IEOR students only. Understand digital businesses, apply scientific, engineering thinking to digital economy. Data-driven digital strategies and operating models. Sectors: ecommerce, advertising technology, and marketing technology. Automation of the marketing, sales, and advertising functions. Algorithms, patents, and business models. Business side of the digital ecosytem and the digital economy.
Prerequisites: CHNS W3302 or the equivalent. Admission after placement exam. Focusing on Tang and Song prose and poetry, introduces a broad variety of genres through close readings of chosen texts as well as the specific methods, skills, and tools to approach them. Strong emphasis on the grammatical and stylistic analysis of representative works. CC GS EN CE
Prerequisite(s): for senior undergraduate Engineering students: IEOR E3608, E3658, and E4307; for Engineering graduate students (M.S. or Ph.D.): Probability and statistics at the level of IEOR E4150, and deterministic models at the level of IEOR E4004; for healthcare management students: P8529 Analytical methods for health services management.
Develops modeling, analytical, and managerial skills of engineering and health care management students. Enables students to master an array of fundamental operations management tools adapted to the management of health care systems. Through real-world business cases, students learn to identify, model, and analyze operational improvements and innovations in a range of health care contexts.
Covers fundamental engineering design tools for creating and testing physical products. Includes basics of computer-aided design, circuit design and use of microcontrollers, Internet of Things, and computational modeling and simulation. Additional hands-on exposure to tools for high-fidelity physical prototyping in Makerspace. Mini-project design involving an engineering device or system incorporated tools.
An introduction to the strategies and fundamental bioengineering design criteria behind the development of cell-based tissue substitutes. Topics include biocompatibility, biological grafts, gene therapy-transfer, and bioreactors.
Prerequisites: 2nd Year Modern Hebrew II, Hebrew for Heritage Speakers II, or the instructor's permission. This course is designed to take students from the intermediate to advanced level. Students will further develop their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills in Hebrew through an examination of a wide range of sources, including short stories, poems, visual arts, popular music, television shows and films. All readings, written assignments, and class discussions are in Hebrew. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
Modeling of power networks, steady-state and transient behaviors, control and optimization, electricity market, and smart grid.
Teams of students work on real-world projects in analytics. Focus on three aspects of analytics: identifying client analytical requirements; assembling, cleaning and organizing data; identifying and implementing analytical techniques (e.g., statistics and/or machine learning); and delivering results in a client-friendly format. Each project has a defined goal and pre-identified data to analyze in one semester. Client facing class. Class requires 10 hours of time per week and possible client visits on Fridays.
Teams of students work on real-world projects in analytics. Focus on three aspects of analytics: identifying client analytical requirements; assembling, cleaning and organizing data; identifying and implementing analytical techniques (e.g., statistics and/or machine learning); and delivering results in a client-friendly format. Each project has a defined goal and pre-identified data to analyze in one semester. Client facing class. Class requires 10 hours of time per week and possible client visits on Fridays.
The Fifth Year Chinese course is designed for advanced learners who have a proficient command of the Chinese language in all four aspects: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, regardless of whether they have Chinese heritage. The course provides a wide variety of literary genres, ranging from short stories to aesthetic essays to academic articles, to enhance students' mastery of formal written Chinese. While the primary objectives of this course lie in reading, students also have opportunities to develop their speaking competence through a variety of in-class discussions, debates, and presentations.
Introduction to the practical application of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence and their application in Mechanical Engineering. A review of relevant programming tools necessary for applying data science is provided, as well as a detailed review of data infrastructure and database construction for data science. A series of industry case studies from experts in the field of data science will be presented.
Biogeochemistry considers how the basic chemical conditions of the Earth, from atmosphere to soil to seawater, have been and are being affected by the existence of life. Human activities in particular, from the rapid consumption of resources to the destruction of the rainforests and the expansion of smog-covered cities, are leading to rapid changes in the basic chemistry of the Earth.
This course will examine biogeochemical processes in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in Earth’s Biosphere. We will cover the historical development and evolution of biogeochemical cycles and compare past biogeochemical systems on the planet to contemporary and future eco-biogeochemical systems that are increasingly perturbed and dominated by human activity.
MS IEOR students only. Introduction to machine learning, practical use of ML algorithms and applications to financial engineering and operations. Supervised learning: regression, classification, resampling methods, regularization, support vector machines (SVMs), and deep learning. Unsupervised learning: dimensionality reduction, matrix decomposition, and clustering algorithms.
To introduce students to programming issues around working with clouds for data analytics. Class will learn how to work with infrastructure of cloud platforms, and discussion about distributed computing, focus of course is on programming. Topics covered include MapReduce, parallelism, rewriting of algorithms (statistical, OR, and machine learning) for the cloud, and basics of porting applications so that they run on the cloud.
