Education

This page is dedicated to my education.

Courses I’ve taken

I’ve noted the courses that have stuck with me the most and noted which topics and literature stands out.

Latin American Civilization I

Latin America from pre-colonial times to independence. With Professor Pizzigoni.

My favorite topics: Native American empires, the chain of conquest, local and international economy, the Inquisition, international politics, race, gender, and deviancy in colonial Latin America.

Latin American Civilization II

Latin America from independence to present-day. With Professor Salgado.

My favorite topics: The Mexican Revolution, populism (Peronist Argentina), the Cuban Revolution and the post-revolutionary state, work, citizenship, and welfare, social security, the National Security State (Pinochet’s Chile), neoliberalism and its discontents.

Selected literature

  • López, “The India Bonita Contest of 1921 and the Ethnicization of Mexican National Culture”
  • Milanesio, “Food Politics and Consumption in Peronist Argentina”
  • Tomás Moulian, “The Credit-Card Citizen”
  • Tinsman, “Politics of Gender and Consumption in Authoritarian Chile”

Masterpieces of Western Literature

Survey of western literature, from Homer to Toni Morrison. With Professor Zhang.

Selected literature

  • Genesis
  • Homer, Odyssey (trans. Emily Wilson)
  • Plato, Symposium
  • Virgil, Aeneid
  • Gospels of Luke and John
  • Ovid, Metamorphoses
  • Dante, Inferno
  • Montaigne, Essays
  • Cervantes, Don Quixote
  • Austen, Northanger Abbey

Contemporary Civilization

Survey of political literature and theory. With Professor Aitken, Professor Simons.

Selected literature

  • Plato, Republic
  • Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
  • Aristotle, Politics
  • Aquinas, Law, Morality and Politics
  • Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
  • Hobbes, Leviathan
  • Locke, Second Treatise of Government
  • Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality; Social Contract
  • John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
  • Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Heterogenous Computing for Signal and Data Processing

Excellent course that reviewed the basics of heterogenous architectures, their applications, and programming for GPUs, as well as dives into the detail of GPUs. With Professor Zoran Kostic, formerly at Broadcom and Nokia Bell Labs, fascinating to get to hear his stories and expertise.

Gave me a much more well-rounded view of computing from the borderline of hardware and software, and a better understanding of SoCs. I feel I have a grasp on how a device like a mobile phone works end-to-end and the design requirements that go into it. Seems like a valuabe thing to understand especially when developing embedded software that deserves extra care and attention.

Topics of Note

  • System-on-Chip (SoC) theory and architecture
  • NVIDIA GPU architecture
  • CUDA / OpenCL
  • PyCUDA / PyOpenCL
  • Kernel algorithms and optimization (e.g. convolution)
  • Memory hierarchy, access patterns
  • NVIDIA NSight Profiling