This course focuses on how to identify, evaluate, and capture business analytic opportunities that create value. The course covers basic analytic methods alongside case studies on organizations that successfully deployed these techniques. The first part of the course is on using data to develop insights and predictive capabilities with machine learning techniques. The second part focuses on the use of A/B testing, causal inference, ethics, and optimization to support decision-making.
This course will educate students and support effective coastal resilience planning and climate justice through social and data science learning and data acquisition and analysis, making use of emerging technologies and best practices for collaboration with environmental and climate justice practitioners.
Instruction is provided in two areas: i. Climate adaptation planning & climate justice; and, ii. Data science: acquisition, analysis and visualization. Students and instructors will work with participating community-based climate and environmental justice organizations to collect and analyze biological, geographic and socio-economic data relevant to local resilience needs. Once this data has been acquired or generated and quality-assured, the students and community partner organizations will prepare it for presentation to federal, state and local planning officials, to help ensure that the resilience goals and related concerns identified by our community partners will be fully reflected in future planning by those officials.
Upon completion of the course, students will better understand the challenges involved in creating and implementing collaborative, data-informed, multi-stakeholder plans for coastal resilience and ecosystem restoration in today’s increasingly climate-disrupted world. Successful completion of this course will partially fulfill the
Analysis and Solutions to Complex Problems
coursework requirement within the Undergraduate Major in Sustainable Development.
This course will explore recent histories of post-independence India, focusing on the first three decades of independence (1947-1977) following the end of British colonial rule. Until rather recently, most histories of South Asia concluded with independence, casting, perhaps unconsciously, the end of British rule as the end of history in the region. However, in recent years, we have witnessed a boom of historical writing on post-independence India. In this class, we will analyze this emerging scholarship and focus on the themes of democracy and majoritarianism. We will read about the establishment of universal franchise in 1950s India, the writing and implementation of the constitution, and the country’s experiments with various economic plans. At the same time, we will study the Indian state’s often violent integration of regions originally outside Britain’s direct domain, including the princely states of Kashmir and Hyderabad, and the development of what scholars have described as new forms of colonialism in the region after 1947. Likewise
,
we will study the growth of majoritarian ideologies and the continued struggle against caste oppression, all while considering India’s place in the larger Cold War. Throughout the class, we will remain attendant to aesthetic developments in media and literature during this period. While the course focuses on India—or more specifically on various communities’ interactions with the Indian state—we will also study developments in Pakistan (and Bangladesh after 1971) and other neighboring states, recognizing that their shared histories did not end with Partition.
Course is aimed at senior undergraduate and graduate students. Introduces fundamental concepts of Bayesian data analysis as applied to chemical engineering problems. Covers basic elements of probability theory, parameter estimation, model selection, and experimental design. Advanced topics such as nonparametric estimation and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MEME) techniques are introduced. Example problems and case studies drawn from chemical engineering practice are used to highlight the practical relevance of the material. Theory reduced to practice through programming in Mathematica. Course grade based on midterm and final exams, biweekly homework assignments, and final team project.
This seminar aims to give a basic knowledge of the history, society, and culture of the Nahuas, one of the main Indigenous groups of Mexico, during the early period, 16th-18th centuries. The Nahuas left a vast and varied corpus of documents written in Nahuatl, a language still in use today. In each class, we will be reading a different set of documents available both in Nahuatl and in English translation and analyze them together to get an understanding of the Nahua world from within. To help us in this analysis, we will be reading also academic works by experts in the field of Indigenous history of early Latin America.
Thanks to a collaboration with Eduardo de la Cruz, director of IDIEZ (Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas) and a native-speaker instructor of Nahuatl, we will have the possibility to learn how Nahuatl is spoken today and how Indigenous people read their own primary sources from the past. The course will have at least one activity with professor de la Cruz built in the class time and accessible via Zoom.
Prerequisites: Two courses in psychology, with at least one focusing on statistics and/or research methods in psychology, and permission of the instructor. Review of basic psychological research that is relevant to questions people frequently encounter during the course of everyday life. Potential topics for this seminar include research on decision-making, emotion, and/or interpersonal relationships.
Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Reviews and integrates current research on the role of social factors in psychopathology. The immediate and long-term effects of chronic and traumatic stressors originating outside the family (e.g. natural disasters, chronic poverty) and inside the family (e.g. family violence, divorce, parental psychopathology) on psychopathology.
Chemical and physical aspects of genome structure and organization, genetic information flow from DNA to RNA to Protein. Nucleic acid hybridization and sequence complexity of DNA and RNA. Genome mapping and sequencing methods. The engineering of DNA polymerase for DNA sequencing and polymerase chain reaction. Fluorescent DNA sequencing and high-throughput DNA sequencer development. Construction of gene chip and micro array for gene expression analysis. Technology and biochemical approach for functional genomics analysis. Gene discovery and genetics database search method. The application of genetic database for new therapeutics discovery.
