The 2nd semester 2021/22 will bring something new to the University of Padova!
In the information era, where technology is an essential part of our everyday life, it is important to understand the mechanisms that rule and balance the interplay between the techno-industrial innovation and the evolution of the international context. The current semiconductor crisis and the strained relations between US and China in the information and communication technologies – ICTs, are just two of the issues that the world is currently facing, relevant to this initiative. This is why two apparently distant departments of the University of Padua decided to collaborate in order to create a new innovative course, that has no equals in Italy: Microelectronics and Globalization.
Professors Alessandro Paccagnella (DEI – Dept. of Information Engineering) and David Burigana (SPGI – Dept. of Political Sciences, Law, and International Studies) will lead you into the understanding of the deep connections between technology and geopolitics through the microelectronics’ focus, a privileged field to enlighten the multiple interconnections between technology and politics assets today, and the techno-science diplomacy as an essential tool of international relations.
The course, offered to students of DEI and to students of SPGI, has an interdisciplinary approach with historical, scientific and geopolitical insights: for this reason, no previous background is required to attend the course and all fundamental notions will be given or revised in a plain approach. The aim of the course is to provide a critical overview of the connections between microelectronics and geopolitics. The instructors, who are leading experts in their fields, will give a historically solid and at the same time updated framework, starting from the discovery of the transistor (1947) but concentrating on today's issues concerning microelectronics, its development, its applications, and the corresponding markets in the framework of international relations. Students will be directly and actively involved in the course, by forming mixed teams that will develop specific themes and present them, as partial and final exams.
Find out all the details here:
https://en.didattica.unipd.it/off/2021/LM/IN/IN0520/000ZZ/INQ1098469/N0
