Students will learn about equine-assisted services, including equine-assisted therapy, equine-assisted learning, horsemanship, and interactive vaulting. This course will focus on the approaches and benefits of these services to individuals with intellectual, physical, sensory, and/or psychosocial disabilities across the lifespan. This course consists of both classroom-based learning as well as field experience at the UMass Hadley Farm. No horse experience is required, but students should be comfortable interacting with horses.

This course examines the initial development of this genre of literature under the early Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, and its subsequent flourishing in various courts and under various influences. Students will survey writings that are representative of key themes and stages in this process of literary development, examine their various emphases, and try to gauge their perspectives on Islamic societies and foreign cultures. The course readings consist of selected texts from primary sources in translation along with analytic perspectives by modern scholars.

This course will cover contemporary investment strategies, with an emphasis on real-world relevance. The theme of the course will vary depending on instructor interest and expertise. Major topics: fundamental analysis, market efficiency, and computer age investing.

Seminars involving various problems and themes of mutual interest among faculty and graduate students. Recent topics have included studies of Christianity, Greek tragedy, theories of interpretation, theories of conspicuous consumption.

Students will work low power portable Edge devices for data acquisition and DL-based processing with an eye towards computer vision and healthcare analytics. Hands-on experiments with NVIDIA Jetson Nano/ Google Coral/ Intel Neural Compute Stick. This course will not provide any existing infrastructure and is ideally suited for students with strong motivation to master Deep-Learning on Edge with limited guidance.

Much recent work in computer science in a variety of areas, from game theory to machine learning and sensor networks, exploits sophisticated methods of optimization. This course is intended to give students an in-depth background in both the foundations as well as some recent trends in the theory and practice of optimization for computer science. There is currently no course in the department that covers these topics, and yet it is critical to a large number of research projects done within the department.

This studio arts course will explore a broad range of strategies, processes, and materials. Students will be exposed to a variety of approaches to art making through small, guided prompts as well as two independent projects. Students will undertake research particular to their materials, interests, and processes. Slide lectures introduce the class to contemporary and historical artists and art movements across cultural perspectives. From the dollhouse to the forest, soft sculpture to performative objects, this course embraces an expanded definition of studio art.