Course Description: This course offers a survey of the variety of theories and issues in communication in a systematic fashion and from a historical perspective, with a focus on those theories and issues that bear strong implications for the present situations of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. This course seeks to:

• Establish a coherent understanding of the progressive development of the discipline of communication;

• Provide a context for critical appreciation of current scholarship and research in communication;

• Offer a reasonable account of future conditions for human communication.

Course Description: This course is designed for students without programming background to grasp computational thinking skills and data science in practice with Python. Topics include package installation, program execution, Python variables, expressions, data structures, functions, debugging, control flow statements. Students will also work on several Python packages on data exploration, analysis, and visualization, such as Pandas, Numpy, and Matplotlib.

Course Description: As a foundation course of this programme, this course is designed to expose students with fundamental concepts, theoretical paradigms, and cutting-edged research approaches in the interdisciplinary field of AI and its relevance in digital media. Special focus will be on the interdisciplinary research areas between journalism, mass communication, law and policy, statistics, and data science. Student will learn the fundamental concepts of AI and fundamental theoretical frameworks in media and communication through case studies and reviews. The course then ends with a critical reflection on AI. Students are expected to be equipped with an interdisciplinary and crucial perspective, and making sense of new technologies’ social, cultural, and political implications, in both global and local contexts.

Course Description: This project-orientated course aims to integrate knowledge and skills in AI and digital media, and with a focus of design thinking and media product deployment. This course introduces students to digital media, with particular focus on the multimedia, social media, and the internet, and product deployment. It will also explain the influence of new AI technologies on media industry and social changes. The objective of the project is to enable students to carry out a piece of independent project which could be an advanced data analytics and/or visualization project, or a case study evaluating the applications of AI in digital media.

Course Description: This course introduces principal concepts of big data analysis and information management. It covers various topics including database management, cloud service fundamentals, data processing, and data analytics. It is expected that students can learn practical skills about how to collect, store, analyze, and process data.

Course Description: To describe the fundamental concepts, theories, learning models, and techniques in artificial intelligence (AI). Topics include the fundamentals of AI, such as statistics, uncertainty, and Bayes networks; machine learning; logic and planning. The course also addresses the applications of AI, including image processing and computer vision; robotics and robot motion planning; natural language processing and information retrieval.

Course Description: In the current age of information overload, recommender systems offer personalized access for users to efficiently search information and make choices online. Recommender systems also play a crucial role in the context of digital media and communication. This course introduces recommender systems’ major concepts, methodologies, evaluation design, and user experiences. A variety of real-world applications in media and communication are included, such as those deployed in news service sites, marketing campaigns, and social networks.

Course Description: Data mining is a significant method for media data acquisition, analysis and management. This course aims to introduce the fundamental issues of media and data mining; to learn the latest techniques of data mining; to conduct application case studies to show the usage of data mining for media analytics. A variety of practical application in media and communication are included, such as social media analysis and social network analysis.

Course Description: This course aims at providing essential exploratory concepts and techniques for analyzing and visualizing data, and to gain hands-on experience of using software tools for data harvesting, cleaning, storage, analysis and visualization.

Course Description: This course aims to integrate knowledge and skills of journalism practice in the digital age, by covering computational journalism, news writing and reporting, and data-driven interactive storytelling. Special focus will be placed on the industrial production process of all aspects of techniques, including searching, collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and visualizing data from various sources. The design and aesthetic components will also be covered. In additional to the traditional teaching learning activities, the course will also adopt the case study approach and perform reverse-engineering on classic and cutting-edged data-driven storytelling examples. Critical reflection on the overuse and abuse of big data and relevant ethical and legal controversies will be addressed as well. By the end of the semester, students are expected to produce a data-driven narrative project using computational methods.

Course Description: This course approaches the objective from two folds: For Technology and By Technology. It is highly likely the students will report technology company, event and trend upon graduation. Or they may be PR specialists for a technology company. The duly acquired knowledge about the latest technology from this course can make them more accurate and more confident in the communication process. This is the "for technology" part of this course. Once the students become technology literate, they can create new product, new business model and new workflow, with the help of the new technology. This is the "by technology" part of this course. With the two folds exercises, we expect the students to be serious thinkers and thought leaders in the changing world, not only understanding technology and its influence on communication, but also constantly reflecting the power, its misuse and social implications.

Course Description: This course will help students apply fundamental newsgathering and writing techniques to real-world reporting. Students will also improve English-language newswriting skills through the analysis of professional news articles and learn to convey information in a concise and engaging style as needed for digital journalism. Though a variety of skills will be addressed, this course focuses on feature writing. In addition, students will create and maintain an online professional portfolio appropriate for a journalist.

Course Description: This course aims to discover and examine how individuals interact with media on the psychological level. Through exploring (1) media users’ motivations, (2) media processing theories, as well as (3) media effects, this course provides students with an overview of both the theories and methods in the field. In addition, students will go through the complete process of designing and conducting a media psychology study, and apply their findings to solve real-life issues. Topics such as human-computer interactions (HCI) and user experience (UX) will also be covered.

Course Description: The course aims to offer students the latest knowledge as well as critical and reflective perspectives on how “algorithm,” i.e., a finite sequence of rules operating on some input yielding some output after a finite number of step for computer programmes, are shaping, and shaped by, humans’ culture and society. This course interrogates how these algorithm-driven media technologies are casting cultural, social, and political impacts on the society, and aims to reveal the power and control hidden behind the algorithmic systems. Special focus will be placed on an array of highly controversial and timely topics, such as the algorithmic discrimination on gender and race, algorithm-confounded cultural values and tastes, censorship, political ideologies, and identities.

Course Description: This course will provide students with a general understanding of the relationship among cognitive neuroscience, physiology and a variety of communication effects. This course is structured into four general sections: 1) implicit measures of attitudes, 2) eye-tracking, 3) physiological measurement systems, and 4) cognitive neuroscience. Cutting-edge research in the areas of the interaction between media audiences and media content, both theories and methods, will be discussed. Students will go through the complete process of designing and conducting a media biology study.

Course Description: The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with the practical applications and the theoretical implications of social media-related technologies. The course is grounded in practice, and students will be required to participate in social networks, forums, Facebook, wikis, micro-blogs, and more. We will examine their economic, social, and cultural implications, and cover some of the latest developments in the social media area. We will also explore techniques for collecting and analysing social media data.

Course Description: Students will learn the concepts, methodologies, and techniques of interactive visualization to facilitate analytical reasoning and critical thinking with data, in order to improve students’ comprehension of data analysis in the field of media and communication field.

Course Description: This course aims to cover key concepts, technologies and skills in Web and programming design such as Python, R, JavaScript, server side scripting language, database connectivity and session management. After the completion of this course, students will be able to develop Web and social media with dynamic and interactive contents to better understand artificial intelligence’s background and future developments such as data visualization and machine learning.

Course Description: This course provides students with an overview of how to design and conduct a simple research study (project) for practical application on selected topics in the areas of digital media. It covers study design and the preparation of proposals and manuscripts. Students are introduced to the main types of research methods, with a more in-depth examination of the computational methods, to address research issues in digital media. In this respect, a group of 3-4 students (No less than 3 students per group) are mentored by a staff member in a research project leading to a critical inquiry report and research outputs.