Not available at this time

Course taught in English. Re-examines Italian neo-realism and the filmmakers' project of social reconstruction after Fascism. How Italian film produces meanings and pleasures through semiotics and psychoanalysis, so as to understand the specific features of Italian cinema, its cultural politics, and the Italian contribution to filmmaking and formal aesthetics. Course taught in English. (Gen. Ed. AT)

This course examines the history and cultural production of Italians in the United States from 1870 to today. The first part of the course discusses the conditions that spurred mass emigration from Italy and led to the constitution of Italian-Americans as the fourth largest ethnic group in the United States today. Analyzing literary texts, films, and historical documents, this course follows the evolution of Italian-American culture and identity, both collective and personal.

Course taught in Italian: Readings and discussions will be in Italian; written assignments for most students will be in English, as this course satisfies the departmental jr. year writing requirement. Students examine various genres of Italian cultural expression, including poetry, song, the short story, theater, cinema, the novel, and, to a limited extent, art history. Emphasis is placed on developing and refining students' written critical responses to the objects of study. Each year the thematic content of the course will vary.

Not available at this time

This is a graduate-level introduction to cryptography, with an emphasis on definitions are proofs of security. The viewpoint of the course is "theory applied to practice" in that we attempt to treat topics of direct practical value. Topics covered include: blockciphers, pseudorandom functions and permutations, symmetric-key encryption and modes of operation, hash functions, message authentication codes, authenticated encryption and TLS/SSL, computational algebra and number theory, public-key encryption, digital signatures, and public-key infrastructures.

Machine learning is the computational study of artificial systems that can adapt to novel situations, discover patterns from data, and improve performance with practice. This course will cover the mathematical foundations of supervised and unsupervised learning. The course will provide a state-of-the-art overview of the field, with an emphasis on implementing and deriving learning algorithms for a variety of models from first principles.

This course will provide an introduction to, and comprehensive overview of, reinforcement learning (RL).

This course will focus on modern, practical methods for deep learning with neural networks. The course will begin with a description of simple classifiers such as perceptrons and logistic regression classifiers, and move on to standard neural networks, convolutional neural networks, some elements of recurrent neural networks, and transformers. The emphasis will be on understanding the basics and on practical application more than on theory. Many applications will be in computer vision, but we will make an effort to cover some natural language processing (NLP) applications as well.

This is a class devoted to the study of securing distributed systems, with blockchain-based cryptocurrencies serving as our real platform of interest. We'll start with the fundamentals of Lamport's, Fischer's, and Douceur's results that fence-in all consensus system, and discuss Byzantine fault tolerance. We'll also look at the efficiency of the network architectures for peer-to-peer;distributed system communication and attacks on their security, such as denial of service attacks. And we'll review relevant applied cryptography such as elliptic curves.