This course introduces the fundamental concepts and problems of international human rights law. What are the origins of modern human rights law? What is the substance of this law, who is obligated by it, and how is it enforced? The course will cover the major international human rights treaties and mechanisms and consider some of todays most significant human rights issues and controversies. While the topics are necessarily law-related, the course will assume no prior exposure to legal studies.
There are two purposes to this course: 1. to develop your ability to negotiate in a purposeful, principled and effective way; and 2. to teach you how to build consensus and broker wise agreements with others. Negotiation is a social skill, and like all social skills you have to practice it if you want to get better at it. To give you the chance to practice, we'll do a number of simulated negotiations in and out of class. We'll also use lectures, case studies, exercises, games, videos, and demonstrations to help you develop your understanding. As we advance in the course, our focus will shift from simple one-on-one negotiations to more complex ones involving many parties, agents, coalitions, and organizations.
Musicals, especially those that have traditionally originated on Broadway, are complex pieces of machinery that are designed to produce a variety of energies in the theater. When taken collectively, those energies constitute the aesthetic of the experience. As with plays, stage managers are charged with coordinating all of a musical’s production elements. However, stage managers should also be able to view a musical from every angle; that is, read it intelligently and analyze it dramatically so they can accurately gauge their contribution to the overall aesthetic. This course seeks to provide stage managers with a customized template to do that: in other words, how to connect what’s on the page and the stage to their own standard methodologies, cue calling, and the CEO/COO perspective. In the contemporary professional landscape, these are important tools that will help them optimize their work on musicals.
Many of the leading causes of mortality and morbidity disproportionately affect the populations of low-income countries. This course uses a multidisciplinary approach to analyse the emergence, justificiation and success of current global health priorities including reproductive health, child health water, infectious diseases, noncommunicable disease, mental health, and public health in complex emergencies (man made and Environmental). Students will learn to examine the social, economic, and political factors contributing to the rise of these global health priorities, learn about the different suggested approaches and tools for managing them as well be involved in the development of strategies for their solution. This course builds on Introduction to Global Health" (P6811) by demonstrating the application of major concepts and principles that govern the practice of global health in resource-poor countries."
Fundamentals of digital speech processing and audio signals. Acoustic and perceptual basics of audio. Short-time Fourier analysis. Analysis and filterbank models. Speech and audio coding, compression, and reconstruction. Acoustic feature extraction and classification. Recognition techniques for speech and other sounds, including hidden Markov models.
For the first time since the Second World War, the far right wins a regional election in Germany. All comes together with a rising number of Nazi attacks and pogroms, documented cases of police violence and racial profiling, political parties promoting the idea of a Fortress Europe, and more restrictions being imposed on asylum and migration, even by liberal political parties.
Taking this as a point of departure, the course investigates post-millennial literature by Black authors and authors of color in Germany. The course will focus on the entanglement of politics and aesthetics, as well as the emergence of new forms and narrative techniques as an intervention in contemporary Germany literature, with stories and plots becoming almost a prophecy of the political reality. We will also closely investigate how BPoC-authors write into and reshape German memory culture that is usually thought of as belonging to white majority society. How do racist killings infiltrate plots and change narrative structures? How is German collective remembrance being (re)shaped with stories by marginalized authors on the Holocaust, the history of German colonialism and other genocides? How is Europe being represented? Where does it end? What transnational alliances, networks, and solidarities are made im/possible? These are some of the many questions the course aims to tackle.
The course is taught in English. All readings are available in German and English.
This course is about the politics of international economic relations. It considers major areas in the politics of international economic policy. It is not a general survey, although the range of issues covered is broad. The emphasis of the course is on contemporary topics, rather than “classics” in IPE or the historical development of the field.
The Graduate Seminar in Sound Art and Related Media is designed to create a space that is inclusive yet focused on sound as an art form and a medium. Class time is structured to support, reflect, and challenge students as individual artists and as a community. The course examines the medium and subject of sound in an expanded field, investigating its constitutive materials, exhibition and installation practices, and its ethics in the 21st century. The seminar will focus on the specific relations between tools, ideas, and meanings and the specific histories and theories that have arisen when artists engage with sound as a medium and subject in art. The seminar combines discussions of readings and artworks with presentations of students' work and research, as well as site visits and guest lectures.