Prerequisite(s): IEOR E4106 or E3106. Required for undergraduate students majoring in OR:FE. Introduction to investment and financial instruments via portfolio theory and derivative securities, using basic operations research/engineering methodology. Portfolio theory, arbitrage; Markowitz model, market equilibrium, and the capital asset pricing model. General models for asset price fluctuations in discrete and continuous time. Elementary introduction to Brownian motion and geometric Brownian motion. Option theory; Black-Scholes equation and call option formula. Computational methods such as Monte Carlo simulation.
This course presents basic mathematical and statistical concepts that are essential for formal and quantitative analysis in political science research. It prepares students for the graduate-level sequence on formal models and quantitative political methodology offered in the department. The first half of the course will cover basic mathematics, such as calculus and linear algebra. The second half of the course will focus on probability theory and statistics. We will rigorously cover the topics that are directly relevant to formal and quantitative analysis in political science such that students can build both intuitions and technical skills. There is no prerequisite since this course is ordinarily taken by Ph.D. students in their first semester. The course is aimed for both students with little exposure to mathematics and those who have taken some courses but wish to gain a more solid foundation.
NOTE: This course does not satisfy the Political Science Major/Concentration research methods requirement.
Prior knowledge of Python is recommended. Provides a broad understanding of the basic techniques for building intelligent computer systems. Topics include state-space problem representations, problem reduction and and-or graphs, game playing and heuristic search, predicate calculus, and resolution theorem proving, AI systems and languages for knowledge representation, machine learning and concept formation and other topics such as natural language processing may be included as time permits.
This graduate course is only for M.S. Program in Financial Engineering students, offered during the summer session. Review of elements of probability theory, Poisson processes, exponential distribution, renewal theory, Wald’s equation. Introduction to discrete-time Markov chains and applications to queueing theory, inventory models, branching processes.
Computational approaches to the analysis, understanding, and generation of natural language text at scale. Emphasis on machine learning techniques for NLP, including deep learning and large language models. Applications may include information extraction, sentiment analysis, question answering, summarization, machine translation, and conversational AI. Discussion of datasets, benchmarking and evaluation, interpretability, and ethical considerations.
Due to significant overlap in content, only one of COMS 4705 or Barnard COMS 3705BC may be taken for credit.
This graduate course is only for M.S. Program in Financial Engineering students, offered during the summer session. Discrete-time models of equity, bond, credit, and foreign-exchange markets. Introduction to derivative markets. Pricing and hedging of derivative securities. Complete and incomplete markets. Introduction to portfolio optimization and the capital asset pricing model.
Lab fee: $50. Theory and use of alpha, beta, gamma, and X-ray detectors and associated electronics for counting, energy spectroscopy, and dosimetry; radiation safety; counting statistics and error propagation; mechanisms of radiation emission and interaction. (Topic coverage may be revised.)
While helping students advance their levels of oral and written expression, this course focuses on literature of the modern and medieval periods, with particular emphasis on the development of the modern novella and traditional and new forms of poetry. In addition to literature, students are introduced to a wide variety of genres from political and cultural essays and blogs to newspaper translations of the early 20th century. They will be further exposed to ta´rof in reference to a wide variety of socio-cultural contexts and be expected to use ta´rof in class conversations. Students will be exposed to popular artists and their works and satirical websites for insight into contemporary Iranian culture and politics. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
This course examines the basic methods of data analysis and statistics, through multivariate regression analysis, that political scientists use in quantitative research that attempts to make causal inferences about how the political world works. The same methods apply to other kinds of problems about cause and effect relationships more generally. The course will provide students with extensive experience in analyzing data and in writing (and thus reading) research papers about testable theories and hypotheses.
An introduction to capital markets and investments providing an overview of financial markets and tools for asset valuation. Topics covered include the pricing of fixed-income securities (treasury markets, interest rate swaps futures, etc.), discussions on topics in credit, foreign exchange, sovereign ad securitized markets—private equity and hedge funds, etc.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS GU4710.
The digital revolution has created previously unimaginable opportunities to learn about political behavior and institutions. It has also created new challenges for analyzing the massive amounts of data that are now easily accessible. Open source software has reduced barriers and inequities in coding, but it also requires different kinds of effort to employ optimally the latest innovations. Harnessing the power of political data is more critical than ever, given the threats that misinformation and alternative “facts” present to democratic forms of government.
This course will teach students both essential tools and general strategies of data science within the domain of politics. Whether students’ goals are to analyze political behavior for academic or professional purposes, successful analysis requires skills for handling a wide array of issues that stand in the way of creating knowledge and insights from data.
This course prioritizes breadth over depth in the sense that we will introduce a broad range of topics relevant for data science to develop basic skills and form a foundation that students can build on. More complete mastery of these skills will require additional engagement beyond this course.
