Online courses directory (19947)

Techniques for the design and analysis of efficient algorithms, emphasizing methods useful in practice. Topics include sorting; search trees, heaps, and hashing; divide-and-conquer; dynamic programming; greedy algorithms; amortized analysis; graph algorithms; and shortest paths. Advanced topics may include network flow, computational geometry, number-theoretic algorithms, polynomial and matrix calculations, caching, and parallel computing.

Like other scientists, medical researchers and clinicians must be capable of presenting their work to an audience of professional peers. Unlike many scientists, however, physicians must routinely translate their sophisticated knowledge into lay terms for their own patients and for the education of the public at large. A surprising number of physicians write for less utilitarian reasons as well, choosing the narrative essay as a means of exploring the non-technical issues that emerge in their clinical practice. Over the course of the semester, we will explore the full range of writings by physicians and other health practitioners.

Becoming the Next Bill Nye is about using video production techniques to develop your ability to engagingly convey your passions for science, technology, engineering, and / or math. You'll have the opportunity to script and on-screen host 5-minute YouTube science, technology, engineering, and / or math-related shows to inspire youth to consider a future in science.

The nuts and bolts of preparing a New Venture Plan and launching the venture will be explored in this twenty-fifth annual course offering. The course is open to members of the MIT Community and to others interested in entrepreneurship. It is particularly recommended for persons who are interested in starting or are involved in a new business or venture. Because some of the speakers will be judges of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, persons who are planning to enter the Competition should find the course particularly useful. In the past approximately 50% of the class has been from the Engineering / Science / Architecture Schools and 50% from the Sloan School of Management.

The course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.

This course seeks to provide a supportive context for students to grow significantly as writers by discovering and engaging with issues that matter to them. Writing on social and ethical issues, we can see ourselves within a tradition of authors such as Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, George Orwell, Rachel Carson, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., who have used the power of the pen to inspire social change.

Production of Educational Videos is an introduction to technical communication that is situated in the production of educational videos; the assignments are all focused on the production of videos that teach some aspect of MIT's first-year core curriculum. The objective of these assignments is improvement in both communication ability and communication habits; these improvements are effected by providing participants with instruction, practice, feedback, and the opportunity for reflection. In addition to improvements in communication skills, improvement is expected in students' attitude towards writing, oral presentations, and collaboration; as the semester progresses, students should feel confident of their ability to write, present, and collaborate.

Interdisciplinary introduction to contemporary Latin America, drawing on films, literature, popular press accounts, and scholarly research. Topics include economic development, ethnic and racial identity, religion, revolution, democracy, transitional justice, and the rule of law. Examples draw on a range of countries in the region, especially Mexico, Chile, and Brazil. Includes a heavy oral participation component, with regular breakout groups, formal class presentations on pressing social issues (such as criminal justice and land tenure), and a structured class debate.

This course provides an introduction to major political, social, cultural and intellectual changes in Europe from the beginnings of the Renaissance in Italy around 1300 to the outbreak of the French Revolution at the end of the 1700s. It focuses on the porous boundaries between categories of theology, magic and science, as well as print. It examines how developments in these areas altered European political institutions, social structures, and cultural practices. It also studies men and women, nobles and commoners, as well as Europeans and some non-Europeans with whom they came into contact.

This course is an introduction to the principal concepts and methods of heat transfer. The objectives of this integrated subject are to develop the fundamental principles and laws of heat transfer and to explore the implications of these principles for system behavior; to formulate the models necessary to study, analyze and design heat transfer systems through the application of these principles; to develop the problem-solving skills essential to good engineering practice of heat transfer in real-world applications.

In this course, we will lay the foundation for understanding how materials behave in nuclear systems. In particular, we will build on a solid base of nuclear material fundamentals in order to understand radiation damage and effects in fuels and structural materials. This course consists of a series of directed readings, lectures on video, problem sets, short research projects, and class discussions with worked examples. We will start with an overview of nuclear materials, where they are found in nuclear systems, and how they fail. We will then develop the formalism in crystallography as a common language for materials scientists everywhere. This will be followed by the development of phase diagrams from thermodynamics, which predict how binary alloy systems evolve towards equilibrium. Then effects of stress, defects, and kinetics will be introduced. These will all be tied together when developing theories about how radiation, particularly neutrons and heavy charged particles, interact with solid matter to produce defects and evolve microstructure. A few applications of radiation effects will then be treated with this newfound framework, including the change of material properties under irradiation, void swelling, embrittlement, loss of ductility, and the simulation of in-reactor irradiation (neutrons) with heavy ions.

