Teams will solve an analytics challenge from a sponsoring company. The company will provide the data and the problem. You and your team will design a solution in the form of a set of visualizations and a model and assess the business impact in conjunction with the sponsoring company. Key questions: How much money will the proposed solution save? How many new customers will the proposed solution attract? The core deliverable is a presentation.

In the second capstone course you will assess the business impact of your solution and should be done in conjunction with the sponsoring company. Key assessment questions may include: a) how much money (or other resources) will the proposed solution save? b) How many new customers will the proposed solution attract? c) how much money will current customers spend? The core deliverable is a report on the business impact your proposed solution.

Course investigates practical challenges policy researchers face conducting impact evaluations. Develop capacity to replicate prominent empirical research using experimental & quasi-experimental methods & present results in compelling, accessible formats.Course primarily uses R (No prior exp. w/R expected). Course assumes prior grad-level instruction in experimental & quasi-experimental methods and Batten MPPs likely have completed RMDA II.

In this course, you acquire skills in analytics project scoping, planning, risk analysis and management, resource allocation and budgeting, monitoring, and real options thinking. You will use state-of-the-art software such as Microsoft Project and Jira to plan and execute large-scale projects. You will also consider the challenge of managing projects and develop an awareness of behavioral decision-making biases in project management.

In this course, you will build a more accurate and up-to-date understanding of what drives human behavior, understand the nature and complexity of moral issues that digital technology and analytics raise, and practice making decisions that balance your ability to use analytics and benefit people.

The threat of international terrorism in the wake of 9/11 prompted costly & controversial US military & stabilization efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Initially targeting terrorism, it expanded into regime change. Bush, Obama, & Trump administrations struggled to craft effective strategies, facing setbacks like ISIS & Taliban resurgence. What can we learn from this chapter in America¿s endeavor to counter terrorist and security threats abroad?

Why are some countries poor and how can growth be increased? How do we ensure basic services for the poorest? This course examines capacity, demand, and influence in development, covering poverty, inequality, and growth. Topics include land, labor, credit, human capital, environment, urbanization, risk, decentralization, and corruption. Students test theories of effectiveness, design anti-poverty programs, and write policy memos.

Graduate-level poetry writing workshop for advanced writing students. A weekly 2.5 hour workshop discussion of student poems. For more details, visit our program website at creativewriting.virginia.edu.

International relations studies often overlook underlying geographic, economic, & intern¿l order dimensions that varyingly benefit some states & disadvantage others. How does access to open seas or having a veto at the UN benefit a country? How does being landlocked or lacking natural resources disadvantage a country? Course highlights underlying dimensions shaping how a country perceives its interests & what it emphasizes in foreign policy.

Covers advanced theoretical concepts for deep neural networks. Topics include convolutional neural networks and their design principles, encoder-decoder architectures, recurrent neural networks, transformers, bounding box detection, image segmentation, generative adversarial networks, diffusion models, etc. Using open-source Python libraries such as NumPy, TensorFlow, and Keras, to understand how theoretical concepts are implemented.