The digital revolution has created previously unimaginable opportunities to learn about political behavior and institutions. It has also created new challenges for analyzing the massive amounts of data that are now easily accessible. Open source software has reduced barriers and inequities in coding, but it also requires different kinds of effort to employ optimally the latest innovations. Harnessing the power of political data is more critical than ever, given the threats that misinformation and alternative “facts” present to democratic forms of government.
This course will teach students both essential tools and general strategies of data science within the domain of politics. Whether students’ goals are to analyze political behavior for academic or professional purposes, successful analysis requires skills for handling a wide array of issues that stand in the way of creating knowledge and insights from data.
This course prioritizes breadth over depth in the sense that we will introduce a broad range of topics relevant for data science to develop basic skills and form a foundation that students can build on. More complete mastery of these skills will require additional engagement beyond this course.
Fitting and understanding linear regression and generalized linear models, simulation, causal inference, and the basics of design of quantitative studies. Computation in R. Textbook: Regression and Other Stories by Gelman, Hill, and Vehtari.
“Archaeology and Heritage in the Ottoman Lands” is an undergraduate/graduate seminar focusing on archaeology, museology, and the notion of heritage throughout the lands under Ottoman rule during the ‘long’ nineteenth century. The objective is to critically reassess the nature of Western antiquarian and archaeological endeavors, and to focus on the local dimension of the question to fill numerous gaps and inconsistencies in the ‘grand narrative’ of Near Eastern archaeology and heritage.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS GU4720.
Stochastic control has broad applications in almost every walk of life, including finance, revenue management, energy, health care and robotics. Classical, model-based stochastic control theory assumes that the system dynamics and reward functions are known and given, whereas modern, model-free stochastic control problems call for reinforcement learning to learn optimal policies in an unknown environment. This course covers model-based stochastic control and model-free reinforcement learning, both in continuous time with continuous state space and possibly continuous control (action) space. It includes the following topics: Shortest path problem, calculus of variations and optimal control; formulation of stochastic control; maximum principle and backward stochastic differential equations; dynamic programming and Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation; linear-quadratic control and Riccati equations; applications in high-frequency trading; exploration versus exploitation in reinforcement learning; policy evaluation and martingale characterization; policy gradient; q-learning; applications in diffusion models for generative AI.
ESG (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance) Finance is a rapidly growing area of Investment Management – and Finance more broadly – that has received a lot of attention in the past several years from the investor community, financial regulatory agencies, and the general public alike. This course provides an introduction to ESG Finance from a financial engineer’s perspective. This course also discusses proliferation of newly available data sources and the associated quantitative techniques necessary to process those. A major component of this course is a discussion of Climate Risk, an area of particular focus due to its increasing general importance. The course includes an overview of both recent research and the evolving regulatory landscape in the climate risk space. An in-depth discussion of financial impact assessment of various climate risk-driven scenarios (climate risk stress testing) concludes the course.
In this course, we will cover the basics of mathematical modeling of interest rates and credit derivatives. In the first part, we will cover basic interest rate derivatives, the Heath-Jarrow-Morton (HJM)
framework, classic short rate models (for both interest rates and default intensities), and the numerical techniques used in practice for their calibration. In the second part, we will cover the basics
of single-name derivatives modeling, and we will discuss pricing simple credit derivatives. We will also discuss correlation products and the most common techniques used for their pricing. In the third part, we will discuss some recent research papers addressing the use of adjoint algorithmic differentiation for the calculation of risk for interest rate and credit derivatives.
In this course, we will discuss the logic of experimentation, its strengths and weaknesses compared to other methodologies, and the ways in which experimentation has been — and could be — used to investigate social phenomena. Students will learn how to interpret, design, and execute experiments. Special attention will be devoted to field experiments, or randomized trials conducted in real-world settings.
Prerequisites: Students should have taken at least one or two semesters of statistics. Some understanding of probability, hypothesis testing, and regression are assumed. Familiarity with statistical software such as R is helpful. We will be working with data in class throughout the term. The examples used in the textbook and lectures are written in R, and R tutorials will be taught in special sessions early in the term.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS GU4724.
The search for better performance has led investors to explore Alternative Investments that are outside the traditional categories of exchange traded equities, Treasury Bonds, and other
investment-grade fixed income products. The field of Alternative Investments covers a wide range of products such as convertible bonds, Preferred Shares, Hedge Funds, Venture Capital, and
Cryptocurrencies. There is a growing need in the market for students with knowledge of these products and the practical and theoretical know how of valuing and risk managing these investments given that each product has it own nuances and anomalies. This course presents and studies some major Alternative Investment products and ways to evaluate and risk manage them.
Introductory course in computer vision. Topics include image formation and optics, image sensing, binary images, image processing and filtering, edge extraction and boundary detection, region growing and segmentation, pattern classification methods, brightness and reflectance, shape from shading and photometric stereo, texture, binocular stereo, optical flow and motion, 2D and 3D object representation, object recognition, vision systems and applications.