While the Columbia Visual Arts Program is dedicated to maintaining an interdisciplinary learning environment where students are free to use and explore different mediums while also learning to look at, and critically discuss, artwork in any medium, we are equally committed to providing in-depth knowledge concerning the theories, histories, practices, tools and materials underlying these different disciplines. We offer Graduate Seminars in different disciplines, or combinations of disciplines, including moving image, new genres, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, as well as in Sound Art in collaboration with the Columbia Music Department through their Computer Music Center. These Discipline Seminars are taught by full-time and adjunct faculty, eminent critics, historians, curators, theorists, writers, and artists.
This SIPA seminar will study, analyze, and assess global monetary policy since 2000 with a primary focus on the challenges faced, policies pursued, and repercussions flowing from the actions taken by Federal Reserve, the ECB, and the Bank of England during the first two decades of the 21st century. These twenty plus years have been marked by the two deepest global downturns since the Great Depression, a Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, a global pandemic, and recently, the largest sustained surge in inflation since the 1970s. Confronting these challenges subject to the constraint of an effective lower bound on interest rates , major central banks introduced a number of unconventional – and controversial – policy tools and expanded substantially their presence in financial markets and in their economies.
The format of the course will combine lectures by the instructor with student presentation on recent central bank policy decisions and will conclude in the final weeks within class seminar presentations by teams of students of term papers that critically assesses the pandemic policy reponse and the post pandemic policy normalization plans pursued by a major central bank.
The extraordinary policy responses of global central banks to the 2023 banking turmoil, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2007–2009 financial crisis have sparked debate about the appropriateness and effectiveness of central bank actions. This course will explore the theory and practice of “unconventional” monetary policy tools—those used to address financial crises, widespread deflations, and deep recessions or depressions.
Course examples will be drawn from a wide range of crises, countries, and central banks in both the developed and emerging world over many decades. The bulk of the course will focus on how central banks adapt their policy rules and tools in the face of extraordinary financial or economic turmoil.
Different types of monetary policy tools will be discussed and analyzed, with particular emphasis on the design and effectiveness of various crisis policy tools. Understanding policy effectiveness will require examining how financial and macroeconomic conditions shape central bank policy design, and how financial markets and the macroeconomy respond to these extraordinary measures. The latter half of the course will examine the use of crisis management tools—both successful and unsuccessful—across different jurisdictions.
The course will conclude with discussions of several important and timely dilemmas: Where is the line between crisis monetary policies and traditional fiscal policy actions? Why was the inflationary impact of COVID-19 policy responses so different from previous episodes of instability? How do central banks “undo” their crisis management policies and return to “normal”? What challenges do central banks face in managing the economic side effects and political consequences of extraordinary policies?
This required Visual Arts core MFA curriculum course, comprising two parts, allows MFA students to deeply engage with and learn directly from a wide variety of working artists who visit the program each year.
Lecture Series
The lecture component, taught by an adjunct faculty member with a background in art history and/or curatorial studies, consists of lectures and individual studio visits by visiting artists and critics over the course of the academic year. The series is programmed by a panel of graduate Visual Arts students under the professor's close guidance. Invitations are extended to artists whose practice reflects the interests, mediums, and working methods of MFA students and the program. Weekly readings assigned by the professor provide context for upcoming visitors. Other course assignments include researching and preparing introductions and discussion questions for each of the visitors. Undergraduate students enrolled in Visual Arts courses are encouraged to attend and graduate students in Columbia's Department of Art History are also invited. Following each class-period the conversation continues informally at a reception for the visitor. Studio visits with Visual Arts MFA students take place on or around the week of the artist or critic's lecture and are coordinated and assigned by lottery by the professor.
Artist Mentorship
The Artist-Mentor component allows a close and focused relationship to form between a core group of ten to fifteen students and their mentor. Students are assigned two mentors who they meet with each semester in two separate one-week workshops. The content of each workshop varies according to the Mentors’ areas of expertise and the needs of the students. Mentor weeks can include individual critiques, group critiques, studio visits, visits to galleries, other artist's studios, museums, special site visits, readings, and writing workshops. Here are a few descriptions from recent mentors:
• During Mentor Week we will individually and collectively examine our assumptions and notions about art. What shapes our needs and expectations as artists and the impact of what we do?
