Course

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been classified as one of the most important transformational technologies to improve social life and address organizations’ problems. AI’s practical application is profoundly versatile and has the unique ability to offer convenience and efficiency. However, the proliferated application of AI has also raised some skepticism since the impacts of AI involve not only institutions that maintain societal operations, but also the way in which we confront social problems.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by animals, including humans. Initially, computers were primarily used for numerical calculations, leading to the development of applications that supported routine tasks, such as retrieving news articles from the internet. However, achieving AI requires a substantial amount of data and precise handling of various details and issues. A notable project in the field of AI is ChatGPT, where the objective is to develop an advanced language model capable of generating human-like text. Through extensive training on diverse datasets, ChatGPT leverages deep learning techniques to comprehend context and produce coherent responses, making it a powerful tool for natural language processing tasks. In GPT series, GPT-3 is trained on a massive dataset of text and code, including text from the internet, books, code repositories, and other sources. The exact composition of the dataset is not publicly known, but it is estimated to be over 500 gigabytes in size.

The course covers various topics in data science. It includes an introduction to data, computer vision (CV) concepts such as semantic segmentation, image classification, and object detection. Additionally, it covers natural language processing (NLP) areas like language modeling, question answering, machine translation, sentiment analysis, and text generation. The course also delves into time series analysis, covering anomaly detection and time series forecasting, as well as speech-related topics like speech recognition and speech synthesis.

This course is an introduction and practice for data analysis for social analysis. In recent years, the application of Big Data has become an important trend in almost every field. This course employs a project-driven strategy that students are able to follow the instructors’ steps about how a data project is developed and how to use R programming to finish a project for academic studies, business analysis, and data journalism.

Innovation and human centered design are the driving force behind the mindsets that communities and employers are looking for today and into the future.  Adopting a human centered design approach presents opportunities to solve novel problems, start a business, and/or uncover new questions to explore. The process encourages students to take risks, confront failure, and build up resilience in the face of persistent challenges. In this course, students will learn idea creation techniques to examine, change, and address a social issue.  Students will apply creative skills more effectively through journaling, in-depth research, peer feedback, storytelling, and a semester long group project that develops a solution for a pressing social problem in or around the National Chengchi University community. The course requires meaningful cooperation with peers, willingness to provide candid feedback to others, and humility to receive critique from others.

Since the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election, the spread of misinformation has generated considerable concern. The rise in popularity of misinformation and conspiracy theories affects citizen’s cognition and consensus building, thereby threatening and often impairing the functioning of a democratic society. Thus, it has become crucial to address the negative impacts of misinformation. However, since misinformation is related to interdisciplinary fields, it is rather challenging to coordinate the expertise of relevant professionals to abate the prevalence of misinformation.