The course will focus primarily on contemporary discourses concerning gender inequality. Most of the readings assigned will be recent articles published in U.S. and British media capturing the latest thinking and research on gender inequality in the workplace. The class will be highly interactive combining case studies, videos, debates, guest speakers, and in-class simulations.

This is an advanced seminar that will analyze the effectiveness of development and planning theories from the perspective of practitioners who implement projects and policies based on such theories. The ultimate goal is to create new planning sensibilities, which theorize from practice, not the other way around.

This participatory seminar focuses on the knowledge and skills necessary for teaching science and engineering in higher education. This course is designed for graduate students interested in an academic career, and anyone else interested in teaching. Topics include theories of adult learning; course development; promoting active learning, problem-solving, and critical thinking in students; communicating with a diverse student body; using educational technology to further learning; lecturing; creating effective tests and assignments; and assessment and evaluation. Students research and present a relevant topic of particular interest. The subject is appropriate for both novices and those with teaching experience.

This course introduces scholarly debates about the sociocultural practices through which individuals and societies create, sustain, recall, and erase memories. Emphasis is given to the history of knowledge, construction of memory, the role of authorities in shaping memory, and how societies decide on whose versions of memory are more "truthful" and "real." Other topics include how memory works in the human brain, memory and trauma, amnesia, memory practices in the sciences, false memory, sites of memory, and the commodification of memory. Students taking the graduate version complete additional assignments.

This course surveys a variety of reasoning, optimization and decision making methodologies for creating highly autonomous systems and decision support aids. The focus is on principles, algorithms, and their application, taken from the disciplines of artificial intelligence and operations research.

Reasoning paradigms include logic and deduction, heuristic and constraint-based search, model-based reasoning, planning and execution, and machine learning. Optimization paradigms include linear programming, integer programming, and dynamic programming. Decision-making paradigms include decision theoretic planning, and Markov decision processes.

The basic objective of Unified Engineering is to give a solid understanding of the fundamental disciplines of aerospace engineering, as well as their interrelationships and applications. These disciplines are Materials and Structures (M); Computers and Programming (C); Fluid Mechanics (F); Thermodynamics (T); Propulsion (P); and Signals and Systems (S). In choosing to teach these subjects in a unified manner, the instructors seek to explain the common intellectual threads in these disciplines, as well as their combined application to solve engineering Systems Problems (SP). Throughout the year, the instructors emphasize the connections among the disciplines.

This seminar explores “land” as a genre, theme, and medium of art and architecture of the last five decades. Focusing largely on work within the boundaries of the United States, the course seeks to understand how the use of land in art and architecture is bound into complicated entanglements of property and power, the inheritances of non-U.S. traditions, and the violence of colonial ambitions. The term “landscape” is variously deployed in the service of a range of political and philosophical positions.

This course provides broad exposure to research in biophysics and physical biology, with emphasis on the critical evaluation of scientific literature. Weekly meetings include in-depth discussion of scientific literature led by various MIT faculty on active research topics. Each session also includes a brief discussion of non-research topics including effective presentation skills, writing papers and fellowship proposals, choosing scientific and technical research topics, time management, and scientific ethics.

This course investigates the relationship between urban architecture and political, social, and cultural history of Athens in the 5^th and 4^th centuries BC. It surveys and analyzes archeological and literary evidence, including the sanctuary of Athena on the Acropolis, the Agora, Greek houses, the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, plays of Sophocles and Aristophanes, and the panhellenic sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia.

This class will focus on the craft of writing genre science fiction. Students write and read science fiction and analyze and discuss stories written for the class. For the first eight weeks, readings in contemporary science fiction accompany lectures and formal writing assignments intended to illuminate various aspects of writing craft as well as the particular problems of writing science fiction. The rest of the term is given to roundtable workshops on student's stories.