This course will explore various topics in the History of U.S. foreign relations. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly writings, we will explore the history of the United States and the world with an eye toward the impact of American power on foreign peoples. Students will also use the semester to design, research, and write a substantial essay that draws on both primary and secondary sources on a topic chosen in consultation with the professor.
Markov Decision Processes (MDP) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems. Reinforcement Learning algorithms including Q-learning, policy gradient methods, actor-critic method. Reinforcement learning while doing exploration-exploitation dilemma, multi-armed bandit problem. Monte Carlo Tree Search methods, Distributional, Multi-agent, and Causal Reinforcement Learning.
Application of polymers and other materials in drug and gene delivery, with focus on recent advances in field. Basic polymer science, pharmacokinetics, and biomaterials, cell-substrate interactions, drug delivery system fabrication from nanoparticles to microparticles and electrospun fibrous membranes. Applications include cancer therapy, immunotherapy, gene therapy, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. Course readings include textbook chapters and journal papers. Homework assignments take format of assay responding to open-ended question. Term paper and 30-minute PowerPoint presentation required at end of semester.
Data visualization and how to build a story with data. Using complex data or statistics to communicate results effectively. Learn to present analysis and results conscisely and effectively.
OKR framework and different variations. Measurement techniques (A/B testing, validation, correlation, etc.) Identifying what to measure in product experience and business initiatives. Data-driven decision making.
Applied Analytics focus querying and transforming data with SQL, defining and visualizing metrics, measuring impact of products / processes. Tools and techniques to convert raw data to business decisions, statistical analysis. Be able to apply these techniques to real-world datasets.
In the early 15th century, technical refinements in glazing allowed oil painting in the Netherlands to achieve its characteristic transparency and brilliance, while technical advances in glass tinning enhanced the reflectivity of convex mirrors in Northern Europe, and the new steel quenching technique, developed by Milanese armorers,made armor as reflective as a mirror. These reflective mirrors and pieces of armors became quintessential pictorial objects and contributed to the specular metaphor that underpins Renaissance painting. The seminar will explore how the “mise en abyme” operated by the reflection reveals the reverse side of painting, in terms of pictorial composition, mediality and artistic conception within a specific cultural context. Addressing materials from the early 15th to the early 17th century, the seminar will analyze how the detail of the reflection offers a specific lens through which to understand the challenges and transformations of painting in early modern Europe.
The course will be run as a seminar, with meetings devoted to discussions. Students will be responsible for introducing and commenng on the weekly readings. They will also be asked to carry out a research project, culminating in a class presentation and a final paper.
Prerequisites: The seminar is open to graduate students and upper-level art history major undergraduates.
This course introduces feminist and decolonial studies as an exciting and interdisciplinary field that helps us better understand power, inequality, and social change. It offers a foundation in key feminist and decolonial ideas while inviting students to connect theory with real-world struggles and movements.
In the first part of the course, we will learn concepts and explore major debates in feminist and decolonial thought. In the second half, we will look at feminism not only as a set of ideas, but also as a diverse and dynamic social movement that has shaped political struggles, cultural representation, and historical change.
Together, we will ask important questions such as: Is gender shaped by colonial histories? What does intersectionality help us see about inequality? How can research and political action be guided by feminist and decolonial perspectives? What can we learn from Indigenous feminisms, community feminisms, and other transformative ways of thinking?
Throughout the course, we will engage with the work of activists, scholars, and artists—especially Indigenous, Afro-descendant, LGBTQ+, and land and water defenders—whose ideas are reshaping feminist studies today. We will also explore how feminist and decolonial perspectives help us understand the current planetary crisis and imagine more just and sustainable ways of relating to each other and to the environment.
Class Note: Indigenous & Black women, feminist & queer authors
Course covers major statistical learning methods for data mining under both supervised and unsupervised settings. Topics covered include linear regression and classification, model selection and regularization, tree-based methods, support vector machines, and unsupervised learning. Students learn about principles underlying each method, how to determine which methods are most suited to applied settings, concepts behind model fitting and parameter tuning, and how to apply methods in practice and assess their performance. Emphasizes roles of statistical modeling and optimization in data mining.
(Lecture). We cant talk about human rights without talking about the forms in which we talk about human rights. This course will study the convergences of the thematics, philosophies, politics, practices, and formal properties of literature and human rights. In particular, it will examine how literary questions of narrative shape (and are shaped by) human rights concerns; how do the forms of stories enable and respond to forms of thought, forms of commitment, forms of being, forms of justice, and forms of violation? How does narrative help us to imagine an international order based on human dignity, rights, and equality? We will read classic literary texts and contemporary writing (both literary and non-literary) and view a number of films and other multimedia projects to think about the relationships between story forms and human rights problematics and practices. Likely literary authors: Roberto Bolaño, Miguel de Cervantes, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Slavenka Drakulic, Nuruddin Farah, Janette Turner Hospital, Franz Kafka, Sahar Kalifeh, Sindiwe Magona, Maniza Naqvi, Michael Ondaatje, Alicia Partnoy, Ousmane Sembène, Mark Twain . . . . We will also read theoretical and historical pieces by authors such as Agamben, An-Naim, Appiah, Arendt, Balibar, Bloch, Chakrabarty, Derrida, Douzinas, Habermas, Harlow, Ignatieff, Laclau and Mouffe, Levinas, Lyotard, Marx, Mutua, Nussbaum, Rorty, Said, Scarry, Soyinka, Spivak, Williams.