Introduction to quantitative modeling of credit risk, with a focus on the pricing of credit derivatives. Focus on the pricing of single-name credit derivatives (credit default swaps) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Detail topics include default and credit risk, multiname default barrier models and multiname reduced form models.
Prerequisites: POLS W4730 or the instructors permission. Advanced topics in game theory will cover the study of repeated games, games of incomplete information and principal-agent models with applications in the fields of voting, bargaining, lobbying and violent conflict. Results from the study of social choice theory, mechanism design and auction theory will also be treated. The course will concentrate on mathematical techniques for constructing and solving games. Students will be required to develop a topic relating political science and game theory and to write a formal research paper.
Foreign exchange market and its related derivative instruments—the latter being forward contracts, futures, options, and exotic options. What is unusual about foreign exchange is that although it can rightfully claim to be the largest of all financial markets, it remains an area where very few have any meaningful experience. Virtually everyone has traded stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. Comparatively few individuals have ever traded foreign exchange. In part that is because foreign exchange is an interbank market. Ironically the foreign exchange markets may be the best place to trade derivatives and to invent new derivatives—given the massive two-way flow of trading that goes through bank dealing rooms virtually 24 hours a day. And most of that is transacted at razor-thin margins, at least comparatively speaking, a fact that makes the foreign exchange market an ideal platform for derivatives. The emphasis is on familiarizing the student with the nature of the foreign exchange market and those factors that make it special among financial markets, enabling the student to gain a deeper understanding of the related market for derivatives on foreign exchange.
Foreign exchange market and its related derivative instruments—the latter being forward contracts, futures, options, and exotic options. What is unusual about foreign exchange is that although it can rightfully claim to be the largest of all financial markets, it remains an area where very few have any meaningful experience. Virtually everyone has traded stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. Comparatively few individuals have ever traded foreign exchange. In part that is because foreign exchange is an interbank market. Ironically the foreign exchange markets may be the best place to trade derivatives and to invent new derivatives—given the massive two-way flow of trading that goes through bank dealing rooms virtually 24 hours a day. And most of that is transacted at razor-thin margins, at least comparatively speaking, a fact that makes the foreign exchange market an ideal platform for derivatives. The emphasis is on familiarizing the student with the nature of the foreign exchange market and those factors that make it special among financial markets, enabling the student to gain a deeper understanding of the related market for derivatives on foreign exchange.
This course provides students with an overview of environmental research, covering the conceptualization of research projects, the grantmaking process, and article writing. Throughout the semester, students will attend lectures from Columbia researchers and professionals from other organizations. These lectures will cover their current projects and how they communicate their findings in various settings, communities, cultures, and industries. The lecturers will also discuss different aspects of the research process and the practicalities of project development. Students will learn the basics of grant writing and research methodology, write an academic research paper, and participate in a colloquium, with the aim of providing them with tangible transferable skills.
This course provides students with an overview of environmental research, covering the conceptualization of research projects, the grantmaking process, and article writing. Throughout the semester, students will attend lectures from Columbia researchers and professionals from other organizations. These lectures will cover their current projects and how they communicate their findings in various settings, communities, cultures, and industries. The lecturers will also discuss different aspects of the research process and the practicalities of project development. Students will learn the basics of grant writing and research methodology, write an academic research paper, and participate in a colloquium, with the aim of providing them with tangible transferable skills.
Prerequisite(s): IEOR E4700. Conceptual and practical understanding of structured and hybrid products from the standpoint of relevant risk factors, design goals and characteristics, pricing, hedging, and risk management. Detailed analysis of the underlying cash-flows, embedded derivative instruments, and various structural features of these transactions, both from the investor and issuer perspectives, and analysis of the impact of the prevailing market conditions and parameters on their pricing and risk characteristics. Numerical methods for valuing and managing risk of structured/hybrid products and their embedded derivatives and their application to equity, interest rates, commodities and currencies, inflation, and credit-related products. Conceptual and mathematical principles underlying these techniques, and practical issues that arise in their implementations in the Microsoft Excel/VBA and other programming environments. Special contractual provisions encountered in structured and hybrid transactions, and incorporation of yield curves, volatility smile, and other features of the underlying processes into pricing and implementation framework for these products.
“Ottoman Westernization and Orientalism in the Long 19th Century” is an undergraduate/graduate seminar focusing on the intricate relationship between Westernization and Orientalism in the context of the Ottoman Empire. Based on the assumption that these two concepts cannot be dissociated from one another, it sets out to explore Western/Orientalist perceptions of the empire, Ottoman efforts to Westernize, the emergence of Ottoman Orientalism, and other local reactions such as Occidentalism and anti-Westernism.
