University of Pittsburgh Courses

Pitt offers a range of cyber-related courses across disciplines throughout the University.

Featured Courses

Here are a few highlighted courses in Fall 2023 from Pitt Cyber Affiliate Scholars:

Instructor: David Hickton

This course will explore theoretical and practical aspects of nation-state legal issues concerning cyberspace, with a particular focus on computer-related crime, espionage, war, and international governance. The course will review key legal cases, policy, and legislation. In tandem with a series of expert guest speakers from the field, the course will reflect on the roles of national and international governments, the legal and ethical dimensions of cybersecurity, the relationship between the public and private sectors, and the increasing tensions between privacy and national security. The course will consist of four major components: (1) an assessment of the current cybercrime threat landscape, (2) a review of the relevant national and international legal frameworks, (3) analysis of case studies of significant prosecutions, and (4) assessments of domestic and international policy and security challenges, including gaps in existing frameworks. Students who complete the course will obtain an enhanced understanding of the legal, policy, and security frameworks at the core of these challenging issues for nation-states.

Instructor: Dmitriy Babichenko

This course will provide an introduction to programming, data processing, and data analytics using Python for highly motivated students with little or no prior experience in programming. The course will focus on learning the Python programming language in the context of working with data, planning and organizing programs, commonly-used algorithms, data management, data cleaning, basic machine learning, data mining, and fundamentals of computational modeling.

Instructor: Anthony Rodi 

This course provides an overview of ethics concepts and decision-making as they are related to Information Systems and Computing. Emphasis is placed on the study of ethical situations and responsibilities of IS professionals around current and emerging technologies in a global setting. Research papers, Case studies and discussion of current ethical events around technology will be used to facilitate discussions in areas including, but not limited to: Cloud Computing, Data protection, Cyber Security, The Digital Divide, Social Media, Intellectual Property, Whistleblowing, Professional Codes of Conduct, Professional liability, Internet freedom in computing and international laws and governance. Invited Subject Matter Experts will conduct informative sessions on key subject matter areas aligned with the course content.

Instructor: Prashant Krishnamurthy

Computing and information systems underlie nearly every facet of life in today's highly-networked societies. Accordingly, there are many paths through the degree programs offered by the School of Computing and Information, each focusing on different aspects of the theories, practices, and applications of computing and information. This course will introduce students to a variety of core principles and important themes that cross-cut this array of computing- and information-oriented disciplines, as well as explore the types of work that individuals educated in these disciplines engage in.

Instructor: Dmitriy Babichenko

How are computational artifacts currently designed, and how can they be designed differently? What stories can be told by collaborating with computers? What stories can't be told? This project-based course will enable students to engage with and create computational narratives and interactive projects with data, hardware and algorithms. Each collaboratively taught iteration of the course will include 3-4 of these units, such as: fabrication, interactive hardware, computational narrative, interactive data, and prototyping. Students will consider what it means to compose with computers for human audiences, and with humans for computer audiences. Designed for Digital Narrative and Interactive Design (DNID) majors to take midway through the major, it will help students consolidate the interdisciplinary knowledge they have obtained in their prerequisite courses, introduce them to examples of interdisciplinary work that will inform their later capstone projects, and give them practice in working on collaborative projects that span the humanities and information/computing fields.

Instructor: Michael Colaresi

This course will serve as the overall introduction to computational social science. It will showcase why computational social science is needed and distinct, and briefly introduces students to cutting edge applications of computational social science across topics that range from climate change and public health to cybersecurity.

Instructor: Lisa Nelson

Information technology and the information that it generates has increasingly become part of our daily lives shaping our practices, discourses, and institutions in fundamental ways. Personal information is used by consumers, professionals, and organizations to a variety of ends and in a number of different settings. The growing reliance on personal information not only challenges long-standing demarcations between public and private institutions in terms of responsibilities, obligations, and limits, but also calls for a reconsideration of how to ensure the protection of long-standing civil liberties and civil rights. This course will consider the impact of emerging technologies within existing constitutional, statutory, and international guidelines and will then explore a range of policy solutions for managing the use of personal information in our public and private sectors.

Instructor: Wei Gao

This course introduces the fundamental challenges, methodologies, and techniques for designing different components of embedded computing systems, including microprocessors, I/O, memory and caches, and external sensors and actuators. Various system design issues including power management, real-time operating system design and system scheduling will also be discussed. Laboratory activities provide the students with the opportunities of gaining hands-on project experiences with modern embedded and mobile computing platforms such as microcontrollers, smartphones, sensors and wearables, as well as practicing these programming platforms over real-world embedded computing applications.

Instructor: Lingfei Wu

The ability to collect, store and process large amounts of detailed data in a variety of fields has led to a surge in the use of data in various decision-making tasks, ranging from governmental policy-making to drafting players in sports. Data literacy is thus important and in this first introductory course, we will focus on shifting the traditional mode of deterministic (yes/no) thinking to probabilistic thinking. We will see concepts from applied probability and statistics, while we will also explore a variety of data analysis methods including linear regression, matrix factorization, and network analysis.

See something missing? Email cyber@pitt.edu