Fundamentals of heterogeneous catalysis including modern catalytic preparation techniques. Analysis and design of catalytic emissions control systems. Introduction to current industrial catalytic solutions for controlling gaseous emissions. Introduction to future catalytically enabled control technologies.
The New York City Watershed: From Community Displacement to
Collaboration and Climate Adaptation
brings students to the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York to learn first hand from researchers and practitioners who help supply over ten million New Yorkers with safe and abundant drinking water while also working to build social, economic and environmental capital in the towns and villages located in the watershed surrounding the city’s reservoirs – all against a backdrop of increasing climate-related disruption.
The class will learn how New York City and a coalition of upstate watershed communities worked to end nearly a century of mutual resentment, displacement and extraction by entering into the
Watershed Agreement of 1997
, which has become a widely renowned model for collaborative and equitable water resources management planning in the twenty-five years since its completion. Students will engage with several of the Watershed Agreement’s original negotiators and with the local elected officials, agency staff and non-profit leaders who implement its signature “
multi-barrier
” strategy for drinking water protection through open space preservation, support for sustainable farming practices and investments in clean water infrastructure and sustainable economic growth in watershed communities. They will also learn how increases in storm intensity and warming driven by climate change threaten to upset the delicate balance between New York City’s need for safe drinking water and the socio-economic interests of upstate watershed communities.
Upon completion of the course, students will better understand the challenges involved in creating and implementing collaborative, multi-stakeholder plans for water resource management and host community benefits in today’s increasingly climate-disrupted world.
“New York is the perfect model of a city,” stated Lewis Mumford, “not the model of a perfect city.” This seminar contrasts the ideas of four urban thinkers and actors who possessed radically different perspectives on the modern metropolis and brought them to bear in and on New York City. The protagonists are
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), Robert Moses (1888–1981), Jane Jacobs (1916–2006),
and
Rem Koolhaas (1944–)
. We discuss the urban and architectural issues that animated them—and frequently pitted them against each other—as they variously strove to imagine and affect New York’s built future. From Mumford’s prophetic environmentalism and “sidewalk criticism” to Moses’s “expressway world,” from Jacobs’s neighborhood activism and battles against urban renewal to Koolhaas’s celebration of Manhattan’s “delirious” architectural imaginary, the course reassesses the legacies of these figures, placing them into historical context and exploring the changing social, political, and cultural forces and landscapes that shaped their thinking. What “usable past,” to invoke Mumford again, do they offer to urbanism today? Concerned with both realities on the ground and big ideas about how to build and inhabit cities, class discussions revolve around key texts supplemented by slide lectures, film excerpts, and case-study presentations. Students are expected to make site visits and to carry out primary research utilizing archival and material resources available around New York City.
In this seminar we will read the complete published plays of August Wilson along with significant unpublished and obscurely published plays, prose, and poetry. The centerpieces of this course will be what Wilson termed his “century cycle” of plays: each work focusing on the circumstances of Black Americans during a decade of the twentieth century. As we consider these historical framings, we also will explore closely on what Wilson identified as the “four B’s” that influenced his art most emphatically: Bessie Smith (sometimes he called this first B the Blues), Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, and Jorge Luis Borges. Accordingly, as we consider theoretical questions of cross-disciplinary conversations in art, we will study songs by Bessie Smith (and broad questions of the music and literary form), plays, prose, and poetry of Baraka (particularly in the context of Wilson’s early Black Arts Movement works), the paintings of Bearden, and the poetry and prose (along with a few lectures and transcribed interviews) of Borges. We will use archival resources (online as well as “hard copy” material, some of it at Columbia) to explore Wilson’s pathways as a writer, particularly as they crisscrossed the tracks of his “four B’s.” Along the way we will examine several drawings and paintings (from his University of Pittsburgh archives) as we delve into the rhythmical shapes, textures, and colors he used on paper and canvas as well as in his plays. Visitors to the class will include Wilson’s musical director Dwight Andrews and at least one of his regular actors.
Examines interpretations and applications of the calculus of probability including applications as a measure of degree of belief, degree of confirmation, relative frequency, a theoretical property of systems, and other notions of objective probability or chance. Attention to epistimological questions such as Hume's problem of induction, Goodman's problem of projectibility, and the paradox of confirmation.