We have a consciousness of ourselves as placed specially in history, in an epoch which is essentially different from all that has come before: the modern. In respect of having such a discourse about ourselves, minimally, it may be true. Since at least the seventeenth century, intellectuals have been elaborating histories of modernity’s origin and theories of its distinction. This course does not attempt to adjudicate what is the true or best theory of the modern, but rather inquires into the discursive and historical conditions for telling narratives about modernity’s advent and constructing theories of its nature, and their aporiai. Topics will vary but may include the advent of “history” as a genre and non-Western “historical” genres; providential time, the saeculum, and prophecy; the dialectic of break and period; the delimiting of non-modernities, such as the primitive/traditional, the feudal, and the postmodern; the search for narrative agents, such as the nation, the state, and the class; schemes of the ontological disunity of modernity; modernism, the avant-garde, and the aesthetic forms of historicity; capitalism, socialism, and revolution; philosophy’s claim to historical diagnosis and the therapeutic refusal thereof; the desire for and attempts to construct anti-historical forms of narration and their limits.
Covers C++ programming language, applications, and features for financial engineering, and quantitative finance applications. Note: restricted to IEOR MS FE students only.
Selected topics of interest in area of quantitative finance. Some topics include energy derivatives, experimental finance, foreign exchange and related derivative instruments, inflation derivatives, hedge fund management, modeling equity derivatives in Java, mortgage-backed securities, numerical solutions of partial differential equations, quantitative portfolio management, risk management, trade and technology in financial markets. Note: open to IEOR students only.
This course is designed to provide the foundations for exploring the rich and fascinating history of Islamic manuscripts from the 9th through the 19th century. Its structure is shaped mainly by thematic considerations in a notable chronological fashion. The meetings amount to a series of “cuts” through the topic and cover themes such as the paper revolution, authorship, scribal culture, technologies of book production, readers and their notes, libraries and book collections, or textual as well as extra-textual components of manuscripts. Over the semester, we will study key material, textual, and visual elements of Islamic book culture spanning many centuries and continents, and visit major historiographical questions on the millennium-long history of Islamic manuscript tradition before the widespread adoption of print technology.
Introduces risk management principles, practical implementation and applications, standard market, liquidity, and credit risk measurement techniques, and their drawbacks and limitations. Note: restricted to IEOR students only.
From the industrial outposts up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States, across the Mississippi Delta, over the Great Lakes from Erie, Pennsylvania to Buffalo, Toronto, Detroit, and Chicago, over the western plains to Edmonton, Oklahoma City, Omaha, and from there to the technology centers of Vancouver, Seattle, and Silicon Valley, the sites of large-scale industry changed American society over two centuries. Just as gas flares mark subterranean oil deposits under the Texas plains, industrial buildings materialize complex networks of architecture, labor, and industry. They transform seemingly immaterial economic forces into concrete things through the labor of lots and lots of people. They are “fruiting bodies” that blossom from networks of money, labor, and natural resources, where human beings transform raw materials into consumer products.
As industry moved across the North American continent, it took shape in buildings designed to optimize resources, improve manufacturing, and provide employment. From Amoskeag, New Hampshire to Silicon Valley, factories grew and changed in a continuous collective design process focused on
throughput
or
flow
. These buildings were also tied to urban development and large-scale housing; in studying industrial buildings, we also necessarily study cities, neighborhoods, and company towns. In addition, industrial buildings are meant to improve on the ones that came before them, and to give way to the optimizations of ones that come after. Factory design thus reflects a tangible belief in technical progress. Factories are embedded in society
diachronically
, across time, and
synchronically
, across space. They are not singularities; they are inherently
relational
buildings, like other forms of vernacular architecture.
In classes that move chronologically through this terrain, we also focus on two questions: first, how has industrial architecture been situated within architectural history? Second, what happens when we study building design with the kind of heightened synchronic-diachronic awareness that industrial building demands? Industrial architecture is closely connected to capitalism. Studying it reveals architecture’s role in that social organization in a new light. We will survey and closely study buildings to address these and other questions.
Introductory acoustics, basics of waves and discrete mechanical systems. The mechanics of hearing - how sound is transmitted through the external and middle ear to the inner ear, and the mechanical processing of sound within the inner ear.
Methods for deploying signal and data processing algorithms on contemporary general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) and heterogeneous computing infrastructures. Using programming languages such as OpenCL and CUDA for computational speedup in audio, image and video processing and computational data analysis. Significant design project.
This course will introduce modern probabilistic machine learning methods using applications in data analysis tasks from functional genomics, where massively-parallel sequencing is used to measure the state of cells: e.g. what genes are being expressed, what regions of DNA (“chromatin”) are active (“open”) or bound by specific proteins.
Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT), Internet of Things (IoT), and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Embedded and mobile platforms. Embedded programming. Sensors, actuators, and interfaces. Wireless networking, web services, and databases. Edge and cloud computing. Large language models (LLMs) for AIoT. Time-series data visualization and analytics. Group projects to build end-to-end AIoT systems and applications.
Topics from generative and discriminative machine learning including least squares methods, support vector machines, kernel methods, neural networks, Gaussian distributions, linear classification, linear regression, maximum likelihood, exponential family distributions, Bayesian networks, Bayesian inference, mixture models, the EM algorithm, graphical models and hidden Markov models. Algorithms implemented in MATLAB.
