A candidate for the Eng.Sc.D. degree in biomedical engineering must register for 12 points of doctoral research instruction. Registration may not be used to satisfy the minimum residence requirement for the degree.
A candidate for the Eng.Sc.D. degree in electrical engineering must register for 12 points of doctoral research instruction. Registration in ELEN E9800 may not be used to satisfy the minimum residence requirement for the degree.
Internship for Film Research Arts Students Only
In the term following the passing of comprehensive examinations, doctoral candidates must register for a total of 6 points of instruction. Supervision and consultation are provided by the faculty to doctoral candidates in the courses of their selection of the dissertation topic, carrying out the prescribed research, and writing the dissertation. Library privileges are included.
Interenship for MFA Writing Research Arts Students
This course explores environmental justice (EJ) through an anti-colonial lens that centers the perspectives of dispossessed communities in different places around the world. Our primary focus site is New Orleans communities working toward food sovereignty, but we will also learn from initiatives in Palestine, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. Readings and discussions will cover themes that include interdisciplinarity, the history of science(s) and knowledge production, decolonizing the geosciences, and relations based in mutuality (as opposed to extractivism). Students will be trained in community-based research methods in part by developing an anthropological lens – first through a self-ethnography workshop that focuses on positionality and then through their own mini-ethnography projects.
The weekly three-hour seminars will be divided in two. The first half will be lectures, guest lectures, and workshops. After a short break, the second portion of the seminar will be reserved for discussions.
Prerequisites: graduate standing. Students register in this course while preparing their M.Phil. examinations and prospectus--usually in the fall and spring of their third year.
This course is intended for PhD students who are engaged in relevant scholarly activities that are associated with dissertation research.
Artificial Intelligence has made impressive progress in recent years. Nowhere has this progress been
as impressive as in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), concerned with building algorithms
that can parse and generate text in natural language. A new family of NLP algorithms, called
Large Language Models (LLMs), exhibit a remarkable ability to generate fluent text. Paragraphs generated
with LLMs are grammatically well-formed, topically relevant, and stylistically coherent – so
much so that they can often fool human readers. This technological development raises fascinating
questions at the crossroads between philosophy, computer science, and linguistics. Can we say that
LLMs really understand language? Do they have any degree of semantic competence? Or are they
simply manipulating text strings without encoding their meanings? What does it even mean to understand
language in the first place? These are some of the questions we will discuss in this seminar,
by reading philosophical work in conjunction with cutting-edge research from computer science and
computational linguistics.
A candidate for the doctorate in biomedical engineering or applied biology may be required to register for this course in every term after the students course work has been completed and until the dissertation has been accepted.
A candidate for the doctorate may be required to register for this course every term after the students coursework has been completed and until the dissertation has been accepted.
The course is intended for PhD students who are engaged in relevant scholarly activities that are not associated with the required course sequence. Such activities must accrue more than 20 hours/week.
Prerequisites: the instructors permission. Guided individual research.