Ireland

Developmental psychology is the scientific study of age‐related change and consistency across the spectrum of human growth. This course builds on students' prior knowledge and introduces them to longstanding and current issues. The focus is on presenting the key elements of each perspective under scrutiny and then inviting students to critically review, examine, and evaluate the available information. Topics include: Stressed out kids? The over-scheduling debate. Prejudiced from preschool? The development of stigma in childhood. Decision-making in pediatrics: How should child patients get involved? Are children reliable and credible witnesses? Impressionable young minds? Screen time & child outcomes.  

This course presents a practical and theoretical introduction to modern autonomous mobile robot systems. It gives students a broad introduction to the field spanning topics including hardware, software, AI and machine learning, and human-robot interaction and robot ethics. Students study the technology and methods underlying a robot’s ability to sense and act in its environment. Through a series of labs and assignments, students gain a proficiency in developing applications for robots in both simulation and real-world settings  The course has the following key components: an introduction to mobile robots – sensors, actuators, and control paradigms; the fundamental theory for autonomous mobile robots (kinematics, localization, mapping, and path planning); the scientific methods for evaluating robot performance; an introduction to the field of human-robot interaction; and robots-in-the-wild: case studies of real-world robots and their ethical implications.

The course is an interdisciplinary course drawing on political science, law, and history. Although the major focus of the course is on the European Court of Justice, the politics and law of other courts and international tribunals are also discussed, certainly including the United States Supreme Court and the politics of the US constitution, but also perhaps including the Supreme Court of Ireland and the German Bundesverfassungsgericht as well as international dispute settlement tribunals such as the World Trade Organization, Investor-State Dispute Settlement systems, and the European Convention on Human Rights. Students also study alternative approaches to understanding and investigating court decision-making, including through a focus on legal texts, use of the comparative method, archival research, judicial biography, and quantitative approaches.

Topics include regular languages, context-free languages, feature structures, and brief introductions to probabilistic methods in natural language processing and recursive computation of semantic values from grammatical structures.

This course offers students the philosophical and critical theoretical tools to analyze the complex phenomenon of violence by exploring the contemporary field of the Environmental Post humanities. Assembling perspectives from contemporary feminist and political philosophy with environmental post humanist approaches, violence here is examined as an (im)material socio-political phenomenon that is impacted by categories such as gender, race/ethnicity, dis/ability, class, sexuality, age, and others and the societal power relations that have been engendered by these – and other intersecting – categories. The course focuses on the analysis of eco-violence, the more-than-human, and processes of de/humanization.

The problems facing less developed countries are among the greatest challenges facing the world today. This course focuses on the diverse structures and common characteristics of less developed countries and offers an evaluation of policies being pursued. It begins by discussing the idea of economic development before moving onto sources of and barriers to development. It uses contemporary models of economic development to investigate why some countries are rich and others are poor.

Students learn to express knowledge, understanding and critical appreciation of the practice of film writing. Students describe the different approaches to writing about film and the respective purpose, audiences, and outlets for them shows the development of original thought. They demonstrate independence of thought and creative expression in the synthesis of research and ideas in seminar debates and through assessments. The course teaches students how to use critical thinking to produce a piece of film writing that investigates or reflects contemporary culture. 

The course focuses on the ethical issues involved with innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and critically examines the role played by social, political, cultural, and human factors when designing, introducing, and using technologies.  This course therefore contributes to the broader program outcomes related to ethics, reasoning, and moral inquiry. The course links most strongly with the SDGs which can be addressed by new, disruptive, and innovative approaches and technologies.  This course focuses on the SDGs which can be addressed by smaller, community-level and citizen-led technology-based initiatives.  Examples of this include designing innovative ways of leveraging the ubiquity of mobile phones in the Global South for healthcare and education, and the design, evaluation, and implementation of innovative techniques which are designed to be ethically, socially, and culturally appropriate for their particular context. The course content includes relevant, authentic, situated cases from the Global South and Europe that have been developed specifically for the course.  These multimedia-enhanced cases focus on projects from Ireland, India, Uganda, and Ethiopia. 

Topics covered in this course include HTML syntax, composition, and validation; cascading style sheets (CSS); basic dynamic scripting examples; site planning, visual information management, and responsive design; digital image formats; and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Students provide markup for various HTML elements, attributes, and values associated with the representation of web page content. They use CSS to effectively control the presentation of websites and understand the usefulness of incorporating dynamic scripting into web sites. This course teaches students how to differentiate between alternate image formats that are appropriate for web use, make responsive design layouts using CSS Grid and Flexbox, and understand the importance of consistency, structure, and aesthetics of design and how to achieve these. Students learn current W3C standards and recommendations when planning, designing, and publishing a website.