University of Pisa

Italy

APPLY

www.unipi.it

Available Courses

The course is aimed at the student’s acquisition of basic notions of the Italian language. Through games, readings and interactive activities, the student will learn the Italian language and acquire a certain familiarity with the Italian culture.

This course will present a survey of films, directors, film styles and narrative forms in Italy from the origins to the present. After an introductory part dedicated to media history and the birth of cinema, the class will focus on Italian cinema history from the silent era to the present. The course is designed as an introduction to the history, the art and the industry of Italian cinema through its aesthetics and its relation to the wider social and cultural environment of Italy. At the end of the course students will be able to demonstrate a solid knowledge of the history of Italian cinema and they will develop an ability to discuss and analyse cinema as an artistic, industrial, and socio-cultural phenomenon. They will acquire a critical capacity to recognize historical periods, authors, films, forms and styles, and will be able to appreciate the richness of the film language and particularly the main features that made Italian cinema great to the world and a source of inspiration worldwide.

Students are expected to acquire an understanding of the cultures and societies of the Greek and Roman worlds and to become familiar with the turning points of the Greek and Roman history, from the archaic period to Late Antiquity. Students will be able to conduct research and analysis of ancient sources and to acquired knowledge about the bibliographic tools and methodologies of ancient history.

This course is designed as a broad introduction to the Italian literature and culture from its origins through the early modern age. We will read texts by Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, and Machiavelli, to name only a few authors whose influence was crucial not only for the Italian letters, but for the definition of the Western culture overall. At the same time, this course will also trace the origins and development of Italian language, from its Latin roots throughout its social and literary evolution in poetry, novels, political and scientific essays. By combining close reading with a larger historical approach, we will explore the fascinating paradox of Italian literature: that is, an apparently national literature which developed in a fragmentary, regional, not-yet-national environment. By the end of this course students will be able to contextualize the main Italian authors within the European literary tradition, from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern centuries, and they will be able to use key concepts and terms to analyze literary texts.

Students will develop a general understanding of visual studies and contemporary image theories in aesthetics and understand these disciplines’ essential vocabulary and methodologies. Students will develop the basic knowledge to analyze visual culture and images from a critical and situated perspective.

Durung the course, we will study:
– Late Antique and Early Christian Art: the changes that occurred in art around c. 300 CE and the development of a Christian art. The main types of churches and religious or semi-religious buildings are introduced
– Ravenna: art production in the northern Italian city of Ravenna, mosaics, and how they were made
– Migration Period Art: artistic production of migratory groups from c. 300 to the eight century
– Carolingian Art: artistic production for the new Roman Emperor, Charles the Great, and his successors, from c. 750 to 987 CE
– Ottonian Art: artistic production under the Ottonian dynasty that ruled Western Europe from c. 887 to 1000 CE
– Romanesque, Part 1 and 2: Romanesque art and its tenets, covering the period from the late tenth to twelfth centuries. Italian variant of Romanesque; particular attention is given to the Cathedrals of Modena and Pisa
– Gothic, Part 1 and 2: Gothic style, its characteristics and development, starting from Abbot Suger’s intervention at Saint-Denis. Discussion of other relevant Gothic monuments
– The Italian Duecento: An Introduction. Discussion of the importance of the thirteenth century in the history of Italian art. The main novelties in religion and art are presented. Nicola Pisano, Giovanni Pisano, San Francesco in Assisi, Giotto, Sienese painters, Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Pisa’s Camposanto, Fourteenth-Century Art in Florence.

The course focuses on the regulation of the governance of the company. It will focus on the legal and non-legal mechanisms designed to minimise agency problems among the corporation’s constituencies. The course will look at corporate governance focusing on some of the most pressing topics: after a general introduction of the main features of corporations, the goal of corporate law and the major agency problems affecting corporaitons’ governance, the lessons will deal with more specific corporate governance topics, including i) initiation and appointment strategies, ii) directors’ relationships with shareholders and stakeholders; iii) directors’ duties; iv) corporate opportunities and related party transactions; The Course also aims at illustrating some basic principles of sectoral laws regarding businesses, as banking law, intellectual property law and competition law.

What does it take to be happy? Is happiness the true goal of humankind? What exactly is true happiness? Is it moral, intellectual, or both? And what does God have to do with it? These are just some of the questions that this introductory course to the history of medieval philosophy will try to answer, through a selection of readings of medieval thinkers who analyzed in depth the concept of happiness and its implications for the self-actualization of human life. We will follow the idea of happiness from its Greek foundations and through its various cultural and linguistic iterations in the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian milieus, thereby also showing the distinctive role that the notions of desire, pleasure, virtue, contemplation, and the limits of knowledge play for its meaningful definition.

The aim of the course is to provide students with a full understanding of macroeconomics from a European perspective, with a broad coverage of main topics and problems relevant in modern economies. We will study the working mechanisms of the goods market, the financial markets and the labor market, and their interconnections and implications in determining the evolution of output, prices, unemployment, interest rates and exchange rates in the short, medium, and long run.

