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.
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.
This class has no prerequisites, however those who have taken Intro Darkroom or Intro Digital will find additional linkages. You will have access to Adobe Creative Cloud, Printing, and Camera equipment during the semester. Your final project will be exhibited at the End of Semester Visual Arts Show.
This course will explore the photobook as a central medium of contemporary lens-based practice. Students are exposed to a variety of approaches and viewpoints through historical lectures, class trips, and presentations by guest photographers, curators, critics, editors, graphic designers, etc. Each student will propose, develop, and produce editioned books during this course. Over the last decade, a significant change in the circulation of the photographic image has been the rise of the “photo book” as designed art object. Artists such as Dayanita Singh in India, publishers such as Steidl and Taschen, organizations such as Penumbra and Aperture, and events such as Paris Photo and NY Art Book Fair have all entered this vibrant space. At the same time, novelists such as Teju Cole and photographers such as Gauri Gill produce books that weave text and image in a new way. This course requires reading, research, photography, and book design culminating in an end of semester show.
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.
Introduction to how shape and structure are generated in biological materials using engineering approach emphasizing application of fundamental physical concepts to a diverse set of problems. Mechanisms of pattern formation, self-assembly, and self-organization in biological materials, including intracellular structures, cells, tissues, and developing embryos. Structure, mechanical properties, and dynamic behavior of these materials. Discussion of experimental approaches and modeling. Course uses textbook materials as well as collection of research papers.
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.
This course will examine some of the problems inherent in Western historical writing on non-European cultures, as well as broad questions of what itmeans to write history across cultures. The course will touch on therelationship between knowledge and power, given that much of the knowledge we will be considering was produced at a time of the expansion of Western power over the rest of the world. By comparing some of the others which European historians constructed in the different non-western societies they depicted, and the ways other societies dealt with alterity and self, we may be able to derive a better sense of how the Western sense of self was constructed. Group(s): C Field(s): ME
Intensive study of a particular topic in Moral Psychology.
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.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS GU4720.
This bridge seminar investigates the history of science through the study of artworks and monuments and the materials and techniques of their manufacture. Because the course’s method hinges on the marriage of theory and practice, in addition to discussions in the seminar room, several sessions will take the form of workshops with artisans and conservators (e.g. stonemasons, illuminators, gardeners), or “laboratory meetings” where students will conduct their own hands-on experiments with materials as part of Professor Pamela Smith’s
Making and Knowing
Project. Topics to be explored include but are not limited to: metallurgy and cosmogeny, paint pigments and pharmacology, microarchitecture and agriculture, masonry and geology, manuscripts and husbandry, and gynecology and Mariology. Discussion and lab experiments enhanced thanks to the service and experience of Naomi Rosenkranz, Associate Director, The Center for Science and Society, The Making and Knowing Project.
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 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.
Within the Global North social-science mainstream, Latin America (like other parts of the Global South) has often been conceptualized as a region of analytical interest due to its complex
internal
dynamics (relating, for example, to recurring authoritarian rule, democratization, transitional justice, “modernization” and economic development, and social mobilization). Yet until recently, these have infrequently been conceptualized as
global
processes in which Latin America plays a substantive role. To be sure, various
external
forces—namely, colonialism, imperialism, interventionism, and their legacies—are of course widely understood to have shaped Latin American in myriad ways. However, the notions that Latin America exercises agency (or at least matters) in world affairs, is more than a generally passive recipient of global flows, and is meaningfully connected to other regions (including through migratory, political, economic, and cultural linkages), have only recently begun to resonate within the Northern academy.
In contrast to the “methodological nationalism” (or “regionalism”) that has long characterized outside analysis of Latin America, this course foregrounds the region’s global embeddedness and world-making potential—as a protagonist in the generation, adaptation, and diffusion of diverse border-crossing flows, frameworks, and imaginaries. These include: global discourses concerning modernity, postmodernity, liberalism, and postcolonialism; global understandings of race, class, gender, and the intersections between them; global policy frameworks related to human rights, democracy, and economic development; historical and contemporary globalizing relations with distant parts of the world, including the Middle East and Asia; and global alternatives to a world order based on exclusion, extractivism, and environmental degradation.