Each offering of this course is devoted to a particular sector of Operations Research and its contemporary research, practice, and approaches. If topics are different, then course can be taken more than once for credit.
or
Special topics arranged as the need and availability arises. Topics are usually offered on a one-time basis. Since the content of this course changes each time it is offered, it may be repeated for credit. Consult the department for section assignment.
Special topics arranged as the need and availability arises. Topics are usually offered on a one-time basis. Since the content of this course changes each time it is offered, it may be repeated for credit. Consult the department for section assignment.
Each offering of this course is devoted to a particular sector of Operations Research and its contemporary research, practice, and approaches. If topics are different, then course can be taken more than once for credit.
Each offering of this course is devoted to a particular sector of Operations Research and its contemporary research, practice, and approaches. If topics are different, then course can be taken more than once for credit.
or
Special topics arranged as the need and availability arises. Topics are usually offered on a one-time basis. Since the content of this course changes each time it is offered, it may be repeated for credit. Consult the department for section assignment.
Special topics arranged as the need and availability arises. Topics are usually offered on a one-time basis. Since the content of this course changes each time it is offered, it may be repeated for credit. Consult the department for section assignment.
Special topics arranged as the need and availability arises. Topics are usually offered on a one-time basis. Since the content of this course changes each time it is offered, it may be repeated for credit. Consult the department for section assignment.
Special topics arranged as the need and availability arises. Topics are usually offered on a one-time basis. Since the content of this course changes each time it is offered, it may be repeated for credit. Consult the department for section assignment.
Special topics arranged as the need and availability arises. Topics are usually offered on a one-time basis. Since the content of this course changes each time it is offered, it may be repeated for credit. Consult the department for section assignment.
Special topics arranged as the need and availability arises. Topics are usually offered on a one-time basis. Since the content of this course changes each time it is offered, it may be repeated for credit. Consult the department for section assignment.
Special topics arranged as the need and availability arises. Topics are usually offered on a one-time basis. Since the content of this course changes each time it is offered, it may be repeated for credit. Consult the department for section assignment.
Special topics arranged as the need and availability arises. Topics are usually offered on a one-time basis. Since the content of this course changes each time it is offered, it may be repeated for credit. Consult the department for section assignment.
Health, disease, and death from a systems engineering perspective, introduction to control theory in a biomedical context.
Examines innovation systems and technology adoption in medical advances, with a focus on translational analysis across devices, diagnostics, and therapeutics. Case-based evaluation of diagnostic imaging (CT, MRI, ultrasound), minimally invasive surgical systems, cardiovascular devices, and drug development pipelines. Frameworks for R&D goal-setting, evaluation and testing protocols, regulatory constraints, technology diffusion, and multi-stakeholder development systems.
For BMEN students, this course counts towards a technical elective, but not engineering content technical elective.
The IEOR Department hosts Business Analytics Practitioners Seminars throughout the Fall and Spring semesters. There are 5-6 seminars per semester, for a total of 10-12 seminars a year. These seminars feature a variety of academics and professionals in the field of Business Analytics; they are meant to educate and expose students to the latest research and practice.
First year BA students are required to attend all BA seminars during their first year
as well as submit journals about the material.
Primer on quantitative and mathematical concepts. Required for all incoming MSBA students.
Basic radiation physics: radioactive decay, radiation producing devices, characteristics of the different types of radiation (photons, charged and uncharged particles) and mechanisms of their interactions with materials. Essentials of the determination, by measurement and calculation, of absorbed doses from ionizing radiation sources used in medical physics (clinical) situations and for health physics purposes.
Prerequisites: none; high school chemistry recommended. This course is open to graduate students, and juniors and seniors within DEES, Sus Dev, Engineering, Chemistry, Physics, and APAM - or with the instructors permission. Survey of the origin and extent of mineral resources, fossil fuels, and industrial materials, that are non renewable, finite resources, and the environmental consequences of their extraction and use, using the textbook Earth Resources and the Environment, by James Craig, David Vaughan and Brian Skinner. This course will provide an overview, but will include focus on topics of current societal relevance, including estimated reserves and extraction costs for fossil fuels, geological storage of CO2, sources and disposal methods for nuclear energy fuels, sources and future for luxury goods such as gold and diamonds, and special, rare materials used in consumer electronics (e.g. ;Coltan; mostly from Congo) and in newly emerging technologies such as superconducting magnets and rechargeable batteries (e.g. heavy rare earth elements, mostly from China). Guest lectures from economists, commodity traders and resource geologists will provide ;real world; input.
While Israel is perhaps one of the most discussed and debated state in the world – only few onlookers have a deep understanding of Israel’s complex and fragmented society and politics.
This course invites the students into a journey to the historical and current Israeli politics and society by introducing the creation of the Israeli Democracy, the main political debates, different ideological visions, and the main cleavages and demographic divisions that have driven Israeli society from 1948 through the present days.
