ways in which evidence is abused in the academic or managerial debate, and (b) the causality in the relationship between variables. The approach is both formal, as the course makes extensive use of econometric theorems and techniques, and solidly grounded in intuition, as it provides numerous examples of tests of real-life relations. Many of these examples are illustrated using the STATA software package, and students learn the basics of data manipulation and regression techniques.

The course covers analyzing market demand; factors affecting firms; cost, profit analysis, pricing, competition in various kinds of market structure, strategic behavior, firm growth (mergers and acquisitions); the impact of governments on company policies; interpreting economic data; and the macroeconomic environment.  In analyzing all these topics, the course relies heavily on, and where practical, current examples and case studies, rather than mathematical modelling. 

In this course students learn how to evaluate a brand strategy and how to use defined models and analytical tools to improve upon it. It covers the complete process, from consumer research, competitor analysis and positioning, to bringing the brand to life through design and activations. The course is based on the latest academic insights and infused with examples from our daily lives. It helps you prepare for a future as a marketeer, brand strategist, or entrepreneur.

This course examines, from a philosophical perspective, what is known about the minds of other animals - and what this means for the ethics of how people treat them.

Students apply knowledge of core chemical engineering to the design and evaluation of solutions for industrially relevant problems in an authentic context.  The course enables students to confidently undertake open-ended research in later courses. Students also explore business ethics on 3 levels (the Corporate, the social, and the theoretical) in order to develop an understanding of the moral structure of competing obligations and responsibilities inherent in various situations and issues.

This course explores the classical theory of games involving concepts of dominance, best response, and equilibria, where it proves Nash’s Theorem on the existence of equilibria in games. Students learn the concept of when a game is termed zero-sum and prove the related Von Neumann’s Minimax Theorem. The course explores cooperation in games and investigates the interesting Nash bargaining solution which arises from reasonable bargaining axioms. Students also explore the concept of a congestion game, often applied to situations involving traffic flow, where they see the counterintuitive Braess paradox emerge and prove Nash’s theorem in another context.