Throughout, we will highlight the agency of state and non-state actors throughout “Latin America”—itself a homogenizing, Eurocentric label imposed from the outside—as constitutive forces in creating the world that we all inhabit, contributing to the problems that confront us, and helping to generate solutions. To do so, we will engage with a series of texts and materials produced by diversely situated interdisciplinary scholars, writers, artists, and political figures—many of them based in Latin America, an
Povides a unique opportunity to explore the intersection of immunology and engineering, focusing on how these fields come together to drive innovations in biotechnology. Students will gain an understanding of the immune system and its components, along with emerging technologies in immunoengineering, such as vaccine design, immunotherapies, and advanced drug delivery systems. In addition to covering principles of modern molecular and cellular biology, the course emphasizes the practical application of engineering skills to analyze the immune system and create new therapeutic tools. Designed to prepare students for multidisciplinary collaboration, the course equips future engineers with the knowledge and skills needed to develop cutting-edge solutions in immunotherapy and beyond.
This is the required discussion section for
POLS GU4724.
The class is an intensive reading of the prose and poetry of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Higginson and Emily Dickinson. Through detailed analysis of Emerson’s
Essays
we will try to understand his philosophy as an effort to radically reformulate traditional concepts of identity, thinking, and everyday living, and investigate the politics that guided his philosophical efforts, especially his stance on slavery and his activism against the Cherokee removals. But we will also be interested in his thinking on dreams, visions and mental transports and in order to ask how those experiences come to model his understanding of personal identity and bodily integrity. In Thoreau, we will look closely into ideas about the art of living and his theory of architecture, as well as quotidian practices of dwelling, eating or cooking, as ways to come to terms with one’s own life. We will pay special attention to Thoreau’s understanding of thinking as walking, as well as the question of space vs. time and we will spend a lot of time figuring his theory of living as mourning. With Whitman we will attend to his new poetics and investigate its relation to forms of American Democracy. We will also want to know how the Civil War affected Whitman’s poetics both in terms of its formal strategies and its content. Finally, we will try to understand how ideas and values of transcendentalist philosophy fashion poetry of Emily Dickinson both in its form and its content. We will thus be looking at Dickinson’s famous fascicles but also into such questions as loss, avian and vegetal life and the experience of the embodied more generally.
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.
This course serves as a modern, applied introduction to machine learning. Students will learn how to evaluate machine learning models and learn specific methods in supervised and unsupervised learning, including regression, ensembles, and neural networks. Other frontier topics with social science relevance will be presented. Topics will be of interest to researchers who are interested in prediction, causal inference, text analysis, and more. Students may use Python, R, or any coding
language that requires only free software. Lectures and lecture notes will only include Python. Students should have prior experience with regression models, be comfortable with matrix algebra notation, and have experience with basic coding (R or Python, ideally).
Learning goals:
• Understand common machine learning models and be able to implement them.
• Gain familiarity with the use of machine learning models in modern social science research.
• Be able to identify research settings where different models might be appropriate.
• Be able to read and interpret technical research papers, extracting the key methodological
choices, assumptions, and results.
Discussion section for POLS GU4728
Covering a period from the late 19th century to the present, this class explores how ideas and practices in science and technology have historically entered popular imagination, social organization and political contestation, as they become mediated by various media forms and technologies such as photography, cinema, novels, television, video, internet platforms and data algorithms. In particular, we focus on how science and technology have shaped our understandings of the human body, and impacted on the various bodily experiences, from perception, cognition, to emotion and connection with others in the environment. This class helps students read media artefacts in a historically grounded and conceptually generative way, understanding media artefacts as historically conditioned, yet offering us resources for envisioning the future.
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.
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.
