University-Lectures-Online

David Wentzlaff

Princeton University

Start: September 2012 (10 weeks)
Workload: 5-8 hours per week.
Computer Science: Systems, Security, Networking
Electrical and Materials Engineering

In this course, you will learn to design the computer architecture of complex modern microprocessors.

This course forms a strong foundation in the understanding and design of modern computing systems. Building on a computer organization base, this course explores techniques that go into designing a modern microprocessor. Fundamental understanding of computer architecture is key not only for students interested in hardware and processor design, but is a foundation for students interested in compilers, operating systems, and high performance programming. This course will explore how the computer architect can utilize the increasing number of transistors available to improve the performance of a processor. Focus will be given to architectures that can exploit different forms of parallelism, whether they be implicit or explicit. This course covers architectural techniques such as multi-issue superscalar processors, out-of-order processors, Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processors, advanced caching, and multiprocessor systems.

Tucker Balch

Georgia Institute of Technology

Start: TBA (6 weeks)
Workload: 5-7 hours/week
Economics & Finance

Find out how modern electronic markets work, why stock prices change in the ways they do, and how computation can help our understanding of them. Learn to build algorithms and visualizations to inform investing practice.

Why do the prices of some companies’ stocks seem to move up and down together while others move separately? What is High Frequency Trading? What does portfolio “diversification” really mean and how important is it? What should the price of a stock be? How can we discover and exploit the relationships between equity prices automatically?

We’ll examine these questions, and others, from a computational point of view. You will learn the principles and algorithms hedge funds and investment professionals use to maximize return and reduce risk in equity portfolios.

We start with a tour of the mathematics and statistics that underlie equity price changes, and the relationships between different groups of equities. We’ll review the most important economic theories of investing and how to create programs that take advantage of them. We’ll look at the data needed to do this, and how to manipulate it effectively.

John Steven Hutchinson

Rice University

Start: January 2013 (10 weeks )
Workload: 4-6 hours/week
Physical & Earth Sciences

This introduction to fundamental chemical concepts of atomic and molecular structure will emphasize the development of these concepts from experimental observations and scientific reasoning.

This course will cover an introduction to the atomic molecular structure of matter, similar to a typical first semester General Chemistry course. The fundamental concepts will be introduced via the Concept Development Approach developed at Rice University and utilizing a free on-line textbook, Concept Development Studies in Chemistry, available via Rice’s Connexions project. In this approach, rather than simply telling you the concepts you need to know and then asking you to memorize them or apply them, we will develop these concepts from experimental observations and scientific reasoning. There are several reasons for using this approach. One reason is that most of us our inductive learners, meaning that we like to make specific observations and then generalize from there. Many of the most significant concepts in Chemistry are counter-intuitive. When we see where those concepts come from, we can more readily accept them, explain them, and apply them. A second reason is that scientific reasoning in general and Chemistry reasoning in particular are inductive processes. This Concept Development approach illustrates those reasoning processes. A third reason is that this is simply more interesting. The structure and reactions of matter are fascinating puzzles to be solved by observation and reasoning. It is more fun intellectually when we can solve those puzzles together, rather than simply have the answers to the riddles revealed at the outset.

Robert Ghrist

Penn University of Pennsylvania

Start: 27 August 2012 (12 weeks)
Mathematics

This course provides a brisk, entertaining treatment of differential and integral calculus, with an emphasis on conceptual understanding and applications to the engineering, physical, and social sciences.

Calculus is one of the grandest achievements of human thought, explaining everything from planetary orbits to the optimal size of a city to the periodicity of a heartbeat. This brisk course covers the core ideas of single-variable Calculus with emphases on conceptual understanding and applications. The course is ideal for students beginning in the engineering, physical, and social sciences. Distinguishing features of the course include:

• the introduction and use of Taylor series and approximations from the beginning;
• a novel synthesis of discrete and continuous forms of Calculus;
• an emphasis on the conceptual over the computational; and
• a clear, entertaining, unified approach.

Vicki Colvin

Rice University

Start: TBA (10 weeks)

Physical & Earth Sciences

If chemistry is the science of stuff, then analytical chemistry answers the question: what is it? And how much of it do you have? This advanced chemistry course covers the basics of quantitative analysis and analytical chemistry in a one semester format.

