QTM3675 Probability for Risk Management

4 CreditsThe fundamental objective of this course is to prepare students for the successful completion of the first level probability examination (Exam P) of the Society of Actuaries. While the necessary theory is addressed, this course focuses on problem solving, so it is well suited for any student with an interest in applied probability concepts and how they are related to a wide variety of situations within and beyond actuarial science, finance, and economics. Topics include general probability and univariate and multivariate probability distributions.

Prerequisites: QTM1010 or AQM 2000

QTM2623 Programming with R for Business Analytics
4 CreditsThis course provides experience in developing, testing, and implementing business analytics software using the R language. R has become the leading tool for analytics software design, statistical computing, and graphics. The language is greatly enhanced by numerous open-source contributed packages and textbooks submitted by users, and it is used almost exclusively in most of the leading-edge analytics applications, such as statistical analysis and data mining. No prior programming experience is assumed. Students will become proficient in programming in the R language with datasets of all kinds with an emphasis on statistical exploration, data mining, graphics, and advanced programming concepts. The course will be case-oriented. The intent is to further enhance the learning experience from other analytics courses, such as QTM1010 and QTM2000.

Prerequisites: QTM1010 and QTM2000 or permission from the instructor

QTM1000 Quantitative Methods for Business Analytics I
4 CreditsThe course introduces the necessary core quantitative methods that are prerequisites to follow-on courses in QTM and in Babson's integrated core business offerings. Statistical software and the use of spreadsheets are integrated throughout so that students better comprehend the importance of using modern technological tools for effective model building and decision-making. About two thirds of the course is data-oriented, exposing students to basic statistical methods, their conceptual underpinning, such as variability and uncertainty, and their use in the real world. Topics include data collection, descriptive statistics, elementary probability rules and distributions, sampling distributions, and basic inference. The last third of the course is dedicated to selected non-statistical quantitative techniques applied to business models. Topics include curve fitting, differential calculus applications to non-linear optimization, and introduction to the time value of money.

Prerequisites: None

QTM1010 Quantitative Methods for Business Analytics II
4 CreditsThis course explores decision-making problems in a managerial context using algebraic, spreadsheet, graphical, and statistical models. The focus is on understanding basic mathematical and modeling principles through the analysis of real data. The course emphasizes communicating in-context interpretations of the results of analysis in written, visual, and oral form. A foundation in introductory statistics and use of spreadsheets is essential because these concepts are extended and reinforced throughout the course. Topics include introductions to linear regression, time series analysis, linear programming, decision analysis and simulation. It emphasizes the use of appropriate software and the latest technological methods for accessing and analyzing data.

Prerequisites: QTM1000 or AQM1000

QTM3605 Quantitative Analysis of Structural Injustice
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

This course provides a survey of current quantitative methods for analyzing structural disparities. Using philosophies from interdisciplinary fields, we follow examples from education, housing, and other topics to document the direction and size of social and economic disparities. The course begins with a discussion on the philosophies of major data issues. We then learn to analyze disparities using a wide range of data types - spatial, panel, experimental, and observational - through the use of raw, real-world data sets. Discussions will center on biases resulting from data, models, and algorithms. The course uses R and QGIS. Prior to enrolling, students should have a foundation in regression analysis

Prerequisites: AQM 2000 OR QTM 2000

QTM3635 Quantitative Methods for Machine Learning
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsThe ease of data collection coupled with plummeting data storage costs over the last decades have resulted in massive amounts of data that many business organizations have at their fingertips. Effective analysis of those data followed by sound decision-making is what makes a company an analytical competitor. This course is dedicated to learning and applying advanced quantitative tools for solving complex machine learning problems. The course will build on analytical tools learned during AQM 2000 (Predictive Business Analytics) course, introducing modern advanced tools ranging from random forests to support vector machines and artificial neural networks. Each topic covered in this course will be discussed in the context of wide-ranging real-world applications such as email spam prediction; handwritten digit recognition; topic modeling/text mining; etc. The implementation of the introduced topics will be carried out in R/RStudio.