– Short run (goods market; financial market; IS-LM model)
– Medium run (labor market; AS-AD model; Phillips curve; output, inflation and money relation)
– Long run (growth; capital accumulation; capital accumulation and technological progress; technological progress over different time frames)
– Expectations (basis; financial market; consumption and investment; output and policy)
– Open economies (openness; goods market; output, interest rate and exchange rate relation; exchange rate regimes)
– Pathologies (global financial crisis; high public debt; high inflation)

The course deals with the preparation of financial statements under the international accounting standards IAS/IFRS. The course provides knowledge on the initial recognition and measurement of key items including goodwill, intangibles, tangible assets, inventories, receivables, liabilities, equity. The course provides in-depth knowledge of the statement of financial position, income statement, cash flow statement.

The course provides notions on the main functions of management, as well as drivers of performance and the most relevant practices. The course also approaches the main issues related to financial accounting, with particular emphasis on the accounting recording process and the preparation of financial statements. Lastly, the course focuses on the managerial accounting, covering the cost concepts, the common methods for determining unit product costs, the cost-volume-profit relationships and the rationale for budgeting. For more information about the syllabus, please see on E-learning Website.

The fundamental issues of the Middle Ages between collective imagination and a reinterpretation of the past. This course provides an introduction to the history of Europe during the Middle Ages (ca. 300-1500) starting form the point of view of the collective imagination of this period of time. The class will broadly explore events and developments over centuries of political, social, and economic history. This course will also introduce students to the basic skills employed by historians (how to deal with primary sources, for example).

Data Preprocessing: data cleaning, integration, reduction, transformation and discretization.

Frequent pattern mining: basic concepts, A-priori algorithm, Pattern-Growth approach, vertical data format, pattern evaluation methods, constraint-based frequent pattern mining, colossal pattern.

Classification: basic concepts, decision tree induction, Bayes classification methods, rule-based classification, lazy learners, techniques for improving accuracy, model evaluation and selection.

Clustering: basic concepts, partitioning methods, hierarchical methods, density-based methods, grid-based methods, model evaluation and selection, clustering with constraints.

Outlier detection: statistical, proximity-based, clustering-based and classification-based approaches.

Sequential Pattern Mining: basic concepts, AprioriAll, AprioriSome, AprioriDynamicSome

Graph Mining: basic concept, geodesic distance, SimRank, Density-based approaches to graph clustering.

Distributed frameworks: basic concepts, Hadoop, MapReduce paradigm, Spark, some examples of data mining algorithms implemented by using MapReduce

Introduction to industrial communication systems. Industrial IoT: evolution and challenges.

Foundations of computer networks. Physical layer transmission; Link layer and local area networks. Ethernet LANs. Wireless networks: LANs, PANs. Internet architecture and protocols: IP and TCP/UDP protocols.

Today’s industrial networks: types of traffic, performance requirements. Fieldbus technologies, real-time Ethernet, industrial wireless networks. Industrial IoT: network interoperability: IPv6 over low power and lossy networks. Low-power Wide Area Networks.

Foundations of distributed computing and middleware services. Application layer protocols, data encoding & representation. Service Oriented Architectures, Web services. Cloud/edge computing principles and services. Industrial IoT: service and platform interoperability. Web of Things, protocols and (cloud-based) platforms.

Industrial Process Control System: Machine Level (PLC); Plant Level (DCS, SCADA); main components, configuration, architectures , dimensioning criteria. PLC programming basics; addressing, programming languages Ladder (LAD), Function Block Diagram (FBD), Graph. Introduction to CFC programming language; objects, faceplates.

Quality Control System: web scanner, sensors; operating principles. Machine Direction (MD) controls and Cross-Machine direction (CD) controls.

The Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM). Data selection and data preparation, categorisation, and prediction models. Supervised and unsupervised learning. Algorithms: the basic methods: Inferring rudimentary rules, Decision trees, Rule induction and association rules, Regression and clustering models, Neural networks.

Implementations: real machine learning schemes and prognostics applications. Verification and validation of models. Credibility. Enhancing the analysis: ensemble modelling.

The paper products industry uses renewable and recyclable resources to manufacture products that makes people’s lives better. Printing-writing papers, paper-based packaging, pulp, tissue and wood products play significant roles in everyday life by meeting needs for information, product protection, hygiene, housing and more. The manufacture of our industry’s products is customer and market driven.
Thus the objective of Sustainability and Circular Economy module is to bring a new approach of the key concepts of circular economy and sustainability, by combining the scientific disciplines of economy, management, engineering, technology, environment, and society, with a particular emphasis to paper sector.
As circular economy is necessary today to promote the goals of sustainable development; these scientific areas are not independent to each other, but their relations, interactions and synergies exist and should be further developed and studied.
Topics:
– The Bruntland Report
– Sustainaible development goals;
– Poverty and inequality;
– EU and sustainability;
– Circular economy;
– Environmental kuznets curve;
– Happiness and wellbeing
– Social and ecological limits to growth.

This course intends to provide students with the basic knowledge of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modern European and Italian history. During our class meeting, we will pay attention to the political, socio-economic, and cultural changes that developed from the French Revolution in 1789 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Course topics include, among others, the Risorgimento, the creation of the Italian Kingdom, the Great War, Fascism, the Second World War, the birth and politics of the Italian Republic. Students will be encouraged to engage in the critical analysis of the assigned readings and will be introduced to methodological questions that are crucial to the scholarly debate.

The student who successfully completes the course will gain a general knowledge of ancient Egyptian archaeology. The students will develop an awareness of Ancient Egypt archaeology’s complexity and a critical approach to the use of ancient sources from a modern perspective. He/she will be able to understand the importance to integrate archaeological, textual and artistic evidence for interpreting ancient Egyptian culture and history.