Analytical chemistry is an advanced topic introduced to chemistry majors often in their sophomore year. It is a broad area that covers what I refer to as ‘old school’ principles of solution phase chemistry and quantitative analysis, as well as more current treatments that introduce a suite of modern analytical instrumentation. In this course, both areas are covered in an integrated curriculum that emphasizes real-world examples of analytical problems. Students who complete this class will see their knowledge of fundamental chemistry strengthened as they work with familiar ideas from freshman chemistry (e.g. acids and bases, solubility, electrochemistry, stoichometry) to solve analysis problems. They will also be introduced to the instrumentation of analytical chemistry, with a particular emphasis on chromatography, and learn to apply these tools to problems in medicine, manufacturing, materials science and even food chemistry.

Christian Terwiesch

University of Pennsylvania

Start: 24 September 2012 (6 weeks)
Workload: 5-7 hrs/week
Business & Management

This course will teach you how to analyze and improve business processes, be it in services or in manufacturing. You will learn how to improve productivity, how to provide more choice to customers, how to reduce response times, and how to improve quality.

Remember the last time you went to a restaurant. What did you expect from that restaurant? You wanted to find something on the menu that you liked, you wanted the meal to be prepared according to high quality standards, you wanted to get it quickly and didn’t want to pay too much money for it. Now, remember the last time you went to a doctor’s office or a hospital. What did you want the doctors and nurses to do? You wanted them to provide the right care for you, you wanted the care delivered with great quality, you wanted to get the care quickly, and you (or your insurance) didn’t want to too pay too much for it.

Put differently, the management skills that you need to run the operations of a restaurant are the same that you need to run a hospital. And these are the skills you will learn in this course. Specifically, you will learn how to improve productivity, increase responsiveness, provide more choice to the customer, and deliver higher quality standards. In short, you will learn how to analyze business processes and how to improve them. Along the way, you will learn about topics such as Lean Operations, Six Sigma, and the Toyota production system, you will hear about bottlenecks, flows rates, and inventory levels. And, much, much more.

Nick Parlante

Stanford University

Start: TBA (6 weeks)
Workload: 3-5 hours/week
Computer Science: Programming & Software Engineering

CS101 teaches the essential ideas of Computer Science for a zero-prior-experience audience. The course uses small coding experiments in the browser to play with the nature of computers, understanding their strengths and limitations.

Computers can appear very complicated, but in reality, computers work within just a few, simple patterns. CS101 demystifies and brings those patterns to life, which is useful for anyone using computers today.

In CS101, students play and experiment with short bits of "computer code" to bring to life to the power and limitations of computers. Everything works within the browser, so there is no extra software to download or install. CS101 also provides a general background on computers today: what is a computer, what is hardware, what is software, what is the internet. No previous experience is required other than the ability to use a web browser.

Irfan Essa

Georgia Institute of Technology

Start: TBA (8 weeks)
Workload: 5-7 hours/week
Information, Technology, and Design
Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Vision

Learn about the basics of how computation has impacted the entire workflow of photography, from how images are captured, manipulated and collaborated on and shared.

This course is aimed at teaching you the basics of how computation has impacted the entire workflow of photography, from how images are captured, manipulated and collaborated on and shared. At the core of it photography means, drawing with light and how light can be captured to form images/videos. In this class you will learn about how the optics, and the sensor within a camera are generalized, as well as the lighting and other aspects of the environment are generalized to capture novel images. We will also cover post and pre processing techniques to manipulate and improve images. Finally, we will consider the power of the web and the Internet for both analyzing and sharing images, as well as the impact of mobile smart phone cameras. This class builds on concepts from well known disciplines like computer vision, computer graphics, and image processing. Look forward to participate in this class.

Alex Aiken

Stanford University

Start: TBA (10 weeks)
Workload: 8-10 hours/week, 10-20 hours/week with programming assignments
Computer Science: Systems, Security, Networking
Computer Science: Programming & Software Engineering

This course will discuss the major ideas used today in the implementation of programming language compilers. You will learn how a program written in a high-level language designed for humans is systematically translated into a program written in low-level assembly more suited to machines!

This course will discuss lexical analysis, parsing, syntax-directed translation, abstract syntax trees, types and type checking, intermediate languages, dataflow analysis, program optimization, code generation, and runtime systems. As a result, you will learn how a program written in a high-level language designed for humans is systematically translated into a program written in low-level assembly more suited to machines. Along the way we will also touch on how programming languages are designed, programming language semantics, and why there are so many different kinds of programming languages.

The course lectures will be presented in short videos. To help you master the material, there will be in-lecture questions to answer, quizzes, and two exams: a midterm and a final. There will also be homework in the form of exercises that ask you to show a sequence of logical steps needed to derive a specific result, such as the sequence of steps a type checker would perform to type check a piece of code, or the sequence of steps a parser would perform to parse an input string. This checking technology is the result of ongoing research at Stanford into developing innovative tools for education, and we're excited to be the first course ever to make it available to students.

