Israel Institute of Technology, Technion/Neubauer

This course seeks to unravel the complexity of the Israeli political, social, and cultural aspects and provide tools for understanding the uniqueness of Israeli society and peoples. Students read and discuss issues such as religion and democracy; ethnicity and nationalism; cultural diversity; and gender, media, and popular culture. The course introduces Israel's contemporary society through a holistic approach using lectures, films, and discussions.

Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and Blockchain Technology have an increasingly transformative impact on people and society. This course introduces the different ways to theorize emerging technology, reflect on its ethical impacts, and use practical tools to integrate ethical reflection in day-to-day projects. The course consists of three parts. The first part of the course covers the basics: presenting major ethical issues with emerging technologies from a historical perspective, explaining the link between ethical theories and technology, and presenting different ways to think about technological mediation. The second part focuses on ethics of particular types of emerging technologies: of artificial intelligence (e.g. deep learning), artificial life (e.g. genetic modification), and existential machines (e.g. the atomic bomb). The third part contextualizes the ethics of emerging technologies in a discussion of three global challenges: global citizenship and human rights, climate change, and violence. The course uses methods of philosophical reflection, argumentation, empirical and historical research, and applied ethics.

This course focuses on the basic methods for processing and analyzing data with deterministic and probabilistic tools. It is a preliminary course for deep learning and convolutional neural networks. The course explains how to digitize signals and data in a computer, how to represent them in different bases, and how to use these representations efficiently for various signal processing tasks. Topics include signal quantization and sampling for bit-allocation, system and data representations including but not limited to the Fourier representation, optimality of the Fourier representation, functional maps, convolutions, compression, dimensionality reduction, principal component analysis, restoration of blurred deterministic or randomly distributed data with or without random noise via filtering. Signals and systems are analyzed in the continuous and discrete settings.

This course covers automata over infinite words: acceptance conditions, expressiveness, algorithms, and constructions. Topics include translation between types of automata; temporal logic: linear temporal logic (LTL), monadic second-order logic (MSO), and the fragment S1S; translation between logics and automata; LTL model checking; games: infinite games on graphs; solving reachability, Buchi, and parity games; and LTL synthesis using parity games.

This course is a survey of the history of the Jewish People with an emphasis on the modern period and the development of the State of Israel. Course topics include an introduction to the national memory: the TANAKH (Hebrew Scriptures or “OLD TESTAMENT”), First Temple Period, Second Temple Period, Jewish existence in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, the European Middle Ages, Russian Jewry, antisemitism, the American experience, and Herzl and Zionism.