By presenting continuation and changes in Israel history and society the students will learn about the main events in Israel history with respect to military and diplomatic issues, different groups and parties – among them, Ultra-Orthodox (Haredim), Palestinian citizens of Israel, Ethiopian Jews, Religious Zionist, Jewish settlers, Ashkenazi vs Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews – which create the fabric of Israel politics and society from its formative years to the current era.
With an eye open to current developments, the course will also discuss new trends in Israeli politics.
In addition to the reading and primary sources, the students will watch and review films about Israeli politics and culture. At the end of the course the students will gain a better understanding of Israel and its complexities.
Course Objectives
By the end of the course students will, (1) Understand Israel’s broad and diverse social and political spectrum, with an emphasis on historical events and core issues (the peace process, religion-state dynamics, etc.)
2. Be able to discuss and write intelligently about Israel’s history, politics and culture.
Introduction to continuous systems with the treatment of classical and state-space formulations. Mathematical concepts, complex variables, integral transforms and their inverses, differential equations, and relevant linear algebra. Classical feedback control, time/frequency domain design, stability analysis, Laplace transform formulation and solutions, block diagram simplifcation and manipulation, signal ow graphs, modeling physical systems and linearization. state-space formulation and modeling, in parallel with classical single-input single-output formulation, connections between the two formulations. Transient and steady state analysis, methods of stability analysis, such as root locus methods, Nyquist stability criterion, Routh-Hurwitz criterion, pole/zero placement, Bode plot analysis, Nichols chart analysis, phase lead and lag compensators, controllability, observability, realization of canonical forms, state estimation in multivariable systems, time-variant systems. Introduction to advanced stability analysis such as Lyapunov stability and simple optimal control formulation. May not take for credit if already received credit for EEME E3601.
This course will combine study of long-term historical sociology with more short term understanding of policies and their possible effects. Though its main purpose will be to provide students with an understanding of politics after independence, it will argue, methodologically, that this understanding should be based on a study of historical sociology – plotting long-terms shifts in the structure of social power. The course will start with analyses of the structures of power and ideas about political legitimacy in pre-modern India, and the transformations brought by colonialism into that order. After a brief study of the nature of political order under the colonial state, the courses will focus primarily on the history of the democratic state after independence.
Risk management models and tools; measure risk using statistical and stochastic methods, hedging and diversification. Examples include insurance risk, financial risk, and operational risk. Topics covered include VaR, estimating rare events, extreme value analysis, time series estimation of extremal events; axioms of risk measures, hedging using financial options, credit risk modeling, and various insurance risk models.
From its very inception on the stage of history, the Zionist idea has been a catalyst for intense controversy, both within the Zionist movement and the Jewish people, as well as among external critics. This course seeks to trace the major debates and controversies that have shaped Zionism from its founding to the present day, as they have manifested in the State of Israel.
The curriculum examines key questions: Is Zionism a modern development of Judaism or a completely new phenomenon that marks a historical break? Should the movement have emphasized cultural identity or political sovereignty? Why did the Zionist movement choose a Western orientation over an Eastern one?
We will also examine how Zionists engaged with the Arab Revolt of the 1930s, raising relevant questions such as the policy of restraint or retaliation, and analyze the core arguments of those who define Zionism as a legitimate — even one of the most justified — national movements versus those who characterize it through colonialist frameworks.
Furthermore, the course will revisit Hannah Arendt’s controversial reflections on the 1961 Eichmann Trial and the subsequent accusations regarding her perceived lack of "
Ahavat Yisrael
" (love for the Jewish people). We will move forward to address the contemporary debate over whether anti-Zionism is inherently the same as antisemitism and explore Israeli views of anti-Zionist critiques.
Throughout the course, we will place special emphasis on examining controversies surrounding Israel and Zionism in comparison to other global nationalist movements.
By situating Zionist history within both global perspectives and internal debates, students will move beyond narrow political discourse to acquire a profound understanding of Israel’s past and present. Each session will be supplemented by primary sources, including films, speeches, testimonies, and interviews.
Overview of robot applications and capabilities. Linear algebra, kinematics, statics, and dynamics of robot manipulators. Survey of sensor technology: force, proximity, vision, compliant manipulators. Motion planning and artificial intelligence; manipulator programming requirements and languages.
This course explores the history, nature and underlying causes of human/wildlife conflict from the human perspective. We will emphasize areas of human and wildlife conflict that endanger the existence of wildlife species in significant portions of their range, and consider emerging strategies that may reduce human-wildlife conflict.
Principles of nontraditional manufacturing, nontraditional transport and media. Emphasis on laser assisted materials processing, laser material interactions with applications to laser material removal, forming, and surface modification. Introduction to electrochemical machining, electrical discharge machining and abrasive water jet machining.
