In this course, you'll learn how to develop a strong research proposal, including identifying research gaps, formulating hypotheses, and choosing the best experimental approaches. We'll also discuss strategies for structuring your proposal, critically engaging with the literature, and managing a research project effectively. Along the way, you'll strengthen your scientific writing, critical thinking, and communication skills—essential for becoming an independent researcher. Additionally, you'll develop valuable professional skills such as collaboration, mentoring, and time management. By the end of the course, you'll be able to articulate your research ideas, justify your methods, and connect your project with your long-term academic and career goals.

This course uses a genre theory approach to examine how popular writing about science and technology reflects and shapes social structures. Students will investigate how science and technology are defined, how they differ from other kinds of knowledge-making, and what roles they play in society. The readings, writing assignments, and discussions will help students to analyze how texts implicitly and explicitly address these questions, thus developing their ability to assess and communicate scientific and technological concepts for a broad audience. Students taking this course should anticipate completing weekly reading and writing tasks outside of class in preparation for the in-class lecture and discussion. Goal 4: Quality education Goal 9: Industry, innovation and infrastructure Goal 16: Peace, justice, and strong institutions Goal 17: Partnerships for the goals (other goals depending on class readings)

This course uses a genre theory approach to examine how popular writing about science and technology reflects and shapes social structures. Students will investigate how science and technology are defined, how they differ from other kinds of knowledge-making, and what roles they play in society. The readings, writing assignments, and discussions will help students to analyze how texts implicitly and explicitly address these questions, thus developing their ability to assess and communicate scientific and technological concepts for a broad audience. Students taking this course should anticipate completing weekly reading and writing tasks outside of class in preparation for the in-class lecture and discussion. Goal 4: Quality education Goal 9: Industry, innovation and infrastructure Goal 16: Peace, justice, and strong institutions Goal 17: Partnerships for the goals (other goals depending on class readings)

What does it mean to write creatively? Do we write to express ourselves, to tell our stories, or to make stories for others to escape into? Yes. But there exists a huge diversity of other reasons to write, and ways to explore them. This exploratory kind of writing has been called by many names: experimental, avant-garde, conceptual, meta, marginal, minor. “Writing Games” is a creative writing course where we will learn by making. Rather than investigate the history and practice of experimental and avant-garde writing mainly by listening to lectures, analyzing readings, and organizing discussions – although these things will occur – we will “make” our way into knowledge, understanding what past and present writers have done by recreating their work. We will encounter familiar (but often misunderstood) phenomena like Dada and Surrealism, but also follow seldom traveled branches of the verbal arts, from magical incantations to performance art, and from metafiction to interactive fiction. In the process we will ask: why be experimental? Where is the line between “groundbreaking” and “pretentious”? What is experimental art’s relationship to everyday life and everyday problems? How can it reflect, enact, or accelerate cultural and social change? How can writing experimentally help us see what we can’t yet see? If the limits of what we can say in words are the historical, social, and personal limits of our imagination, then we will explore the many ways that “experimental literature” attempts to defy these limits.

What does it mean to write creatively? Do we write to express ourselves, to tell our stories, or to make stories for others to escape into? Yes. But there exists a huge diversity of other reasons to write, and ways to explore them. This exploratory kind of writing has been called by many names: experimental, avant-garde, conceptual, meta, marginal, minor. “Writing Games” is a creative writing course where we will learn by making. Rather than investigate the history and practice of experimental and avant-garde writing mainly by listening to lectures, analyzing readings, and organizing discussions – although these things will occur – we will “make” our way into knowledge, understanding what past and present writers have done by recreating their work. We will encounter familiar (but often misunderstood) phenomena like Dada and Surrealism, but also follow seldom traveled branches of the verbal arts, from magical incantations to performance art, and from metafiction to interactive fiction. In the process we will ask: why be experimental? Where is the line between “groundbreaking” and “pretentious”? What is experimental art’s relationship to everyday life and everyday problems? How can it reflect, enact, or accelerate cultural and social change? How can writing experimentally help us see what we can’t yet see? If the limits of what we can say in words are the historical, social, and personal limits of our imagination, then we will explore the many ways that “experimental literature” attempts to defy these limits.

人間が行う知識や情報の処理をコンピュータで再現しようとする試みは、古くから続けられてきました。その成果として、線形分離に優れたサポートベクトルマシンや、現在さまざまな分野で活用されている深層学習が挙げられます。これらのアルゴリズムでは、たとえば0と1のような単純な出力しか持たないモデルを複数組み合わせることで、より複雑な情報の記憶や処理が可能になります。この講義では、コンピュータが知識や情報をどのように処理しているかを可視化しながら学び、機械学習の本質を理解することを目指します。

“Writing About Gaming” begins with the assumption that video games, like works of art, literature, and film, are worth writing about. Rather than debate whether games are “art” – whether they can be more than entertaining distractions from more worthwhile activities – we will consider what we as players and writers can say about them, do with them, and learn from them. Art can and does change the way people think, act, experience, and form communities. The perspectives that we will take together will be critical, exploratory, socially aware, humanist, inclusive, and creative. Games will be played in class. Collective and independent research, study, making, reading, interneting, focused recreation, unexpected detours, concept-mapping, and guided discussion will all take place.

“Writing About Gaming” begins with the assumption that video games, like works of art, literature, and film, are worth writing about. Rather than debate whether games are “art” – whether they can be more than entertaining distractions from more worthwhile activities – we will consider what we as players and writers can say about them, do with them, and learn from them. Art can and does change the way people think, act, experience, and form communities. The perspectives that we will take together will be critical, exploratory, socially aware, humanist, inclusive, and creative. Games will be played in class. Collective and independent research, study, making, reading, interneting, focused recreation, unexpected detours, concept-mapping, and guided discussion will all take place.

We offer two advanced academic English courses for graduate students aiming to improve their skills in academic English: Advanced Academic Writing (offered in A1) and Advanced Academic Presentation (offered in A2). The two courses are suitable for those who are preparing to submit a manuscript to a journal and to present at an international conference, but those who are new to research publication may also take the class. Advanced Academic Writing (AAW) is open to graduate students from all schools. AAW is a prerequisite course for Advanced Academic Presentation (AAP, offered in A2). AAW involves drafting a paper based on the student's own research. Thus, students in this course are expected to have access to research results which can be used in this exercise. The instruction will be delivered in English.

This course will offer an introduction to philosophy. It is designed to be open to students of any background and with any orientation. It will be given in the form of a reading seminar, where students will learn to acquire knowledge about philosophy more actively through engagement with texts. The scope of the seminar will be wide in terms of historical scope—covering the time span from Ancient Greece to our time. It will also make students familiar with various major problems that have been the subject of philosophical controversy. Unlike the sciences, philosophy is not famous for offering good answers or recipes that are useful tools for navigating through everyday human life. What philosophy is good in is to see the questions that are left unanswered by the ‘answers’ we are used to live by—or even to question these ‘answers’ themselves as answers. In this sense, one can appreciate doing philosophy as a meaningful part of everyday human life. The aim of this course is to make students aware of this.