University College London

This is a research-led and research-based course, providing an introduction to the fields of cultural and historical geography. It has a slightly different emphasis to other courses because it explores some of the philosophies and methodologies used to create cultural and historical geographies, and is designed to give students the experience and confidence to undertake their own independent research using UCL’s museum and archive collections. The course encourages students to think critically about questions of representation, different kinds of materials, forms of analysis, and engage with questions of politics and ethics.

The course helps students to become confident with a range of data structures and algorithms and able to apply them in realistic situations. The course provides the tools required to analyze a problem and decide which algorithms or algorithmic techniques to apply to solve it. The course involves practical programming and encourages a thoughtful approach to analysis and design problems.

This course introduces students to the key ideas of Game Theory and strategic thinking, allowing them to use game theoretic tools to analyze real world problems. Students see applications in industrial organization, auctions, competition and cooperation, voting, solving environment problems, and arms races.

This course introduces students to geographical scholarship that has sought to explain, understand, and critically analyze the manifold relationships between space and society in different contexts. The course familiarizes students with innovative geographical research exploring issues such as, for example, environment and uneven development; culture, the global, and the local; transnationalism and migration; gender, race, identity; politics, the state, and regions; empire, colonialism, and postcolonialism; nature, materiality, and non-human agencies.

This course explores this question in the context of the languages and peoples of the Danube region, focusing on German, Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian and Croatian, and Yiddish. These languages belong to two genealogically different groups (Indo-European and Uralic) and one (Yiddish) bears traces of a third group (Semitic); within Indo-European, three different sub-groups are represented (Germanic, Romance, Slavonic). The course uses data from these languages (texts in the original, idioms, proverbs, jokes, etc.) to explore language and cultural contact from both a purely linguistic perspective (language relatedness v. typological features of languages, script v. sounds, areal connections, borrowing of words, idioms, and figures of speech) and a sociolinguistic point of view (intercultural exchange, multilingualism, standardization, purism, and the relation between language and identity). It explores how Danubian languages both converge and differ, how Danubian culture is both intercultural friction and intercultural flow.

This course provides a fundamental overview of mathematical finance. It begins with an overview of financial contracts, interest rates, and the value of money. Specifically, it discusses what constitutes a fair price for a contract and explains why fair prices are rarely used in everyday transactions. After that, students investigate financial markets in a discrete-time setting, with the help of some revision on basic probability theory. The concept of risk-neutral asset pricing is discussed with reference to pricing stocks and options in the exchange. The last part of the course introduces the fundamental concepts of stochastic calculus and concentrates on continuous time finance with the widely used Black-Scholes model. The goal of this course is to provide students with a broad understanding of the application to finance theory, while setting a solid theoretical foundation to the field. 

This course develops awareness of the complex relationship between spoken language and society through discussion of existing literature and through experience of experimental paradigms used to study spoken language variation. It focuses on the study of phonetic aspects of accent variation and change and so it is assumed that students are familiar with basic concepts in phonetics and phonology.  

The course provides an overview of the relationships between computing systems and human beings, from a technological perspective. The first weeks introduce the main theoretical and technical concepts of human-computer interaction (HCI), such as cognitive aspects of visual design, interaction design, persuasion, and user experience. The students analyze the risks and possibilities associated to computing interfaces, wearable technologies, and data visualization. The second part of the course focuses on AI and algorithms, with a broad introduction to the main techniques and challenges involved, e.g., machine learning and data science. In this part as well, once equipped with the basic conceptual tools, students focus on the ethical challenges of modern AI systems, with a discussion on the concepts of accountability and trust?

This course provides a largely non-technical introduction to the basic concepts and methods used by economists to understand and explain the features of the world economy today. Students explore globalization of trade and finance; the emergence of global value chains and the rise of China and India; and the winners and losers of globalization within rich and developing economies.

This course is about the analysis of data within economics, and the interpretation of empirical results. The course provides an introduction to the application of economic theory to data; develops an understanding of simple and commonly used econometric techniques; imparts an ability to understand and interpret results both statistically and economically; and introduces students to widely used software in applied economics (STATA).