• Our week will include visits to exhibition spaces to observe how the public engages the art. Throughout, we will consider art's ability to have real life consequences and the public's desire to personally engage with and experience art without mediation.
• The week will be conducted in two parts, f
Inter-disciplinary graduate-level seminar on design and programming of embedded scalable platforms. Content varies between offerings to cover timely relevant issues and latest advances in system-on-chip design, embedded software programming, and electronic design automation. Requires substantial reading of research papers, class participation, and semester-long project.
Introduction to the fundamental principles of statistical signal processing related to detection and estimation. Hypothesis testing, signal detection, parameter estimation, signal estimation, and selected advanced topics. Suitable for students doing research in communications, control, signal processing, and related areas.
Formerly known as the Williams Moot Court.
Overview of theory, computation and applications for sparse and low-dimensional data modeling. Recoverability of sparse and low-rank models. Optimization methods for low-dim data modeling. Applications to imaging, neuroscience, communications, web data.
This course starts with three premises. Law plays a significant role in shaping the expressive media that represent our world to us. Those media in turn shape law and our experience of it, effectively forming us as legal subjects. But law and media may also act as conflicting domains of judgment, —spaces for the enactment of alternative visions of truth, authority, and justice. The course approaches questions of the relationship between these domains from the perspective of the humanities and social theory. This is not a class in which you will learn entertainment law, media regulation, or intellectual property as fields of legal practice. It is for those who wish to think historically, critically, and theoretically about film, media, and law.
As a workshop, the course has two aims: to explore new work on film, media, and law in conversation with scholars who are at the cutting edge of the field; and to collectively develop our own work in this vein. The guest scholars who will share their recent work with us represent the field’s diversity and richness. Their scholarship emerges from a variety of disciplines: anthropology, art and architecture, history, literature, music, philosophy, political theory, religion, theatre and performance, and (of course) film and media studies and law. What they share is a commitment to thinking about how law and media reflect, inflect, or challenge each other. The class will also serve as a workshop for developing student projects and professional skills with an eye to conference participation, thesis development, and possible publication. The last session will be dedicated to a mini-conference / workshop / celebratory finale in which students present their projects.
Enrollment is limited, but graduate students in any field and at any stage of study are welcome (as auditors or for credit), along with any other members of the scholarly community interested in attending.
Advanced topics in signal processing, such as multidimensional signal processing, image feature extraction, image/video editing and indexing, advanced digital filter design, multirate signal processing, adaptive signal processing, and wave-form coding of signals. Content varies from year to year, and different topics rotate through the course numbers 6880 to 6889.
The Social Impact: Business, Society, and the Natural Environment course explores the relationship between corporations, society, and the natural environment. Specifically, it examines the ways in which governments, (for-profit and non-profit) organizations, and investors (fail to) have positive impact and manage issues where the pursuit of private goals is deemed inconsistent with the public interest.
Advanced topics in signal processing, such as multidimensional signal processing, image feature extraction, image/video editing and indexing, advanced digital filter design, multirate signal processing, adaptive signal processing, and wave-form coding of signals. Content varies from year to year, and different topics rotate through the course numbers 6880 to 6889. Topic: Large Data Stream Processing.
This course presents a systematic overview of the most common cancer diagnoses across the lifespan and associated prevention, screening, and early detection. The course presents genetic predispositions and mutations as well as familial syndromes that increase risk for a diagnosis of cancer. The course examines cancer diagnoses that appear in all age groups as well as cancers mostly specific to set age groups. It incorporates the pathophysiology of pediatric, adolescent, young adult, and adult cancers, current evidence-based treatment modalities and regimens for each cancer, and data from ongoing clinical trials about cutting-edge therapies being developed. The course provides a framework for the oncology nurse practitioner (NP) for synthesis, integration, and application of this knowledge for diagnosing, assessing, and managing patients with a cancer diagnosis in clinical practice.
Advanced topics spanning electrical engineering and computer science such as speech processing and recognition, image and multimedia content analysis, and other areas drawing on signal processing, information theory, machine learning, pattern recognition, and related topics. Content varies from year to year, and different topics rotate through the course numbers 6890 to 6899.
Pre-req: SIPA U6500 - Quant I.
This course will be useful for students who would like to participate in evaluations of development projects. At the end of the course, students will know how to plan an impact evaluation, how to manage one, and how to recognize and differentiate a good impact evaluation from a badly conducted one. Students should also come with one case study that they have been involved in and that would lend itself to an impact evaluation. Previous experience in implementing a development project is desirable.