Hands-on studio class exposing students to practical aspects of the design, fabrication, and programming of physical robotic systems. Students experience entire robot creation process, covering conceptual design, detailed design, simulation and modeling, digital manufacturing, electronics and sensor design, and software programming.
Frontiers of Justice is designed to encourage students and equip them with the skills to become active and effective “Change Agents” within their academic institutions and larger communities.. Oriented by the question,
What does justice look like?
, this course aims to raise political and social awareness and engagement with the challenges facing New York City and strengthen ties between Columbia University, disadvantaged communities, and city government agencies and community organizations. Through sharing ideas about how to make structural and systemic change in ways that integrate science, law, politics, history, narrative and community engagement, the course is intended to support students in working to break down racial and ethnic barriers and toward a more fair and just society.
This seminar will examine the history of the impact of technology and media on religion and vice versa before bringing into focus the main event: religion today and in the future. Well read the classics as well as review current writing, video and other media, bringing thinkers such as Eliade, McLuhan, Mumford and Weber into dialogue with the current writing of Kurzweil, Lanier and Taylor, and look at, among other things: ethics in a Virtual World; the relationship between Burning Man, a potential new religion, and technology; the relevance of God and The Rapture in Kurzweils Singularity; and what will become of karma when carbon-based persons merge with silicon-based entities and other advanced technologies.
(Lecture). This lecture course is intended as the first half of the basic survey in African-American literature. By conducting close readings of selected song lyrics, slave narratives, fiction, poetry, and autobiography, we will focus on major writers in the context of cultural history. In so doing, we will explore the development of the African- American literary tradition. Writers include, but are not limited to, Wheatley, Equiano, Douglass, Jacobs, Harper, Dunbar, Chestnutt, Washington, Du Bois, and Larsen. Course requirements: class attendance, an in-class midterm exam, a five-page paper, and a final exam.
This course interrogates seminal issues in the academic study of Islam through its popular representation in various forms of media from movies and television to novels and comic books. The class is structured around key theoretical readings from a range of academic disciplines ranging from art history and anthropology to comparative literature and religion.
The course begins by placing the controversies surrounding the visual depiction of Muhammad in historical perspective (Gruber). This is followed by an examination of modern portrayals of Muslims in film that highlights both the vilification of the “other” (Shaheen) and the persistence of colonial discourses centered on the “native informant” (Mamdani). Particular emphasis is given to recent pop cultural works that challenge these simplistic discourses of Islam. The second half of the course revisits Muhammad, employing an anthropological framework (Asad) to understand the controversies surrounding Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. The obsession with a gendered depiction of Islam is then examined through an anthropological framework that sheds light on the problems of salvation narratives (Abu Lughod). The course ends with a look at the unique history of Islam in America, particularly the tension between immigrant and African-American communities.
An introduction to the mathematical and computational foundations of data analysis with linear models. Develops theoretical and computational understanding of numerical linear algebra algorithms for problems including data fitting, data classification, clustering, and data reduction. Focus includes vector spaces, matrix factorization, least squares methods, and singular value decompositions. Illustrations on a variety of engineering applications, including power networks, autonomous and electric vehicles, quantum computing, medical imaging, and systems biology.
Required for undergraduate students majoring in OR:FE. Characteristics of commodities or credit derivatives. Case study and pricing of structures and products. Topics covered include swaps, credit derivatives, single tranche CDO, hedging, convertible arbitrage, FX, leverage leases, debt markets, and commodities.
This third year (or fifth semester) course in the Hindi-Urdu program aims to continue building upon the existing listening, speaking, reading, writing, and cultural skills in Hindi.Students will be exposed to a variety of authentic materials, such as stories, plays, newspapers, magazines, videos, and film clips. They will be expected to expand their vocabulary, enhance their grammatical accuracy, and develop their cultural appropriateness through enthusiastic participation in classroom activities and immersion in the speech community outside.
The objective of the course is to promote meaningful interaction with literary texts and strengthen students’ language skills to understand and describe situations and people in diverse academic settings of modern Hindi. Writing in the target language will be emphasized throughout the semester to enable students to use their diverse vocabulary and grammatical structures. This course will prepare students for “Advanced Hindi-II.”
Prerequisites: Two courses in psychology, including at least one course with a focus on research methods
and/or statistics, and permission of the instructor.
Review of theories and empirical research related to religious cognition and behavior. Topics include the
foundations of religious belief and practice, people's concepts of religious ideas, and the lack of religious
belief/identity (e.g., atheism), among others.
What is the relationship between homoeroticism and homosociality? How does this relationship form conceptions of gender and sexuality in ways that might be historically unfamiliar and culturally or regionally specific? We pursue these questions through the lens of friendship and its relationship to ideas and expressions of desire, love, and loyalty in pre-modern times. We begin by considering the intellectual basis of the modern idea of friendship as a private, personal relationship, and trace it back to earlier times when it was often a public relationship of social and political significance. Some of these relationships were between social equals, while many were unequal forms (like patronage) that could bridge social, political or parochial differences.
