Advanced Field Methods in Water, Health and Development | CEE 277F | Autumn, Winter, Spring & Summer

Instructor & Department: Davis, Jenna | Civil and Environmental Engineering

Field methods for assessing household stored water quality, hand contamination, behaviors, and knowledge related to water, sanitation and health.

Advanced Topics in Multivariate Statistical Analysis | CEE 374X | Autumn & Spring

Instructor & Department: Davis, Jenna | Civil and Environmental Engineering

Analysis of experimental and non-experimental data using multivariate modeling approaches

Advanced Topics in Water, Health and Development | CEE 374W | Autumn, Winter, Spring & Summer

Instructor & Department: Davis, Jenna | Civil and Environmental Engineering

Advanced topics in water, health and development. Emphasis on low-and-middle-income countries. Class content varies according to interests of students.

Analyzing land use in a globalized world | ESS 170/270 | Spring

Instructor & Department: Lambin, Eric | Earth Systems Science

This course examines the dynamics of land use in relation to globalization. The objective is to understand how the expansion of global trade, and public and private regulations affect land use changes. The course will enable students to better understand how to effectively influence land use change, from different vantage points (government, NGO, corporate actor). The main emphasis is on tropical regions. Lectures introduce theories, practical cases, and evaluation tools to better understand contemporary land use dynamics.

Animals and Us | ANTHRO 34 | Winter

Instructor & Department: Seetah, Krish | Anthropology, Archaeology

The human-animal relationship is dynamic, all encompassing and durable. Without exception, all socio-cultural groups have evidenced complex interactions with the animals around them, both domesticated and wild. However, the individual circumstances of these interactions are hugely complicated, and involve much more than direct human-animal contact, going far beyond this to incorporate social, ecological and spiritual contexts.n This course delves into this complexity, covering the gamut of social roles played by animals, as well as the methods and approaches to studying these, both traditional and scientific. While the notion of `animals as social actors¿ is well acknowledged, their use as proxies for human autecology (the relationship between a species and its environment) is also increasingly recognized as a viable mechanism for understanding our cultural and economic past. It will piece together the breadth of human-animal relationships using a wide geographic range of case studies.

Archaeological Methods | ANTHRO 91A | Autumn

Instructor & Department: Seetah, Krish | Anthropology, Archaeology

Methodological issues related to the investigation of archaeological sites and objects. Aims and techniques of archaeologists including: location and excavation of sites; dating of places and objects; analysis of artifacts and technology and the study of ancient people, plants, and animals. How these methods are employed to answer the discipline's larger research questions.

Artificial Intelligence: Principles and Techniques | CS 221 | Autumn

Instructor & Department: Ermon, Stefano | Computer Science

Co-instructors: Liang, Percy

Artificial intelligence (AI) has had a huge impact in many areas, including medical diagnosis, speech recognition, robotics, web search, advertising, and scheduling. This course focuses on the foundational concepts that drive these applications. In short, AI is the mathematics of making good decisions given incomplete information (hence the need for probability) and limited computation (hence the need for algorithms). Specific topics include search, constraint satisfaction, game playing, Markov decision processes, graphical models, machine learning, and logic.

Big Data for Biologists - Decoding Genomic Function | HUMBIO 51 | Autumn

Instructor & Department: Kundaje, Anshul | Human Biology

Co-instructors: Salmeen, Annette

Biology and medicine are becoming increasingly data-intensive fields. This course is designed to introduce students interested in human biology and related fields to methods for working with large biological datasets. There will be in-class activities analyzing real data that have revealed insights about the role of the genome and epigenome in health and disease. For example, we will explore data from large-scale gene expression and chromatin state studies. The course will provide an introduction to the relevant topics in biology and to fundamental computational skills such as editing text files, formatting and storing data, visualizing data and writing data analysis scripts. Students will become familiar with both UNIX and Python.

Biostatistics | BIOSTATS 141 | Winter

Instructor & Department: Zhu, Xiang | Biostatistics, Statistics

Introductory statistical methods for biological data: describing data (numerical and graphical summaries); introduction to probability; and statistical inference (hypothesis tests and confidence intervals). Intermediate statistical methods: comparing groups (analysis of variance); analyzing associations (linear and logistic regression); and methods for categorical data (contingency tables and odds ratio). Course content integrated with statistical computing in R.

Climate and Society | EARTH 2 | Winter

Instructor & Department: Burke, Marshall | Earth Systems

Co-instructors: Diffenbaugh, Noah; Lobell, David; Fisk, Jonathan

How and why is the climate changing? How might a changing climate affect human society? And what can we do to alter the course of climate change and adapt to any climatic changes that do occur? This course provides an introduction to the natural science and social science of climate change. The focus is on what science tells us about the causes, consequences, and solutions to climate change, as well as on how scientific progress is made on these issues.