This course exposes students to foundational knowledge in each of the four high level domain areas of data science (Value, Design, Analytics, Systems). This includes an emphasis on ethical issues surrounding the field of data science and how these issues originate and extend into society more broadly.

Each student or small group will develop a project, be matched with a Global Studies faculty mentor, identify relevant community groups, and spend the semester working on that project. Students will discuss ideas, formulate plans, identify tactics, and engage with important social justice literatures. Importantly, the course will engage with the project of activism itself, which has the potential to replicate systems of inequality.

The current state of US police-community relations is in a precarious condition. Recent incidents of negative police-citizen encounters resulting in deaths of unarmed citizens & police officers has affected public trust & confidence in local law enforcement. Class focuses on problems of police-community relations & deliberates prospects for policy solutions. Students develop & present policy proposals to address a particular problem.

This course will center on exposing students to contemporary pipelines for data analysis through a series of steadily escalating use cases. The course will begin with simple local database construction such as SQLite and evolve to cloud base systems such as AWS or Google Cloud. This progression will include topics such as data lakes and other non-SQL applications as appropriate.

This course will help students understand the fundamentals of product management and how it applies to the product development lifecycle. Students will analyze cases covering different phases of the product development lifecycle, build technical and professional skills, and practice soft skills which are essential for success in the world of product.

Devoted to the writing of prose fiction, especially the short story. Student work is discussed in class and individual conferences. Parallel reading in the work of modern novelists and short story writers is required. For advanced students with prior experience in writing fiction. May be repeated with different instructor. For instructions on how to apply to this class, see creativewriting.virginia.edu/ugrad.

One of two required readings courses for students admitted to the Area Program in Literary Prose, also open to other qualified students. For instructions on how to apply to this class, see creativewriting.virginia.edu/ugrad.

What does it mean to prioritize equity in policy? Equity must be operationalized & incorporated into all policy stages: agenda setting, design, implementation, & evaluation. Consider frameworks & tools for centering equity in policy design: engage disadvantaged communities; evaluate degree current policies promote equity, examine policy histories & differential impacts; surface apparent tradeoffs in elevating equity over other analytic concerns.

The data science project course will allow students to take the knowledge gained in each of the four required courses and apply them to a data driven problem. Students will work in groups and can either choose a project provided by SDS faculty or can propose a project for approval. Upon completion of the course students will be required to present their results and publish project content to an open forum.

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.