Core topics from unsupervised learning such as clustering, dimensionality reduction and density estimation will be studied in detail. Topics in clustering: k-means clustering, hierarchical clustering, spectral clustering, clustering with various forms of feedback, good initialization techniques and convergence analysis of various clustering procedures. Topics in dimensionality reduction: linear techniques such as PCA, ICA, Factor Analysis, Random Projections, non-linear techniques such as LLE, IsoMap, Laplacian Eigenmaps, tSNE, and study of embeddings of general metric spaces, what sorts of theoretical guarantees can one provide about such techniques. Miscellaneous topics: design and analysis of datastructures for fast Nearest Neighbor search such as Cover Trees and LSH. Algorithms will be implemented in either Matlab or Python.
Causal Inference theory and applications. The theoretical topics include the 3-layer causal hierarchy, causal bayesian networks, structural learning, the identification problem and the do-calculus, linear identifiability, bounding, and counterfactual analysis. The applied part includes intersection with statistics, the empirical-data sciences (social and health), and AI and ML.
Degree requirement for all MSFE first-year students. Topics in Financial Engineering. Past seminar topics include Evolving Financial Intermediation, Measuring and Using Trading Algorithms Effectively, Path-Dependent Volatility, Artificial Intelligence and Data Science in modern financial decision making, Risk-Based Performance Attribution, and Financial Machine Learning. Meets select Monday evenings.
Primer on quantitative and mathematical concepts. Required of all incoming MSFE students.
It is impossible to study Medical/Health Humanities now without emphasizing the COVID-19 pandemic and the social disparities it casts into relief. This class studies how the arts can provide access to voices and perspectives on illness and health disparities that might be overlooked in news coverage, historical and sociological research on the current pandemic.
This class begins by introducing the field of Medical/Health Humanities and the critical questions and tools it provides. We will use these perspectives to study narrative and visual representations in different media that address the intersections of social inequity, biomedical pandemic, and aesthetic forms. Our study of representations will be divided into four parts. 1.The last great global pandemic. Representations of AIDS epidemic highlight the impact of social stigma on public health and medical care, as well as the use of art as an agent of activism and change. We will consider such works as Tony Kushner’s
Angels in America
, Charles Burns’s
Black Hole,
short stories, and the art produced within and in response to the ACT-UP movement.
2.Race and medical inequity. We study the racialization of genetic science, and its connection new forms of white supremacy and a history of racialized health disparities. Our readings include Rebecca Skloot’s
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
, the poetry of Maya Angelou and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and the speculative fiction of N.K. Jemison. 3.Fictional representations of pandemic that illuminate real life disparities in health and access to medical care will set the stage for our study of the current pandemic. We will read Emily St. John Mandel’s
Station Eleven
and Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel,
Zone One
. 4.Literary representations of COVID, as represented by the short stories in
The Decameron Project
, as well as short film and visual arts. Seminar style classes will emphasize student interests and direction. They will be heavily discussion-based with a combination of full class and smaller breakout formats. Assignments include an in-class presentation and short paper on one week’s materials; a comparative narrative analysis, and an imaginative final project with a critical introduction.
Digital filtering in time and frequency domain, including properties of discrete-time signals and systems, sampling theory, transform analysis, system structures, IIR and FIR filter design techniques, the discrete Fourier transform, fast Fourier transforms.
This course constitutes the first half of a year-long advanced reading course in Classical Sanskrit. In 2021-2022, the focus of Advanced Sanskrit will be the genres of literary theory (alaṅkāraśāstra) and belles-lettres (kāvya). Lending equal attention to literary theory and literary practice, this course will introduce students to iconic works of Sanskrit literature along with the interpretive frameworks whereby they were analyzed, relished, and appraised. Literary excerpts may be drawn from an array of subgenres, including courtly epic (mahākāvya), epic drama (nāṭaka), literary prose (gadya), and individual verses (muktaka). Rigorous analysis of primary texts will be supplemented by occasional discussions about what implications the disciplined reading of kāvya may hold for practices such as translation, comparative literature, and transdisciplinarity. Prerequisites: Intermediate Sanskrit II or instructor’s permission.
This foundational course in sounding media will begin by exploring how listening happens as well the tools necessary to capture and present that listening. Through hands-on experimentation and demonstration, this seminar will examine both the technical and semiotic use of sound as a material within creative practice. Fundamental acoustic and electronic principles, studio techniques, and the building blocks of analog and digital processes for the creation of sound will be explored creatively and critically. Through hands-on projects that implement these ideas we will examine critical terms through praxis. We will study theories of sound and listening that determine or are determined by technology, from the physical and social dimensions of the sounds we use to create, language (sound as a symbol or object), acoustics (sound in space), acousmatics (sound without a visual reference), and psycho-acoustics (sound as cognitive process). This class assumes no prior knowledge or technical skill. Readings will be assigned and we will look and listen to a lot of work, all of which will generate material to engage actively in discussions.