Thinking through the relationships and possible distinctions between erotic love, romantic love and amity (love between friends), we will draw on scholarly works from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, particularly philosophy, sociology, political theory, literature, history, and art history. We will attend to friendship’s work in constituting, maintaining and challenging various social and political orders in a variety of Asian contexts (West, Central, South and East Asian), with comparative reference to scholarship on European and East Asian contexts. Primary source materials will include philosophy, religious manuals, autobiographies, popular love stories, heroic epics, mystical poetry, mirror for princes, paintings, material objects of exchange, and architectural monuments, largely from Islamic and Asian contexts.
As music moves into the 21st century, we find ourselves surrounded by an ever-evolving landscape of technological capability. The world of music, and the music industry itself, is changing rapidly, and with that change comes the opening – and closing – of doorways of possibility. What does this shift mean for today’s practicing artist or composer? With big label recording studios signing and nurturing fewer and fewer artists, it seems certain that, today, musicians who want to record and distribute their music need to be able to do much of the recording and production work on their own. But where does one go to learn how to do this – to learn not only the “how to” part of music production, but the historical underpinnings and the development of the music production industry as well? How does one develop a comprehensive framework within which they can place their own artistic efforts? How does one learn to understand what they hear, re-create what they like and develop their own style? This class, “Recorded Sound,” aims to be the answer. It’s goal is to teach artists how to listen critically to music from across history and genres in order to identify the production techniques that they hear, and reproduce those elements using modern technology so they can be incorporated into the artist’s own musical works.
This course will examine the experience of Jews in the cities of the eastern Roman Empire, offering a challenge to modern hypotheses of Jewish corporate stability in that setting and contributing to modern discussions of the relations between the Roman state, Greek cities, and Jewish and Christian subjects.
Prerequisites: Two years of prior study in Urdu or one year of Urdu for Heritage Speakers I&II courses at Columbia University, or approval of the professor. This is a one-semester course in advanced Urdu language. It will be taught in the fall semester. The goal of the course is to develop students’ linguistic skills i.e. listening, speaking, reading, writing and cultural skills in Urdu, and give students in-depth exposure to some of the finest works of classical and modern Urdu prose. Special emphasis will be given to developing a high-register vocabulary. Necessary grammar points will also be explained for developing an accurate and nuanced understanding of the Urdu language. After completing this course, students will be able to read and enjoy Urdu classics and critical academic texts related to various disciplines i.e. old tales, short stories, essays, history, satire, criticism, politics, current issues etc. along with effective speaking skills suited to active interaction in the speech community and a more advanced academic discussion for undergraduate and graduate students. Students will develop an in-depth understanding of South Asian society and culture as well. This course will prepare students to take MDES GU4635 Readings in Urdu Literature I.
Michel Foucault was a great historian and critic who helped change the ways research and criticism are done today – a new ‘archivist’. At the same time, he was a philosopher. His research and criticism formed part of an attempt to work out a new picture of what it is to think, and think critically, in relation to Knowledge, Power, and Processes of Subjectivization. What was this picture of thought? How did the arts, in particular the visual arts, figure in it? How might they in turn give a new image of Foucault’s kind of critical thinking for us today? In this course, we explore these questions, in the company of Deleuze, Agamben, Rancière and others thinkers and in relation to questions of media, document and archive in the current ‘regime of information’. The Seminar is open to students in all disciplines concerned with these issues.
Systemic approach to the study of the human body from a medical imaging point of view: skeletal, respiratory, cardiovascular, digestive, and urinary systems, breast and womens issues, head and neck, and central nervous system. Lectures are reinforced by examples from clinical two- and three-dimensional and functional imaging (CT, MRI, PET, SPECT, U/S, etc.).
Theory of convex optimization; numerical algorithms; applications in circuits, communications, control, signal processing and power systems.
This course is designed to introduce contemporary children’s rights issues and help students develop practical advocacy skills to protect and promote the rights of children. Students will explore case studies of advocacy campaigns addressing issues including juvenile justice, child labor, child marriage, the use of child soldiers, corporal punishment, migration and child refugees, female genital mutilation, and LBGT issues affecting children. Over the course of the semester, students will become familiar with international children’s rights standards, as well as a variety of advocacy strategies and avenues, including use of the media, litigation, and advocacy with UN, legislative bodies, and the private sector. Written assignments will focus on practical advocacy tools, including advocacy letters, op-eds, submissions to UN mechanisms or treaty bodies, and the development of an overarching advocacy strategy, including the identification of goals and objectives, and appropriate advocacy targets and tactics.
