The purpose of the course is to introduce fundamentals on road traffic flow science and traffic engineering including traffic flow fundamentals, queuing theory, highway capacity and geometric design/network design, intersection control, Intelligent Transport Systems and its applications. Understand the nature of traffic flow including traffic congestion, traffic accident risk, and influence on general social activities including economy. Traffic engineering measures to alleviate negative impacts to the society should be systematically understood, including highway & street geometric design, traffic flow management and control, and utilization of emerging technologies including Intelligent Transport Systems.

At the end of the course, the student should have familiarised with the key concepts informing epistemological and methodological debates in social science, such as hypothesis, theory, falsification, verification, covering law, causality, with particular consideration for positivistic paradigms and anti- or post-positivistic reactions. The student should be aware of the specific difficulties of social scientific disciplines in studying human societies arising from the problematic separation between the studied object and the studying subject, and the link between social science and the political dimension. He should familiarise with problems of social research design, starting from the specificities characterizing the various stages of social science research. The student should become aware of the functional classification of social science methods in qualitative and quantitative, familiarising with a number of techniques in both domains, while grasping that contemporary social research increasingly requires the application of different methods and interdisciplinary approaches, which also lead to the necessity of teamwork coordination. The course also aims at providing a large variety of examples where the concepts and principles described above find their application and didactic clarification. Those examples will focus in particular on the study of technology and its social impact. Finally, the student should become aware of the moral implications, limits and rules informing social science research, as well as of the role and importance of effective communication in the social sciences.

The goal of this course is to enhance students’ abilities to apply insights from the behavioral sciences in designing policies and interventions that improve well-being of societies across the world. This course accomplishes it by 1) providing a general overview of recent advancements in behavioral science research from psychology and behavioral economics, and 2) analyzing the gaps between research, evidence and practice. Applications of the materials covered in this course include public health, environment, management, education, business, politics, and development, among others.

The course will take an intersectional approach to why we commonly find an underrepresentation of women in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. The course will begin by addressing our own unconscious biases and stereotypes, and question the research behind male and female differences. We will cover the brief history of the underrepresentation of minorities and explore research articles on why and how women and other minorities have been excluded from STEM fields. Students will be expected to read scientific articles, discuss them, and apply those concepts to examine their own social environments.

The course will take an intersectional approach to why we commonly find an underrepresentation of women in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. The course will begin by addressing our own unconscious biases and stereotypes, and question the research behind male and female differences. We will cover the brief history of the underrepresentation of minorities and explore research articles on why and how women and other minorities have been excluded from STEM fields. Students will be expected to read scientific articles, discuss them, and apply those concepts to examine their own social environments.

The course will take an intersectional approach to why we commonly find an underrepresentation of women in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. The course will begin by addressing our own unconscious biases and stereotypes, and question the research behind male and female differences. We will cover the brief history of the underrepresentation of minorities and explore research articles on why and how women and other minorities have been excluded from STEM fields. Students will be expected to read scientific articles, discuss them, and apply those concepts to examine their own social environments.

The course will take an intersectional approach to why we commonly find an underrepresentation of women in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. The course will begin by addressing our own unconscious biases and stereotypes, and question the research behind male and female differences. We will cover the brief history of the underrepresentation of minorities and explore research articles on why and how women and other minorities have been excluded from STEM fields. Students will be expected to read scientific articles, discuss them, and apply those concepts to examine their own social environments.

The development and diffusion of science innovative technologies is indispensable for modern society. However, despite its benefits, the development of science and technology is not without various risks and social problems. So far as we are going to make societal decisions for the use of science and technologies with diverse social implications that encompass both risks and benefits, sometimes involving values implications, there is a need for mechanisms of decision making and management of the development and utilization of science and technology. Decisions can be different depending on environmental, institutional and cultural conditions. In addition, innovative policy instruments/ mechanisms to deal with rapidly changing science and technology, including regulatory measures, are required for implementing decisions. This course will deal with wide range of issues from local to global levels faced at the interface areas between science, technology and public policy from comparative perspective of Japan, the US and Europe. It offers key theoretical issues surrounding Science and Technology and provides students with the tools and frameworks, such as risk assessment/ management and transition management, to analyze them. This course invites students from both natural science backgrounds (i.e. the graduate school of engineering, new frontier science and so on) and social science backgrounds (graduate school of public policy, law and politics, and economics and public policy). We expect students to acquire interdisciplinary perspective in addition to their primary major, which is one of the critical skill in analyzing complex social technical issues posed by science and technology.

This course covers principles and topics related to environmental sciences important for the development of the world. Global and local environmental issues related to climate change, agriculture and marine environment, will be introduced in the course.

Science, technology, and innovation (STI) shape the foundation of the contemporary society and thus make a major arena of public policy. The complex nature of the STI system poses various challenges, and effective policymaking approaches have been explored and developed. Evidence-based policy making (EBPM) is one such approach that is expected to address the challenges and has been implemented in STI policy design, although it has its own challenges and limitations. In this course, students are expected to learn the context of STI and the basis of EBPM as well as to learn how EBPM can be applied to STI policy design.