Engineering

Students complete an internship with a local organization or company. Each placement includes oversight and regular check-ins with an internship supervisor from the company or organization. The Internship Methodology Seminar accompanies the internship placement and offers a platform for reflection, enhancement of skills, and development of cultural competence. It focuses on practical skill application, cultural understanding, and adaptability within professional environments to provide a bridge between academic learning and real-world experience.

This course provides an introduction to systems with multiple agents/units/robots that mutually depend on each other’s behaviors in order to evaluate their own or collective system performance. The course covers theory for strategic interaction between self-interested agents as well as more altruistic agents working explicitly together in complex distributed environments. Game theory and swarm intelligence are central parts of the course curriculum.

This course provides research training for exchange students. Students work on a research project under the guidance of assigned faculty members. Through a full-time commitment, students improve their research skills by participating in the different phases of research, including development of research plans, proposals, data analysis, and presentation of research results. A pass/no pass grade is assigned based a progress report, self-evaluation, midterm report, presentation, and final report.

Topics in this Engineering Physics course include: bonding in solids; lattice vibrations, phonons, and heat capacity; theory of free electrons in metals; band theory of solids; semiconductors; dielectric materials; magnetic materials; optical properties of materials; superconductivity.

This course introduces theories and practices on technology startup to students majoring in technology management or engineering. The course provides students with the basic knowledge needed to start a technology-oriented business or prepare career path related to the technology start-up ecosystem in the future. Topics include entrepreneurship, business planning, financing, and other related topics such as laws, finance & accounting strategy, and intellectual property rights. 

This six-week summer course provides individual research training through the experience of belonging to a specific laboratory at Tohoku University. Students are assigned to a laboratory research group with Japanese and international students under the supervision of Tohoku University faculty. They participate in various group activities, including seminars, for the purpose of training in research methods and developing teamwork skills. The specific topic studied depends on the instructor in charge of the laboratory to which each student is assigned. The methods of assessment vary with the student's project and laboratory instructor. Students submit an abstract concerning the results of their individual research each semester and present the results near the end of this program.

This course covers concepts and characteristics required to build and operate a smart factory to improve manufacturing competitiveness. Students first learn about the composition and functions of the 4th Industrial Revolution and smart factories, then examine the general concept of factory automation and learn about the basic components of factory automation such as control systems and PLCs.  The course covers functions of corporate information systems such as ERP, MES, APS, and PLM, and concepts of smart factory digital platforms and big data-based decision-making required for intelligent factory operation. 

This course cultivates entrepreneurship through understanding the current status and trends of the semiconductor industry and the experiences of company founders. In the class, students meet representatives of recently established semiconductor companies, hear about the startup motivation, business model, and future prospects, and share understanding of the overall semiconductor industry and various experiences related to technology-based startups through a Q&A session with the semiconductor CEO.