In addition to École Normale Supérieure and HEC Paris, we’re delighted to welcome another French university into our community – Ecole Centrale Paris – who will join Coursera to build out our engineering offerings.
Founded in 1829, Ecole Centrale Paris is a Grand Ecole and one of the top engineering schools in Europe. Its multiple disciplinary approach blends scientific and technical studies with the social and human realities of today’s challenges, instilling in students the motivation to understand, anticipate and create technologies for tomorrow’s world. Previous alumni have certainly made their marks on society: Gustave Eiffel, engineer of Paris’ most famous landmark, and Andre Michelin, whose name you might find on your car tires. Even the open source video software, VLC, that you use to watch your favorite movies – that’s a product of Ecole Centrale Paris.
Ecole Centrale Paris will be launching three initial courses, all starting in early 2014. First, Professors Nikos Paragios and Pawan Kumar will offer “Discrete Inference and Learning in Artificial Vision,” a Computer Science course that will cover state of the art energy minimization algorithms that are used to perform inference in modern artificial vision models. Additionally, Professor Luc de Brabandere will teach “On Strategy: What Managers Can Learn from Great Philosophers,” a Business and Management course that encourages people to think philosophically, think creatively and think outside the box for game-changing ideas. Finally, Professor John Cagnol will teach “An Introduction to Functional Analysis,” a course that serves as an introduction to the branch of mathematics dealing with spaces of functions.
