Strategic Defense Technologies Graduate Certificate

Space is the most recent domain in which nations and great powers dispute strategic political, military, economic and legal interests. This course analyzes the origins, tensions and promises embedded in the space-focused strategies of major international players. The course will discuss these issues from the U.S. national and strategic interests perspective, focusing on how strategic competition and conflict in space could and should be handled.

Learning Objectives

• Distinguish the key characteristics of grand strategy with examples for each great power involved in space strategy.
• Distinguish the main phases in the history of space exploration and appraise their role in revealing various strategic priorities for space policy.
• Differentiate essential provisions of the key space legal documents and principles by their domain and effect.
• Assess the main space-paced conflictual relationships and prioritize them by importance and immediacy.
• Differentiate the role of governments and private organizations in space strategic. control and determine their main common interests by great power.

This course examines challenges in energy, logistics and information processing, and rapid offensive and defensive systems in the context of the past, the present and the future to develop new conceptual insights, research priorities, system integration, and timely methods to meet emerging national defense engineering needs. The curriculum considers such topics as the Manhattan Project, the development of containerized shipping, artificial intelligence, hypersonics, rail gun technology and more. Each module covers different topics while prompting students to examine creative solutions inspired by the past and use the lessons learned to stimulate thinking needed for solving future challenges.

Learning Objectives

• Develop professional methods to identify, research, collaborate on and fashion solutions to engineering challenges while maintaining appropriate systematic thinking.
• Formulate and solve structured problems using standardized professional methods including case study research, system engineering design and policy analysis.
• Appraise historic, present and anticipated future engineering challenges by identifying the necessary parameters required for solving them, such as specifying challenge dimensions, generating appropriate assumptions for missing information, formulating solutions and projecting possible results.
• Identify, locate and integrate data, parameters, or information about past, present and future practices needed to develop solutions to course problems.
• Assemble and compose written and oral communications involving solutions and arguments valuable for both senior and technical leadership while maintaining ethical and professional conduct.

Cyber is a domain in which nations and great powers dispute strategic political, military, economic and legal interests in virtual cyberspace. The course analyzes the origins, tensions, and promises embedded in the cyber strategies of major international players. The course will discuss these issues from the perspective of the U.S. national and strategic interests, focusing on how strategic competition and conflict in cyber could and should be handled.

Learning Objectives

• Understand and assess an organization’s cyber threat landscape and cybersecurity maturity.
• Identify organizational cyber strategy goals and develop a cyber strategy policymaking process.
• Examine strategies for strengthening, defending and maintaining an organization’s cyber infrastructure and understand models, requirements, frameworks and best practices.
• Promote management commitment and responsibilities to an organization’s cyber strategy and policies and understand cyber strategy staffing, training and budgeting.
• Examine global and domestic cyber business relationships in government and private industry.
• Gain awareness of historic, ongoing and emerging domestic, global and insider cyber threats and actors.
• Understand cyber risk management and cyber incident management.
• Note and apply lessons learned from cyber threat incidents and risk costs.

This course centers around understanding and communicating data in a way that informs, compels or reassures ­– a core personal and professional skill for anyone who wants to be a successful member of the 21st century community. Telling effective data stories combines elements of rhetoric, data science, visualization and storytelling, with artificial intelligence, which is now becoming a prominent tool in the process. The course is subdivided into six modules, the first covering basics of storytelling with the following five modules diving deeper into each step of building a data story that surprises, provides a new, more convincing explanation for or alternative to time-worn ideas, and proposes a course of action. The goal of the class is to train learners in making memorable, teachable, data-driven arguments in the form of stories.

Learning Objectives

• Provide examples and justify all core techniques in storytelling, including challenging prior assumptions, providing alternative explanations, balancing timing versus immediacy, and transforming each story into a teachable moment.

This course provides an overview of how to transform social media and digital media information into business intelligence and actionable insight. Although students are not expected to know a programming language prior to taking the course, they are expected to understand basic statistics and to have a desire to learn the processes, procedures and vocabulary used by data analysts in modern organizations. The goal is not to train them as practicing data scientists, but as knowledgeable data analytics consumers and as informed teammates and leaders of cross-functional teams tasked to make decisions using data.

Learning Objectives

• Differentiate between the opportunities and limitations with social media data.
• Identify methods for using ready and custom-made tools to transform information into insight, from data collection to analysis, interpretation and recommendation.
• Sharpen quantitative and business analytical skills using spreadsheets and online tools.
• Write effective reports and draft scorecards.
• Be prepared to interact with data scientists by speaking their language and understanding their processes for data mining and business intelligence.

This course provides students with a strong grounding in the policy, ethical, and legal regulatory dimensions and environment that shape the governance of AI. Students will analyze current and emerging laws, regulations, and governance strategies shaping the AI landscape across multiple jurisdictions and sectors. The course will help students gain an interdisciplinary understanding of the core ethical principles and values that guide AI.” 

Learning Objectives

• Describe key stakeholders, institutions, and strategies involved in AI policymaking across multiple levels of government (local to global) in multiple fields and explain their roles in governing AI systems. 
• Evaluate the legal, regulatory, and other governance strategies that have been proposed or adopted by governments, firms, and civil society organizations, such as model cards, liability frameworks, standards, and impact assessments. 
• Analyze ethical and social issues related to the development and application of AI systems within multiple fields, including power, model bias, transparency, accountability, worker well-being, and privacy, as well as the translation of ethical values into technical aspects of AI governance practices within public and private, and non-profit sector organizations. 
• Synthesize, analyze, and communicate information about emerging policy issues in AI and the associated ethical and social dimensions, identify stakeholder perspectives, and summarize proposed solutions. 
• Assess current and evolving trends, debates, and solutions in AI governance and ethics through case studies, contemporary issues, and comparative analysis. 

This course provides learners with strategic foresight tools and skills to understand and make decisions regarding the future. Strategic foresight is the ability to create and sustain a variety of high-quality, long-term views and apply insights in adaptive ways. Strategic foresight produces forward-looking views, commonly referred to as scenarios, and these are used to broadly describe what a future world would look like, and how it would feel to live in that world. These scenarios form the basis for strategies and plans to help organizations remain competitive into the foreseeable future. Students in the course will use strategic foresight to create their own scenarios.

Learning Objectives

• Define horizon scanning, signals and drivers of change.
• Demonstrate the 2 x 2 matrix method for generating scenarios.
• Demonstrate the archetype method for generating scenarios.
• Explain the strengths and weaknesses of scenarios.