Introduction to fundamental problems and algorithms in robotics. Topics include configuration spaces, motion and sensor models, search and sampling-based planning, state estimation, localization and mapping, perception, and learning.
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.
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 Python 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.
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.
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.
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.
The purpose of this course is to give students the chance to write an original research paper applying the methodology of lab experiments to political science questions. Experiments have become a standard tool in testing and refining theories, but designing and interpreting economic experiments requires care and practice.
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.
Basic statistical principles and algorithmic paradigms of supervised machine learning.
Prerequisites:
Multivariable calculus (e.g. MATH1201 or MATH1205 or APMA2000), linear algebra (e.g. COMS3251 or MATH2010 or MATH2015), probability (e.g. STAT1201 or STAT4001 or IEOR3658 or MATH2015), discrete math (COMS3203), and general mathematical maturity. Programming and algorithm analysis (e.g. COMS 3134). COMS 3770 is recommended for students who wish to refresh their math background.
Theoretical study of algorithms for machine learning and high-dimensional data analysis. Topics include high-dimensional probability, theory of generalization and statistical learning, online learning and optimization, spectral analysis
Foundational concepts, methods, applications, and recent advances in neural network algorithms.
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.
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.
Engineering fundamentals and experimental methods of human factors design and evaluation for spacecraft and aircraft which incorporate human-in-the-loop control. Develop understanding of human factors specific to spacecraft and aircraft 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. Includes team design project.
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.
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.
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.
Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 Within economics, the standard model of behavior is that of a perfectly rational, self interested utility maximizer with unlimited cognitive resources. In many cases, this provides a good approximation to the types of behavior that economists are interested in. However, over the past 30 years, experimental and behavioral economists have documented ways in which the standard model is not just wrong, but is wrong in ways that are important for economic outcomes. Understanding these behaviors, and their implications, is one of the most exciting areas of current economic inquiry. The aim of this course is to provide a grounding in the main areas of study within behavioral economics, including temptation and self control, fairness and reciprocity, reference dependence, bounded rationality and choice under risk and uncertainty. For each area we will study three things: 1. The evidence that indicates that the standard economic model is missing some important behavior 2. The models that have been developed to capture these behaviors 3. Applications of these models to (for example) finance, labor and development economics As well as the standard lectures, homework assignments, exams and so on, you will be asked to participate in economic experiments, the data from which will be used to illustrate some of the principals in the course. There will also be a certain small degree of classroom ‘flipping’, with a portion of many lectures given over to group problem solving. Finally, an integral part of the course will be a research proposal that you must complete by the end of the course, outlining a novel piece of research that you would be interested in doing.
This seminar explores the history and evolution of conceptual art and conceptualism across four major cities in the Americas: New York, Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Santiago de Chile. Between 1966 and 1975, artists and curators working in distinct geographical and political landscapes simultaneously foregrounded the notion that the “work” of art was an “idea” rather than an act of object-making. Together, they expanded this concept, producing innovative dematerialized, ephemeral, installation, site-specific, and participatory artworks and exhibitions. Instead of viewing U.S. conceptual art as contemporaneous but ultimately distinct from Latin American conceptualism (as is often assumed), this seminar adopts a hemispheric approach.
Our focus will be on the alternative circuits formed by artists, curators, and critics, as well as the dynamic movement of ideas and the distinct local imperatives that have shaped these global connections. Our investigation will be limited to a critical decade, allowing us to develop a depth of context while underscoring the porosity of dematerialized art across borders. We will examine how translations and mistranslations of art terminology, such as “conceptual art”, “Conceptual Art,” and “conceptualism,” can expand or evade rigid institutional categorizations. We will engage with archival materials and listen to the voices of prominent and outlier artists and curators, including Oscar Masotta, Lucy Lippard, Seith Siegelaub, Nemesio Antúnez, Jorge Glusberg, Catalina Parra, Cecilia Vicuña, Juan Pablo Langlois, Art & Language, the Art Workers’ Coalition, and the Rosario Group, to trace the contours of post-1960s conceptualism anew.