Prerequisites: QTM2000 or AQM2000

ART4615 Racing Towards the Future: Early 20th Century Art
(Formerly VSA4615)
4 Advanced Liberal Arts CreditsBetween 1900 -1938, young artists grappled with enormous political, scientific, technological, and social disruptions that threw them headlong into the modern world. Styles such as Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressivism, Dada and Surrealism were their responses to changes in established ways of thinking and being that marked the beginning of the 20th century. Visits to The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Davies Museum of Wellesley College and the Fogg Museum of Harvard University, which have very strong collections from this period, will offer students the opportunity to directly experience this art.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)

LIT 4601: Reading the City, Writing the Self: James Joyce's Dublin

4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

In this exploration of James Joyce's literary Dublin, we study Joyce's works as a springboard for your own creative non-fiction writing. This course combines expressive writing and literary analysis-and includes a week in Dublin itself!

The Irish writer James Joyce is a towering figure in world literature, a writer who pushed boundaries of both form and content. In his stirring bildungsroman Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his sympathetic yet clear-eyed view of his hometown in the short story collection Dubliners, and his experimental and controversial epic Ulysses, Joyce captured ordinary lives in an extraordinary fashion. In this course you will read selections from all three works, exploring such themes as politics, love, and religion while simultaneously tracing the trajectory of Joyce's innovative style. Furthermore, and drawing inspiration from Joyce's narratives, you will pursue your own creative writing, as you will write personal essays remembering and reflecting upon your experiences and relationships. Finally, in the first week of the course, Dublin itself will be our classroom as we range from its museums to its pubs and traverse the same streets and parks and shores that Joyce and his characters inhabited, gaining all the while a rich and vibrant sense of the city's culture and history.

WRT2000 Research Writing
4 Foundation Liberal Arts redits

This course prompts students to put their theory of writing into practice through writing and composing in research-based genres for audiences in academic discourse communities. Students learn to recognize and adhere to the discursive and procedural conventions of particular communities of scholarly practice, and they examine and participate in modes of scholarly inquiry while learning about and engaging in best practices for finding, evaluating, and incorporating sources. Students produce scholarly arguments in essay form while exploring the roles that other textual forms can and do play in scholarship, and they continually reflect on how this work informs their theory and understanding of writing more generally.

Prerequisites: WRT1001

HUM4612 Rome: Origins of Democracy, Imperialism and Human Rights

4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits

At a moment when democracy is contested around the globe, why not return to the source?

This course invites students to revisit the origins of democracy through interdisciplinary study-philosophy, political theory, history, literature-in Rome, one of the places where it all started (at least for the western world). Significantly, this city/state was also one of the first empires, meaning that the Romans explored, conquered or colonized, and ruled and exploited other geographic territories. This course studies the original principles, processes, and representations of democracy from 1st century Rome, while also considering its role as an empire and linking both to human rights in their modern form.

If democracy aspires to equality and freedom, imperialism is its foil, a centuries-long program of conquest, racial and cultural superiority, and ongoing economic exploitation. Some might argue that the tension between them is precisely responsible for current global social, political, and economic challenges. Paradoxically-or not?-the two are deeply intertwined, and both inform the language and practice of contemporary human rights (for the better and for the worse, alas). Examining their earliest aspirations and most significant historical failures where they actually happened will help us to address the current problem of migration and asylum seeking in Europe as a limit to the "human" envisioned by human rights.

Consider this: We'll climb the Palatine Hill, site of the founding of Rome, while reading Virgil's account of that event in The Aeneid; study Shakespeare's Julius Caesar while visiting the Curia of Pompey, site of the Roman Senate (and, so they say, of Caesar's death); and experience the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica while learning about how the Catholic Church fueled the Roman Empire-and vice versa. We will visit ancient ruins and markers of cultures meditating on what they meant to those who made them, and to us, now, and we will relax along the banks of the Tiber listening to music in the evenings.

All along, we will address the profound questions of power, ideology, law, freedom, obligation, hospitality, cultural contact, and human rights that arise with our journeying. Perhaps most significantly, we will visit sites devoted to the lives and futures of migrants and refugees in Rome, one of Europe's key points of entry, as well as meeting members of non-governmental organizations working on human rights issues stemming from migration and other crises.

While experiencing the city and understanding its shifting identity as historical/tourist site and migration center, we will negotiate its spaces as ones where we can most powerfully witness and test ideas of democracy and rights for ourselves.

Prerequisites: Any combination of 2 ILA (HSS, LTA, CSP, LVA, CVA)