Engineering fundamentals and experimental methods of human factors design and evaluation for spacecraft which incorporate human-in-the-loop control. Develop understanding of human factors specific to spacecraft design with human-in-the-loop control. Design of human factors experiments utilizing task analysis and user testing with quantitative evaluation metrics to develop a sate and high-performing operational space system. Human-centered design, functional allocation and automation, human sensory performance in the space environment, task analysis, human factors experimental methods and statistics, space vehicle displays and controls, situation awareness, workload, usability, manual piloting and handling qualities, human error analysis and prevention, and anthropometrics.
The course focuses on the nexus between energy and security as it reveals in the policies and interaction of leading energy producers and consumers. Topics include: Hydrocarbons and search for stability and security in the Persian Gulf, Caspian basin, Eurasia, Africa and Latin America; Russia as a global energy player; Analysis of the impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on energy markets, global security, and the future of the energy transition; Role of natural gas in the world energy balance and European energy security; Transformation of the global energy governance structure; Role and evolution of the OPEC; Introduction into energy economics; Dynamics and fundamentals of the global energy markets; IOCs vs NOCs; Resource nationalism, cartels, sanctions and embargoes; Asia's growing energy needs and its geo-economic and strategic implications; Nuclear energy and challenges to non-proliferation regime; Alternative and renewable sources of energy; Climate change as one of the central challenges of the 21st century; Analysis of the policies, technologies, financial systems and markets needed to achieve climate goals. Climate change and attempts of environmental regulation; Decarbonization trends, international carbon regimes and search for optimal models of sustainable development. Special focus on implications of the shale revolution and technological innovations on U.S. energy security.
Tibetan Buddhism offered a divine means of power and legitimacy to rule in Inner Asia and China. This class will explore the intersection of politics, religion and art in Tibetan Buddhism. Images were one of the primary means of political propagation, integral to magical tantric rites, and embodiments of power.
Along with the American Revolution which immediately preceded it, the French Revolution was the most important political event in modern history. The bloody end of the 18th century ushered in modernity, retrospectively marking a definitive break between “early modern” and “modern” eras. The French Revolution has been endlessly and variously mythologized and analyzed, as well as depicted in polemical writings, novels, poetry, theater, film, and opera. This course is designed as an overview of responses to the ten-year event, concentrating on popular depictions in Francophone and Anglophone works. We will start with contemporary responses and move on through 19th- and 20th-century literary representations of the Revolution, including plays and films, both adaptations of literary responses and original treatments. Readings will include works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burke, Wollestonecraft, Sade, and Dickens, along with more recent responses.
Along with the American Revolution which immediately preceded it, the French Revolution was the most important political event in modern history. The bloody end of the 18th century ushered in modernity, retrospectively marking a definitive break between “early modern” and “modern” eras. The French Revolution has been endlessly and variously mythologized and analyzed, as well as depicted in polemical writings, novels, poetry, theater, film, and opera. This course is designed as an overview of responses to the ten-year event, concentrating on popular depictions in Francophone and Anglophone works. We will start with contemporary responses and move on through 19th- and 20th-century literary representations of the Revolution, including plays and films, both adaptations of literary responses and original treatments. Readings will include works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burke, Wollestonecraft, Sade, and Dickens, along with more recent responses.
An introduction to modern digital system design. Advanced topics in digital logic: controller synthesis (Mealy and Moore machines); adders and multipliers; structured logic blocks (PLDs, PALs, ROMs); iterative circuits. Modern design methodology: register transfer level modelling (RTL); algorithmic state machines (ASMs); introduction to hardware description languages (VHDL or Verilog); system-level modelling and simulation; design examples.
Focuses on advanced topics in computer architecture, illustrated by case studies from classic and modern processors. Fundamentals of quantitative analysis. Pipelining. Memory hierarchy design. Instruction-level and thread-level parallelism. Data-level parallelism and graphics processing units. Multiprocessors. Cache coherence. Interconnection networks. Multi-core processors and systems-on-chip. Platform architectures for embedded, mobile, and cloud computing.
This course will focus on the Indo-Islamic literary traditions in South Asia, and particularly in what is now India and Pakistan, focusing on Urdu literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course will emphasize the rhetorical and performative history of poetic forms in the subcontinent (including the forms of the
Ghazal
and
Nauha
, among others) and will consider how classical poetic tropes continue to inform contemporary mass culture in India and Pakistan—particularly in the song lyrics of Hindi/Bollywood cinema. The course will also consider more contemporary prose genres of Urdu-language writing (in English translation), including the literature of the Partition and the works of contemporary authors such as Naiyer Masud and Saima Iram.
