Could Romans be funny? Perhaps surprisingly, in a culture where seriousness (gravitas) and sternness (severitas) were praiseworthy attributes, Romans enjoyed theatrical productions adapted from Greek comedies - from raucous and ribald farces to more subtle comedies of manners. They also believed that satire, poetry that poked fun at the vices and foibles of human nature, was a truly Roman genre. Moreover, both comic and satrical elements appear in a wide range of Roman literature. Authors may include Plautus, Terence, Horace, Ovid, Martial, Juvenal, and others.

This course provides an introduction to the art and archaeology of the ancient Greeks. Through a chronological survey of monuments, sites, and artifacts, this course examines the major developments in Greek art, architecture, and archaeology from the Bronze Age (3rd millennium BCE) through the rise of Athens and Classical Art, the victories of Alexander the Great, and finally the conquest of Greece by Rome.

Designers are continually innovating ways of incorporating technology into today's world, from projections of butterflies on Grammy performance dresses to "smart" purses that sense when your wallet is missing. The recent emergence of low-cost, user-friendly components is making this new world of design accessible to a broad community. In this course, students will think critically about products already in the marketplace and will be given the tools to create their own designs.

Building large software systems introduces new challenges to software development. Appropriate design decisions and programming methodology can make a major difference in developing software that is correct and maintainable. In this course, students will learn techniques and tools that are used to build correct and maintainable software, improving their skills in designing, writing, debugging, and testing software. Topics include object-oriented design, testing, design patterns, and software architecture. This course is programming intensive.

This intermediate-level course presents a hands-on introduction to robotics. Each student will construct and modify a robot controlled by an Arduino-like microcontroller. Topics include kinematics, inverse kinematics, control-theory, sensors, mechatronics, and motion planning. Material will be delivered through one weekly lecture and one weekly guided laboratory. Assignments include a lab-preparatory homework, guided lab sessions, and out-of-class projects that build upon the in-class sessions.

The vast amount of unstructured and structured data on the web and in organizational databases has increased the need for approaches to processing large volumes of text. Such analyses help researchers and businesses to gain insights -- that would otherwise be too resource- and time-consuming to do manually -- into issues such as how much a consumer can be expected to spend in a particular context, the rise of hate groups and their impact on social media, or to whom a newly discovered manuscript may be attributed.

Computation is now an essential component of several modern statistical methods. This course will introduce students to computationally intensive techniques in statistics and explore the role of computation as a tool for discovery. Specifically, it will emphasize simulation-based, rather than calculus-based, approaches in statistical theory. Topics may include sampling algorithms, numerical analysis, and missing data. All data analysis in the course will be performed using R software. Research applications will be emphasized through assignments and student-defined projects.

This course studies the films of Pedro Almodóvar, European cinema's favorite bad boy turned acclaimed auteur. On the one hand, students learn to situate films within the context of contemporary Spanish history (the transition to democracy, the advent of globalization, etc.) in order to consider the local contours of postmodern aesthetics. On the other hand, the films provide a springboard to reflect on larger theoretical and ethical debates related to gender, sexuality, consumer culture, authenticity, and authorship.

The main objectives of this course are to consolidate the knowledge of the language, as well as to help both non-native and native speakers understand and explain how Spanish works as a linguistic system for communication. Topics covered in this course will range from a review of general goals and methods in Linguistics, to phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, semantics, and language variation within the Spanish speaking world. The coursework will highlight those grammatical aspects that are typically problematic for learners of Spanish as a second language.