Courses tagged with "Information environments" (1105)

This class is the second half of an intensive survey of cognitive science for first-year graduate students. Topics include visual perception, language, memory, cognitive architecture, learning, reasoning, decision-making, and cognitive development. Topics covered are from behavioral, computational, and neural perspectives.

Using film as a lens to explore and interpret various aspects of the urban experience in both the U.S. and abroad, this course presents a survey of important developments in urbanism from 1900 to the present day, including changes in technology, bureaucracy, and industrialization; immigration and national identity; race, class, gender, and economic inequality; politics, conformity, and urban anomie; and planning, development, private property, displacement, sprawl, environmental degradation, and suburbanization.

This course takes a 'back to the beginning' view that aims to better understand the end result. What might be the developmental processes that lead to the organization of 'booming, buzzing confusions' into coherent visual objects? This course examines key experimental results and computational proposals pertinent to the discovery of objects in complex visual inputs. The structure of the course is designed to get students to learn and to focus on the genre of study as a whole; to get a feel for how science is done in this field.

15.567 The Economics of Information provides an analysis of the underlying economics of information with management implications. It studies the effects of digitization and technology on industry, organizational structure, and business strategy, and examines pricing, bundling, and versioning of digital goods, including music, video, software, and communication services. In addition, the course considers the managerial implications of social networks, search, targeted advertising, personalization, privacy, network externalities, open source, and alliances.

This course examines the economic, political, social, and spatial dynamics of urban growth and decline in cities and their key component areas (downtown, suburbs, etc.). Topics include impacts of industrialization, technology, politics, and social practices on cities. Students will examine the role of public and private sector activities, ranging from zoning and subsidies to infrastructure development and real estate investment, in affecting urban growth and decline. Readings are both theoretical and empirical, with considerable thought paid to comparative and historical differences.

The course is designed to provide a better understanding of the built environment, globalization, the current financial crisis and the impact of these factors on the rapidly changing and evolving international architecture, engineering, construction fields.

We will, hopefully, obtain a better understanding of how these forces of globalization and the current financial crisis are having an impact on the built environment and how they will affect firms and your future career opportunities. We will also identify, review and discuss best practices and lessons that can be learned from recent events.

We will explore the "international built environment" in detail, examining how it functions and asking what are the managerial, entrepreneurial and professional opportunities, challenges and risks in it, especially growing crossover and multi-disciplinary opportunities; and we will seek to understand what makes this "built environment" so different from other sectors.

Much of 15.617 focuses on mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and the law-sensitive aspects of financial services and financial markets. The course is designed to be an introduction to business law that covers the fundamentals, including contracts, liability, regulation, employment, and corporations. This class also provides an in-depth treatment of the law of finance.

This course is designed to give students an introduction to the law-sensitive aspects of Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A). In Module I, we examine the legal implications of key roles and deal structures, and walk through some of the issues that would typically arise in a simple and friendly transaction. We also give a class to the legal issues arising in LBOs and the legal concerns of financial sponsors more generally, and another class to employment-related issues, including those relating to managers facing unsettled circumstances.

In Module II, we look at a variety of complications, including those that arise in the friendly or unfriendly purchase of a publicly-held company; deals involving distressed and hi-tech companies; antitrust concerns; allegations of misconduct by management or board members; and deals involving non-U.S. companies.

This course provides an overview of the distinctive features which distinguish sound categories of languages of the world. Theories which relate these categories to their acoustic and articulatory correlates, both universally and in particular languages, are covered. Models of word recognition by listeners, features, and phonological structure are also discussed. In addition, the course offers a variety of perspectives on these issues, drawn from Electrical Engineering, Linguistics and Cognitive Science.

In this course, experimental approaches to the study of hearing and deafness are presented through lectures, laboratory exercises and discussions of the primary literature on the auditory periphery. Topics include inner-ear development, functional anatomy of the inner ear, cochlear mechanics and micromechanics, mechano-electric transduction by hair cells, outer hair cells' electromotility and the cochlear amplifier, otoacoustic emissions, synaptic transmission, stimulus coding in auditory nerve responses, efferent control of cochlear function, damage and repair of hair-cell organs, and sensorineural hearing loss.

This course is being offered in conjunction with the colloquium The Politics of Reconstructing Iraq, which is sponsored by MIT’s Center for International Studies and Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Fundamentally, the course focuses on contemporary post-conflict countries (or in-conflict countries) and the role of planning and reconstruction in building nations, mitigating conflicts, reshaping the social, spatial, geopolitical, and political life, and determining the country’s future.

