This course focuses on the design of control systems. Topics covered include: frequency domain and state space techniques; control law design using Nyquist diagrams and Bode plots; state feedback, state estimation, and the design of dynamic control laws; and elementary analysis of nonlinearities and their impact on control design. There is extensive use of computer-aided control design tools. Applications to various aerospace systems, including navigation, guidance, and control of vehicles, are also discussed.

This course offers an introduction to ethics in business, with a focus on business management. Students explore theoretical concepts in business ethics, and cases representing the challenges they will likely face as managers. There is opportunity to work with guest faculty as well as business and other professional practitioners. Individual class sessions take the form of moderated discussion, with occasional short lectures from the instructor.

This will be a seminar on classic and contemporary work on central topics in ethics. The first third of the course will focus on metaethics: we will examine the meaning of moral claims and ask whether there is any sense in which moral principles are objectively valid. The second third of the course will focus on normative ethics: what makes our lives worth living, what makes our actions right or wrong, and what do we owe to others? The final third of the course will focus on moral character: what is virtue, and how important is it? Can we be held responsible for what we do? When and why?

This course considers the interaction between law, policy, and technology as they relate to the evolving controversies over control of the Internet. In addition, there will be an in-depth treatment of privacy and the notion of “transparency” – regulations and technologies that govern the use of information, as well as access to information. Topics explored will include:

Legal Background for Regulation of the Internet
Fourth Amendment Law and Electronic Surveillance
Profiling, Data Mining, and the U.S. PATRIOT Act
Technologies for Anonymity and Transparency
The Policy-Aware Web

Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the algorithmic judgment at its core, is developing at breakneck speed. This version of the popular Ethics for Engineers course focuses on the ethics issues involved in the latest developments of computer science.

This seminar is made possible through a collaboration between Radius and the Philosophy section of MIT. This course provides an opportunity to explore a wide range of ethical issues through guided discussions that are geared to equip students for ongoing reflection and action. Lectures and discussions with guest faculty, as well as attendance at on-and off-campus events, expose students to ethical problems and resources for addressing them. The course also encourages students to work collaboratively as they clarify their personal and vocational principles.
Topics vary each term and reflect the interests of those enrolled.

This video aims to delve into the human problems brought out by issues in artificial intelligence, specifically with respect to bias. It is suitable for classroom use or as a standalone video for those who wish to understand the issue more deeply than is conventionally covered. For classroom use, we recommend watching the chapterized version of the video and working through the teaching materials provided for each chapter.

This course introduces the tools of philosophical ethics through application to contemporary issues concerning technology. It takes up current debates on topics such as privacy and surveillance, algorithmic bias, the promise and peril of artificial intelligence, automation and the future of work, and threats to democracy in the digital age from the perspective of users, practitioners, and regulatory/governing bodies.

Although this class starts by critically examining the term “ethnic” as it defines a wide range of cultural forms over time, we will focus mostly on contemporary writers. Questions to consider will include: How has ethnic writing changed American culture and renovated forms of literary expression? What are the varieties and nuances of what we might call an ethnic subjectivity? What could it mean to harbor fugitives within the self: transgressive thoughts or a “foreign” identity? And what is the future of “ethnic” literature in a global space?

This course is designed to provide students with a broad overview of the major theories on the relationship between ethnicity and politics. The course is divided into three sections. The first covers general theory and discusses the social construction of ethnicity as well as the limits of construction. The second section discusses ethnicity as a dependent variable. This section studies the forces that shape the development of ethnic identities and their motivating power. The third section addresses ethnicity as an independent variable. In other words, it focuses on how ethnicity operates to affect important political and economic outcomes.
This course is the first semester of a year-long sequence on ethnic politics. However, each semester is self-contained and students may take the course in either or both semesters. Ethnic Politics I aims for breadth over depth. It covers many works in the “canon” of texts on ethnic politics as well as addressing many major topics (modernization, entrepreneurship, prejudice, ethnic party formation, etc.) in one week sessions. Ethnic Politics II covers some of these topics in greater depth and also requires a major research paper.

This course is designed mainly for political science graduate students conducting or considering conducting research on identity politics. While 17.504 Ethnic Politics I is designed as a primarily theoretical course, Ethnic Politics II switches the focus to methods. It aims to familiarize the student with the current conventional approaches as well as major challenges to them. The course discusses definition and measurement issues as well as briefly addressing survey techniques and modeling.

An introduction to the cross-cultural study of ethnic and national identity. We examine the concept of social identity, and consider the ways in which gendered, linguistic, religious, and ethno-racial identity components interact. We explore the history of nationalism, including the emergence of the idea of the nation-state, as well as ethnic conflict, globalization, identity politics, and human rights.

Discerning the ethnic and racial dimensions of politics is considered by some indispensable to understanding contemporary world politics. This course seeks to answer fundamental questions about racial and ethnic politics. To begin, what are the bases of ethnic and racial identities? What accounts for political mobilization based upon such identities? What are the political claims and goals of such mobilization and is conflict between groups and/or with government forces inevitable? How do ethnic and racial identities intersect with other identities, such as gender and class, which are themselves the sources of social, political, and economic cleavages? Finally, how are domestic ethnic/racial politics connected to international human rights? To answer these questions, the course begins with an introduction to dominant theoretical approaches to racial and ethnic identity. The course then considers these approaches in light of current events in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the United States.

This course is a practicum-style seminar in anthropological methods of ethnographic fieldwork and writing. Depending on student experience in ethnographic reading and practice, the course is a mix of reading anthropological and science studies ethnographies; and formulating and pursuing ethnographic work in local labs, companies, or other sites.

From pineapples grown in Hawaii to English-speaking call centers outsourced to India, the legacy of the “Age of Imperialism” appears everywhere in our modern world. This class explores the history of European imperialism in its political, economic, and cultural dimensions from the 1840s through the 1960s.

This course examines similarities and differences in politics and political economy in Britain, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. In particular, the course focuses on the structure of political power within the state, and on important institutions that form the link between state and society, especially political parties and interest organizations.

This subject surveys main currents of European cultural and intellectual history in the modern period. Such a foundation course is central to the humanities in Europe. The curriculum introduces a set of ideas and arguments that have played a formative role in European cultural history, and acquaints them with some exemplars of critical thought. Among the topics to be considered: the critique of religion, the promise of independence, the advance of capitalism, the temptations of Marxism, the origins of totalitarianism, and the dialects of enlightenment. In addition to texts, we will also discuss pieces of art, incl. paintings and film.

This course provides a broad conceptual and historical introduction to scientific theories of evolution and their place in the wider culture. It embraces historical, scientific and anthropological/cultural perspectives grounded in relevant developments in the biological sciences since 1800 that are largely responsible for the development of the modern theory of evolution by natural selection. Students read key texts, analyze key debates (e.g. Darwinian debates in the 19th century, and the creation controversies in the 20th century) and give class presentations.

Current research on the evolution and development of cognition and affect, including intuitive physics, biology, and psychology, language, emotions, sexuality, and social relations.

Evolution of Physical Oceanography was created to mark the career of Henry M. Stommel, the leading physical oceanographer of the 20th Century and a longtime MIT faculty member. The authors of the different chapters were asked to describe the evolution of their subject over the history of physical oceanography, and to provide a survey of the state-of-the-art of their subject as of 1980. Many of the chapters in this textbook are still up-to-date descriptions of active scientific fields, and all of them are important historical records. This textbook is made available courtesy of The MIT Press.