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 seminar deals with the presence of indigenous peoples in Latin American colonial societies and aims to analyze indigenous responses to conquest and colonization. How did indigenous people see themselves and interact with other groups? What roles did they play in shaping Latin American societies? What spaces were they able to create for themselves? These and similar questions will guide our discussion through the semester. Every week, we will read documents written by the indigenous people themselves, as well as academic studies of their cultures and societies. The course will offer a survey of the main indigenous groups; however, the case studies are by necessity just a selection. The seminar is conceived for students interested in race and ethnic relations and in the mechanisms of colonization and responses to it, as seen through the lenses of Latin America, between the 16th and the 18th centuries.
This course serves as a guide to the field of macromolecular materials chemistry, with a strong focus on the synthesis and design of polymers for tackling outstanding issues in polymer sustainability. The course will cover fundamental topics in polymerization techniques: step growth, conventional chain growth, ionic, controlled radical polymerizations, and ring opening polymerizations. As this course is primarily intended for engineers, great emphasis is placed on common, practical approaches to polymer synthesis and developing structure-property relationships. Fundamental topics will be expanded on using literature examples to demonstrate their applications in polymer sustainability.
This course examines the psychological mechanisms that support naturalistic person perception—how people extract meaning from faces, voices, bodies, speech, and behavior to infer any number of characteristics about others, including their personality traits, emotions, mental states, or social group memberships. We will examine not only how these processes are driven by complex social cues but also how these processes are shaped by higher-order cognition—such as stereotypes, motivations, cultural learning, and social context. Moving beyond traditional laboratory tasks, the course will routinely engage with emerging approaches that study person perception in more naturalistic and high-dimensional ways. We will consider how perceptions and inferences about other people unfold over time during ongoing encounters and conversations, how perceivers integrate diverse cues into multidimensional representations of other people, and how these representations are studied using modern tools such as computational modeling, natural language processing, and deep learning models. Across the semester, we will span multiple levels of analysis—from perceptual and neural mechanisms to interpersonal outcomes—considering how person perception shapes phenomena such as interpersonal relationships, social decision-making, stereotyping and bias, and the formation of lasting impressions.
Geographic information systems (GIS) are powerful tools for analyzing fundamental geographic questions. GIS involves generating, linking, manipulating, and analyzing different sorts of spatial data; creating outputs commonly visualized as two- and sometimes three- dimensional maps. This course will cover major topics in GIS with applications for the broad field of biology and natural sciences, using QGIS and R. The goal of this course is to teach students a level of GIS proficiency such that they will be self-sufficient in their further learning and use of GIS.
A survey of the various attempts to reconcile the macroscopic directionality of time with the time-reversibility of the fundamental laws of physics. The second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy, statistical mechanics, cosmological problems, the problems of memory, the possibility of multiple time direction.
Typically, a course in social theory or political philosophy might be taught with two different emphases—as intellectual history, or as a theoretical tradition. In the first approach canonical texts are examined in relation to their political, social, economic and cultural contexts. In the second approach “classic” texts are systematically compared to one another to show both similarities and differences in their approach, and to place them in some developmental sequence. In either case, the textual corpus tends to focus on the historical experiences of the North Atlantic as both normative and universal.
Instead, this seminar focuses not merely on the placement of social theory in global contexts but rather, has as its explicit focus texts generated by thinkers who seek to theorize the geohistorical complexities of modern worldmaking through social forms and lifeworlds that stand askew to dominant approaches to the study of capitalist modernity. The South is conceived here as a set of relations and not as a place, less as a geographical location than a heuristic tool that might reorient discussion on fundamental questions about equality and difference, politics and personhood as these have taken shape as world historical questions of our time.
The seminar is particularly interested in the interface between subaltern and minority pasts as these confront material contexts of resource extraction and labor exploitation, and the distinctive manner by which embodied difference intersects social inequality. That is, we will think about the relationship between historical identities and their material substrate. Broadly speaking, the seminar will bring into conversation work generated in the Americas, especially African American scholarship that engages questions of slavery and subjectivity, black vitality, and Afropessimism together with approaches addressing problems of anticolonial politics, postcolonial sovereignty, ideas of Islamic universality, and global Marxisms. That is, we seek to direct the energies of social thought toward questions of translation, alterity, and historical comparison. A broad familiarity with colonial histories, anticolonial thought, and/or with canonical texts of social theory would be helpful, but not necessary.
The seminar will focus on key concepts such as anticolonial thought; racial capitalism, primitive accumulation; caste-race comparison; political aesthetics; and left and right populism. Readings for the seminar will include a mix of r
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.
This seminar is devoted to examining the work of writers who address the nature and course of history in their imaginative and non-fiction work. This semester we will be exploring the work of Thomas Mann in the context of the First and Second World Wars. This will include his relation to the German “conservative revolution,” the Weimar political experience, and the United States, where he spent several years in exile. We will pay particular attention to his conceptions of modern history as expressed in his novels.
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.
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.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS GU4700.