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.
Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 and STAT UN1201 Standard economic theory seeks to explain human behavior (especially in economic settings, such as markets) in terms of rational choice, which means that the choices that are made can be predicted on the basis of what would best serve some coherent objective, under an objectively correct understanding of the predictable consequences of alternative actions. Observed behavior often seems difficult to reconcile with a strong form of this theory, even if incentives clearly have some influence on behavior; and the course will discuss empirical evidence (both from laboratory experiments and observations in the field) for some well-established anomalies. But beyond simply cataloguing anomalies for the standard theory, the course will consider the extent to which departures from a strong version of rational choice theory can be understood as reflecting cognitive processes that are also evident in other domains such as sensory perception; examples from visual perception will receive particular attention. And in addition to describing what is known about how the underlying mechanisms work (something that is understood in more detail in sensory contexts than in the case of value-based decision making), the course will consider the extent to which such mechanisms --- while suboptimal from a normative standpoint that treats perfect knowledge of one's situation as costless and automatic --- might actually represent efficient uses of the limited information and bounded information-processing resources available to actual people (or other organisms). Thus the course will consider both ways in which the realism of economic analysis may be improved by taking into account cognitive processes, and ways in which understanding of cognitive processes might be advanced by considering the economic problem of efficient use of limited (cognitive) resources.
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.
The United States has a long complex relationship with the international human rights system. Although its founding was grounded in fundamental norms of inalienable rights, equality and freedom, U.S. history is characterized by divisive and sometimes violent disagreements about who counts as human, what is fundamental to the human condition, and which/how rights should be protected. How has this history contributed to our contemporary struggles? Through engaging with issues related to racial justice, criminal justice, reproductive justice, disability justice, gender justice, and indigenous people’s rights, students are asked to consider how certain rights are sites of contestation within the U.S. political system and within U.S. society.
This course offers a multidisciplinary survey of urgent contemporary human rights issues in the United States and seeks to advance students’ skills to examine human rights research and analysis through intersectional approaches. Part of the inquiry of this course is ensuring that students understand existing tensions among several key concepts (1) human rights as a body of international human rights law and institutions; (2) human rights movements using human rights discourse to further their aspirations; (3) constitutional rights in the U.S. as interpreted by U.S. courts that may or may not allude to/be contained in international law; and (4) political rhetoric that use the language of “rights” for political ends.
Coursework will ground current human rights debates in their social, legal, and political contexts. It will outline the different actors in the human rights landscape, focusing on mobilization strategies of human rights movements and the policy reforms that they seek to advance human rights agendas. Students will engage with legal cases and legislation in the United States. By the end of this course, you should expect to be able to:
Understand critical human rights issues in the United States, and apply international and domestic human rights principles and practice to these contemporary human rights debates;
Understand the role of social movements in shaping narratives around human rights;
Analyze (through case studies) the real-life application and effects of human rights policies, as well as how they contribute to the promotion, progressive enforcement, and internalization of international human rights.
China’s transformation under its last imperial rulers, with special emphasis on economic, legal, political, and cultural change.
Prerequisites: introductory chemistry and earth science coursework. Prerequisites: Introductory Chemistry and Earth Science coursework. Given in alternate years. This class will be an introduction to the field of stable isotope geochemistry and its application to understanding current and past environmental processes. The utility of stable isotopes as tracers will be examined with respect to the disciplines of hydrology, oceanography,paleoclimatology, paleoceanography, landscape evolution, carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle dynamics. We will focus on the stable isotopes of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen in water, ice, carbonates and organic compounds and why they fractionate in the environment. The theoretical background for isotope fractionation will be discussed in class. Radiocarbon as a tracer and dating tool will also be reviewed. In addition, the mechanics of how mass spectrometers analyze different isotope ratios will be explored in class and during experiments in the laboratory. Additional key parts of the class will be a review of paper or laboratory report and student-lead reviews of published papers on relevant topics.