Advanced topics spanning electrical engineering and computer science such as speech processing and recognition, image and multimedia content analysis, and other areas drawing on signal processing, information theory, machine learning, pattern recognition, and related topics. Content varies from year to year, and different topics rotate through the course numbers 6890 to 6899.
This course will go beyond technical or methodological materials (i.e. how to collect and analyze data) and instead focus on how M-E practically applies to day-to-day responsibilities of practitioners, regardless of their position title, and how anyone can (and should) become an effective producer and consumer of data and thus an impactful contributor in the field of international development and humanitarian assistance. For students interested in a career in M-E, this course will help them recognize and address some of the common challenges they will face at work (e.g. how to convince and collaborate with the chief of party to invest in and run effective M-E). For students who are interested in non-M-E career tracks, this course will help them do their jobs better and help the development and humanitarian fields overcome “pilot-itis” and become more evidence-driven. Students should also understand that they are likely to take on different roles throughout their careers, which may involve M-E - this course will prepare them to become versatile and impactful players in this challenging but meaningful line of work.
This seminar asks how spatial politics intersect with economic inequality and social difference (race, gender, caste, and ethnicity) to produce marginalized and stigmatized spaces such as “favelas,” “slum,” and “ghettos.”
The seminar draws on the convergent yet distinct urban trajectories of Bombay/Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro as a place from which to explore questions of comparative and global urbanism from an explicitly South-South perspective. That is, we ask how Bombay and Rio’s distinct yet connected urbanity might force us to alter our approaches to the city; approaches that are largely drawn from modular Euro-American paradigms for understanding urbanization as coeval with modernity, as well as industrialization. We do so in this seminar by focusing on people and practices—subaltern urbanity (and on those whose labor produced the modern city), as well as on spatial orders—the informal or unintended city—to ask the question: “what makes and unmakes a city?”
How might questions about built form, industrialization, capital flows, and social life and inhabitation that takes the perspective of “city theory from the Global South” shed new understanding on the history of the city, the extranational frames of colonial modernity, and the ongoing impact of neoliberalism? How can we rethink critical concepts in urban studies (precarity, spatial segregation, subalternity, economies of eviction, urban dispossession) through embedded studies of locality and lifemaking?
This course proposes to make a theoretical reYlection on Latin American literature, art, video, and cinema in the present. Starting from a diagnosis of the new scene, we are going to study some alternative forms. We will start with reading theoretical texts in the four proposed topics: Archive, Gender, Nature, and Intermediality.
The study of these works will also allow us to understand the dynamics between the different media and how artists conceive their practice in the midst of contemporary conditions. We are going to explore in these works the relationships between imagining, documenting, creating communities, intervening in the social field, and discussing global issues that often, from a precise location, involve planetary issues.
We will study works by Cristina Rivera Garza, Tamara Kamenszain, Ariana Harwicz, Fernanda Trías, Daniela Catrileo, Verónica Gerber-Biceci, among others. We will discuss the constellation of problems around aesthetics, mediality, exhibition, politics, materiality, and immateriality in art and literature, mimesis and institutions, artists and intellectuals.
Advanced topics spanning Electrical Engineering and Computer Science such as speech processing and recognition, image and multimedia content analysis, and other areas drawing on signal processing, information theory, machine learning, pattern recognition, and related topics. Content varies from year to year, and different topics rotate through the course numbers 6890 to 6899. Topic: Advanced Big Data Analytics.
“Writing About Policy” gives you the journalistic tools to intervene in public policy debates. You will learn to translate the expertise you’re gaining – as policy professionals and as SIPA students –for the rest of the public, whether in op eds, review essays or blogs. You will also report and write feature stories. This class is a workshop, as well as a seminar, and there will be writing assignments due almost every week. Students will publish their work in SIPAs student publications, as well as in media outlets reaching far beyond the IAB.
Software or hardware projects in computer science. Before registering, the student must submit a written proposal to the instructor for review. The proposal should give a brief outline of the project, estimated schedule of completion, and computer resources needed. Oral and written reports are required. May be taken over more than one semester, in which case the grade will be deferred until all 12 points have been completed. No more than 12 points of COMS E6901 may be taken. Consult the department for section assignment.