Through a comparative study of texts in different genres and at different moments in history, students will consider questions such as: What aspects of contemporary literary culture in India and Pakistan can be traced to early establishment of Islamic culture in the region? How have the poetic conventions of Indo-Islamic poetry continued to resonate? How did the interaction of Hindu and Muslim literary, musical, visual, and religious cultures in the Mughal era help to generate the rich profusion of literature and music and cultural tolerance in this period?
Most of our readings in this course will Urdu literature in English translation. We will also, however, read some secondary sources in order to help us better understand the primary sources.
This seminar will survey historical and modern developments in machine intelligence from fields such as psychology, neuroscience, and computer science, and from approaches such as cybernetics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, connectionism, neural networks, and deep learning. The emphasis is on the conceptual understanding of topics. The course does not include, nor require a background in, computer programming and statistics. The overall goal is for students to become informed consumers of applications of artificial intelligence.
A recent American newspaper headline announced that China has become “the most materialistic country the world.” Globally circulating narratives often interpret Chinese consumers’ demand for commodities as an attempt to fill a void left by the absence of the Maoist state, traditional religious life, and Western-style democracy. But things aren’t as simple as they appear. This course explores the intertwined questions of “Chinese” desire and the desire for China. Avoiding reductionist understandings of desire as either a universal natural human attribute or a particular Chinese cultural trait, we will track the production and management of desire within a complex global field. Drawing on ethnographies, films, short stories, and psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory, this course will explore the shifting figure of desire across the Maoist and post-Maoist eras by examining how academics, government officials, intellectuals, and artists have represented Chinese needs, wants and fantasies. From state leaders’ attempts to improve the “quality” of the country’s population to citizens’ dreams of home ownership, from sexualized desire to hunger for food, drugs and other commodities, we will attend to the continuities and disjunctures of recent Chinese history by tracking how desire in China has been conceptualized and refracted through local and global encounters.
At the crossroads of three continents, the Middle East is home to many diverse peoples, with ancient and proud cultures, in varying stages of political and socio-economic development, often in conflict. Following the Arab Spring and subsequent upheaval in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and more, the region is in a state of historic flux. The Sunni-Shia rivalry, especially between Saudi Arabia and Iran, growing Iranian-Israeli conflict, population explosion, poverty and authoritarian control, Russian ascendance and US retrenchment, are the primary regional drivers today. Together, these factors have transformed the Middle Eastern landscape, with great consequence for the national security of the countries of the region and their foreign relations. The primary source of the worlds energy resources, the Middle East remains the locus of the terror-WMD-fundamentalist nexus, which continues to pose a significant threat to both regional and international security. The course surveys the national security challenges facing the regions primary players (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinians and Turkey,) and how the convolutions of recent years have affected them. Unlike many Middle East courses, which focus on US policy in the region, the course concentrates on the regional players perceptions of the threats and opportunities they face and the strategies they have adopted to deal with them. It thus provides an essential vantage point for those interested in gaining a deeper understanding of a region, which stands at the center of many of the foreign policy issues of our era. The course is designed for those with a general interest in the Middle East, especially those interested in national security issues, students of comparative politics and future practitioners, with an interest in real world international relations and national security.
Major cultural, political, social, economic and literary issues in the history of this 500-year long period. Reading and discussion of primary texts (in translation) and major scholarly works. All readings will be in English.
This course examines how domestic and international politics influence the economic policies of developing countries. We will critically evaluate different theoretical debates related to foreign economic policymaking in emerging markets, and introduce chief methodological approaches used in contemporary analyses. We will focus attention on different types of cross-border flows: the flow of goods (trade policy), the flow of people (immigration policy), the flow and location of production (foreign investment policy), the flow of capital (financial and monetary policy), and the flow of pollution (environment policy). In the process, we will address several themes that are central to understanding the politics of economic policymaking in emerging economies, including, the legacies of colonialism, trade protectionism and liberalization, globalization and the race to the bottom, the relationship between economic policy and culture, and development and redistribution. There will be an emphasis on applying concepts through the analysis of policy-relevant case studies designed for this course.
This course explores key frameworks and issue areas within international political economy. It examines the history and key characteristics of (economic) globalization, the theories of international cooperation, as well as the nature and role of international organizations (such as the World Trade Organization) in fostering trade and international economic cooperation. Furthermore, the course discusses the pros and cons of globalization and its implications on domestic policies of nation-states, with a particular focus on the tensions globalization creates and the lines of cleavages between winners and losers from globalization. Finally, the course reflects on the future of globalization and international trade and the challenges faced by national and supranational policy makers.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS GU4865.
Design and programming of System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms. Topics include: overview of technology and economic trends, methodologies and supporting CAD tools for system-level design, models of computation, the SystemC language, transaction-level modeling, software simulation and virtual platforms, hardware-software partitioning, high-level synthesis, system programming and device drivers, on-chip communication, memory organization, power management and optimization, integration of programmable processor cores and specialized accelerators. Case studies of modern SoC platforms for various classes of applications.