Online courses directory (2511)

The course is designed for students in the System Design and Management (SDM) program and therefore assumes that you already have a basic knowledge of project management. The objective is to introduce advanced methods and tools of project management in a realistic context such that they can be taken back to the workplace to improve management of development projects. In contrast to traditional courses on the subject we will emphasize scenarios that cannot be fully predicted such as task iterations, unplanned rework, perceived versus actual progress and misalignments between tasks, product architectures and organizations.

This class was also offered in Course 13 (Department of Ocean Engineering) as 13.615J. In 2005, ocean engineering subjects became part of Course 2 (Department of Mechanical Engineering), and the 13.470J designation was retired.

This course studies fundamental design and implementation ideas in the engineering of operating systems. Lectures are based on a study of UNIX and research papers. Topics include virtual memory, threads, context switches, kernels, interrupts, system calls, interprocess communication, coordination, and the interaction between software and hardware. Individual laboratory assignments involve implementation of a small operating system in C, with some x86 assembly.

This course explores the ideal of social justice. What makes a society just? We will approach this question by studying three opposing theories of justice—utilitarianism, libertarianism, and egalitarian liberalism—each foundational to contemporary political thought and discourse.

This course is an introduction to the fundamental aspects of science and engineering necessary for exploring, observing, and utilizing the oceans. Hands-on projects focus on instrumentation in the marine environment and the design of ocean observatories for ocean monitoring and exploration. Topics include acoustics, sound speed and refraction, sounds generated by ships and marine animals, sonar systems and their principles of operation, hydrostatic behavior of floating and submerged bodies geared towards ocean vehicle design, stability of ocean vessels, and the application of instrumentation and electronics in the marine environment. Students work with sensor systems and deploy them in the field to gather and analyze real world data.

This subject exposes students to a variety of visualization techniques so that they learn to understand the work involved in producing them and to critically assess the power and limits of each. Students concentrate on areas where visualizations are crucial for meaning making and data production. Drawing on scholarship in science and technology studies on visualization, critical art theory, and core discussions in science and engineering, students work through a series of case studies in order to become better readers and producers of visualizations.

Explore the future through modeling, reading, and discussion in an open-ended seminar! Our fields of interest will include changes in science and technology, culture and lifestyles, and dominant paradigms and societies.

This course is designed as an introduction to Latin American politics and society for undergraduates at MIT. No background on the region is required. Overall workload (reading, writing, class participation, and examinations) is similar to that of other HASS-D courses. Many of the themes raised here are covered in greater detail in other courses: 21G.020J (New World Literature), 21G.716 (Introduction to Contemporary Hispanic Literature), 21G.730 (Twentieth and Twentyfirst-Century Spanish American Literaturere), 21G.735 (Advanced Topics in Hispanic Literature and Film), 21A.220 (The Conquest of America), 21H.802 (Modern Latin America), 3.982 (The Ancient Andean World), 3.983 (Ancient Mesoamerican Civilization), 17.507 (Democratization and Democratic Collapse), and 17.554 (Political Economy of Latin America).F

4.125 is the third undergraduate design studio. This subject introduces skills needed to build within a landscape establishing continuities between the built and natural world. Students learn to build appropriately through analysis of landscape and climate for a chosen site, and to conceptualize design decisions through drawings and models.

The course is designed to be an introduction to methods of analyzing, evaluating, and recording the urban environment first hand. Its aim is to supplement existing courses that cover theory and history of city design and planning and to better prepare students without prior design background for the studio sequence.

This course considers molecular control of neural specification, formation of neuronal connections, construction of neural systems, and the contributions of experience to shaping brain structure and function. Topics include: neural induction and pattern formation, cell lineage and fate determination, neuronal migration, axon guidance, synapse formation and stabilization, activity-dependent development and critical periods, development of behavior.

Modern computing platforms provide unprecedented amounts of raw computational power. But significant complexity comes along with this power, to the point that making useful computations exploit even a fraction of the potential of the computing platform is a substantial challenge. Indeed, obtaining good performance requires a comprehensive understanding of all layers of the underlying platform, deep insight into the computation at hand, and the ingenuity and creativity required to obtain an effective mapping of the computation onto the machine. The reward for mastering these sophisticated and challenging topics is the ability to make computations that can process large amount of data orders of magnitude more quickly and efficiently and to obtain results that are unavailable with standard practice.

This class is a hands-on, project-based introduction to building scalable and high-performance software systems. Topics include performance analysis, algorithmic techniques for high performance, instruction-level optimizations, cache and memory hierarchy optimization, parallel programming, and building scalable distributed systems.

The course also includes design reviews with industry mentors, as described in this MIT News article.

This course is a seminar on creativity in art, science, and technology. We discuss how these pursuits are jointly dependent on affective as well as cognitive elements in human nature. We study feeling and imagination in relation to principles of idealization, consummation, and the aesthetic values that give meaning to science and technology as well as literature and the other arts. Readings in philosophy, psychology, and literature are part of the course.

This course will examine literature and practice regarding community-owned enterprise as an alternative means of increasing community participation and development. The use of cooperatives, credit unions, land trusts, and limited stock ownership enterprises for increasing community participation and empowerment will be examined.

This intermediate organic chemistry course focuses on the methods used to identify the structure of organic molecules, advanced principles of organic stereochemistry, organic reaction mechanisms, and methods used for the synthesis of organic compounds. Additional special topics include illustrating the role of organic chemistry in biology, medicine, and industry.

Students in ESD.00 work on projects to address large, complex and seemingly intractable real-world problems, such as energy supply, environmental issues, health care delivery, and critical infrastructure (e.g., telecommunications, water supply, and transportation). The course introduces interdisciplinary approaches - rooted in engineering, management, and the social sciences - to considering these critical contemporary issues. Small, faculty-led teams select an engineering systems term project to illustrate one or more of these approaches.

In this 3-unit class, we will read Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. The goal of the class is for students to come away feeling comfortable with its language and argument; meeting in a small group will also allow us to talk about the key questions and issues raised by the poem. This 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.

Surveys the literature on the cognitive and neural organization of human memory and learning. Includes consideration of working memory and executive control, episodic and semantic memory, and implicit forms of memory. Emphasizes integration of cognitive theory with recent insights from functional neuroimaging (e.g., fMRI and PET).

The geologic record demonstrates that our environment has changed over a variety of time scales from seconds to billions of years. This course explores the many ways in which geologic processes control and modify the Earth's environment and serves as an introduction to Environmental Earth Science Field Course (12.120), which addresses field applications of these principles in the American Southwest.

Material covered in this course includes the following topics:

• Laws of thermodynamics: general formulation and applications to mechanical, electromagnetic and electrochemical systems, solutions, and phase diagrams
• Computation of phase diagrams
• Statistical thermodynamics and relation between microscopic and macroscopic properties, including ensembles, gases, crystal lattices, phase transitions
• Applications to phase stability and properties of mixtures
• Computational modeling
• Interfaces

This course was also taught as part of the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) programme as course number SMA 5111 (Materials at Equilibrium).

The subject of enumerative combinatorics deals with counting the number of elements of a finite set. For instance, the number of ways to write a positive integer n as a sum of positive integers, taking order into account, is 2^n-1. We will be concerned primarily with bijective proofs, i.e., showing that two sets have the same number of elements by exhibiting a bijection (one-to-one correspondence) between them. This is a subject which requires little mathematical background to reach the frontiers of current research. Students will therefore have the opportunity to do original research. It might be necessary to limit enrollment.