An optional course project is to write a complete compiler for COOL, the Classroom Object Oriented Language. COOL has the essential features of a realistic programming language, but is small and simple enough that it can be implemented in a few thousand lines of code. Students who choose to do the project can implement it in either C++ or Java.

Catherine R. Lucey, MD

UCSF

Start: 28 January 2013 (6 weeks)
Workload: 4-6 hours/week
Medicine

Participants will learn how to move efficiently from patient signs and symptoms to a rational and prioritized set of diagnostic possibilities and will learn how to study and read to facilitate this process.

Clinical problem solving or diagnostic reasoning is the skill that physicians use to understand a patient’s complaints and then to identify a short, prioritized list of possible diagnoses that could account for those complaints. This differential diagnosis then drives the choice of diagnostic tests and possible treatments. Despite striking advances in information technology, clinical problem solving has not yet been effectively replicated by computers, making it essential that clinicians work to develop expertise in this very important skill set. While television shows make this seem like a magical process, work done by cognitive psychologists and medical educators has helped us understand the ways in which expert physicians reason through these difficult problems to help their patients.

This course will examine the ways physicians think about clinical problem solving and will help participants develop competence in the building blocks of clinical problem solving. The professor will use cases to illustrate different reasoning strategies and will discuss how both correct and incorrect diagnoses result from these strategies. Participants will use sample clinical cases to practice what they have learned through the lectures. Finally, the professor will discuss strategies to help students and young physicians read textbooks and articles in a way that enhances their ability to use information in the clinical environment.

Benjamin Abella, MD MPhil

Penn University of Pennsylvania

Start: TBA (4 - 5 weeks)
Medicine

This course will explore new breakthroughs in the treatment of patients during cardiac arrest and after successful resuscitation, including new approaches to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and post-arrest care.

Topics will include: (1) the underlying challenges of cardiac arrest in public health, (2) the important role of chest compressions and ventilations, and new thinking about how to improve these approaches in resuscitation care, (3) the role of defibrillation and the exciting growth of automatic external defibrillation (AED) programs, and (4) the new science of targeted temperature management, also known as therapeutic hypothermia, to improve brain function after circulation is restored. This course is designed for a broad audience including the lay public, emergency medical personnel and other health care providers.

Roger Coke Barr

Duke University

Start: 24 September 2012 (8 weeks)
Workload: 6-9 hours/week
Physical & Earth Sciences
Biology & Life Sciences

Nerves, the heart, and the brain are electrical. How do these things work? This course presents fundamental principles, described quantitatively.

In this class you will learn how to think about electrically active tissue in terms of individual mechanisms, and you will learn to analyze the mechanisms quantitatively as well as describe them qualitatively. The course uses many of the same examples used by Hodgkin and Huxley, who won the Nobel Prize for their experimental unraveling of the mechanisms of the nerve axon of the giant squid, and their creation of a mathematical model of membranes and propagation to understand its function. That work has been the foundational element of most subsequent understandings of electrically active tissue, whether in nerves, the brain or in muscle, including the heart.

In this course, topics include:

1. The electrical charging of active membranes from the creation and use of differences in ionic concentrations across the membrane.
2. The stimulation of the membrane, both naturally and from engineered sources.
3. The creation of action potentials by the membrane in response to stimulation.
4. The chain reaction of membrane responses, with each small region or cell initiating an action potential in adjacent ones.
5. The observation of associated electrical currents in terms of extracellular wave voltages they create, the basis of clinical measurements such as the electrocardiogram.

The course will at each step present equations and other quantitative reasoning so that you will be able to go beyond describing what happens qualitatively and be able to link together the phenomena in the mosaic in a quantitative fashion, which is essential to judging whether specific changes in inputs are important to the outcome. Through the use of quantitative analysis, you will learn that all the elements of the system are tied together and be able to link together and analyze the effects of one part on another.

Robert S. Lawrence, Keeve Nachman

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Start: January 2013 (6 weeks)
Workload: 4-6 hours/week
Health and Society & Medical Ethics

Explore how food intersects with public health and the environment as it moves from field to plate.

A food system encompasses the activities, people and resources involved in getting food from field to plate. Along the way, it intersects with aspects of public health, equity and the environment. In this course, we will provide a brief introduction to the U.S. food system and how food production practices and what we choose to eat impacts the world in which we live. Through several case studies, we will discuss some key historical and political factors that have helped shape the current food system and consider alternative approaches from farm to fork. The course will be led by a team of faculty and staff from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. Guest lecturers will include experts from a variety of disciplines, including public health and agriculture.