This seminar engages in the notion of space from various points of departure. The goal is first of all to engage in the term and secondly to examine possibilities of art, architecture within urban settings in order to produce what is your interpretation of space.

Coups, civil wars, revolutions, and peaceful transitions are the "real stuff" of political science. They show us why politics matters, and they highlight the consequences of political choices in times of institutional crisis. This course will help you understand why democracies emerge and why they die, from ancient times to the recent wave of democratization in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, and the developing world.

Few things are more dramatic than the collapse of a political system, whether through violent conflict or the peaceful negotiation of new political institutions. Explaining why regimes break down, why new ones emerge, and how these new regimes are consolidated are among the most important questions in political science. Not surprisingly, regime change has obsessed scholars for centuries, from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Marx to current theorists of democratization.

You will review several broad explanations for regime change before turning to more detailed examination of some of history's most famous and theoretically interesting political transitions: the collapse of the Weimar Republic in Germany; democratic breakdown, the consolidation of military dictatorship, and re-democratization in Chile; the breakdown of British colonial rule in the Massachussets Bay Colony; and protracted political transition in Mexico. There will be shorter discussions of democratization in Spain, South Africa, and South Korea; as well as democratic collapse in Brazil, Austria, and Italy.

This course is an introduction to the theory that tries to explain how minds are made from collections of simpler processes. It treats such aspects of thinking as vision, language, learning, reasoning, memory, consciousness, ideals, emotions, and personality. It incorporates ideas from psychology, artificial intelligence, and computer science to resolve theoretical issues such as wholes vs. parts, structural vs. functional descriptions, declarative vs. procedural representations, symbolic vs. connectionist models, and logical vs. common-sense theories of learning.

This course is an introduction to a theory that tries to explain how minds are made from collections of simpler processes. The subject treats such aspects of thinking as vision, language, learning, reasoning, memory, consciousness, ideals, emotions, and personality. Ideas incorporate psychology, artificial intelligence, and computer science to resolve theoretical issues such as whole vs. parts, structural vs. functional descriptions, declarative vs. procedural representations, symbolic vs. connectionist models, and logical vs. common-sense theories of learning.

This seminar provides an introduction to scholarship in a growing research community: the sociologists and sociologically-inclined organization theorists who study issues that relate, at least in a broad sense, to the interdisciplinary field of inquiry that is known as "strategy" or "strategic management" research. The course is not designed to survey the field of strategy. Rather, the focus is on getting a closer understanding of the recent work by sociologists and sociologically-oriented organization theorists that investigates central questions in strategic management. In particular, we will be concerned with identifying and assessing sociological work that aims to shed light on: (a) relative firm performance; (b) the nature of competition and market interaction; (c) organizational capabilities; (d) the beginnings of industries and firms; (e) the diffusion or transfer of ideas and practices across firms; and (f) strategic change.

This subject is a seminar-style course aimed at anyone who is interested in founding a software company or working for a software company or company that uses software technology extensively as a senior manager, developer, or product/program manager. It is also appropriate for people interested in the industry or in working as an industry analyst. Many of the issues we discuss are highly relevant for companies whose businesses are heavily dependent on software, such as in e-business or financial services, or embedded software for industrial applications.

This workshop explores how designers might become as sensitive to space as they are to objects. Through a number of projects and precedent studies, architectural design is studied in relation to the Space Between. The design process is studied in reverse, considering space first and objects second. This is not to imply that objects are not important, but rather that space is equally important.

6.933J / STS.420J provides an integrated approach to engineering practice in the real world. Students of 6.933J / STS.420J research the life cycle of a major engineering project, new technology, or startup company from multiple perspectives: technical, economic, political, and cultural. Research involves interviewing inventors, reading laboratory notebooks, evaluating patents, and looking over the shoulders of engineers as they developed today's technologies. This subject is for students who recognize that technical proficiency alone is only part of the formula for success in technology.

The doctoral seminar 15.764 focuses on theoretical work for studying operations planning and control problems. This term's special topic, "Customer-Driven Operations," considers how a number of companies have succeeded in focusing their operation systems on the customer. The class reviews the quantitative models and theoretical tools underlying some of the customer-driven operational practices of these cutting-edge companies. Students will read and present research papers on topics such as distribution systems, short life-cycle product management, and forecast evolution models.

This MIT OpenCourseWare site is dedicated to the memory of Bhuwan Singh, a member of the class.