AI Everywhere: How San José State University Empowers Students and Educators - Ep. 275

[ 00 min 10 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

Hello and welcome to the NVIDIA AI Podcast. I'm your host Noah Kravitz. Over the course of almost 170 years since its founding as California's first public university, San Jose State University has evolved into the anchor of the 10th largest city in the United States, one of the nation's leading public universities and holder of the title, Silicon Valley's Public University, which as we'll talk about over the next half hour or so, is really a vital and fascinating place to be, right?

[ 00 min 40 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

Now, since January of 2023, our guest has led SJSU through what's turned out to be quite an eventful few years. Broadly speaking, Doctor Cynthia Teniente-Matson is the 31st president of San Jose State and its first Latina President. Doctor Teniente-Matson is an internationally recognized Latina leader with extensive executive experience across multiple State University systems, and she's known as a champion for student success, institutional innovation and Industry Partnerships that drive economic mobility. I'm delighted for the chance to speak with Doctor Teniente Matson.

[ 01 min 15 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

Cynthia, welcome and thanks so much for joining the podcast.

[ 01 min 19 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

It's great to be here too.

[ 01 min 20 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

So let's start with your role. What brought you to San Jose State? We live in interesting times, as the saying goes, and you joined San Jose State at a really pivotal time. What called you to the role and how has your own journey before this shaped your vision for what you want to bring to the SJSU community?

[ 01 min 40 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

So I’m a returner to California and the California State University system. I'm a native Texan. I was born in San Antonio, but like many people of that era and generation, my parents moved out to California when I was a small child for better opportunities, and that has really shaped and influenced my thinking about coming to San Jose State in particular, of the incredible opportunity that exists not only in Silicon Valley but as Silicon Valley's public university. So when I arrived back in January of 2023, the whole ChatGPT, OpenAI explosion was just occuring. And it was just happening. San Jose State was in the middle of some of that in terms of already having launched, by that time, a master's in artificial intelligence and really already starting to build this coursework and this research across our institutional organization. Well, for me to come forward in the new leadership role, there are a lot of dynamic issues that we were addressing at the time. But from a curricular perspective, really ensuring that we understood our role in this catalytic geography has driven the vision for our institutional priorities and continued academic program growth. And I think you know over these 25 - 30 months, we've had much recognition, the Wall Street Journal named San Jose State the number four public university in the US, and Code Signal recently ranked our university software engineers amongst the best, beating out some of the private universities in the region and other public universities in the region.

[ 03 min 24 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

That's fantastic. Congratulations.

[ 03 min 26 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

Yeah, there are just a number of other rankings and ratings that are generated by third-party sources that continuously point to the excellence at San Jose State. And I think our prominence in our position now as a national partner to so many tech companies, including, you know, being on your show today, but partnering with NVIDIA and what that means. So our vision is largely driven by living and breathing in the epicenter of the future and how we prepare our graduates to be in the epicenter of the future.

[ 04 min 00 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

And I jokingly say that future started yesterday — so it’s really about what's going on tomorrow, in industries that we are now at the center of.

[ 04 min 10 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

Well, I can say anecdotally, I work very closely with an SJSU graduate at NVIDIA, and they're the best. So doing something right 100%. You mentioned in the introduction that you're the first Latina to lead the university. How do representation and your own lived experience guide your approach to leadership, to education at San Jose State? You mentioned you grew up in Texas, you were a president in the Texas higher ed system before coming returning to California. So can you talk a little bit about how your own experiences inspire your approach?

[ 04 min 47 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

So I, as a first-generation college graduate and a first-generation President, I think about the significance of being a visible role model for all students, but in particular students who might identify with my ethnic or gender.

[ 05 min 05 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

Or background or experiences in whatever way people make these intersectional connections. So I spend time being available and accessible to students, to people in our community, and to other industry partners around, ensuring everyone has opportunities to be successful.

[ 05 min 26 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

In coming to a public university like San Jose State and whatever career paths that they explore, so from a leadership perspective, a large part of this approach and strategies about being visible and being accessible both for good and bad. I have, you know, gotten positive feedback. I know when something is on a person's mind because they reach out and let me know, which is a wonderful way for us to be able to lead and ensure everyone is seen and heard. So as a Latina, I also tried to spend time with other Latino students, in addition to everybody else. I have an opportunity to just talk and connect with them, so I do that informally out here. I might show up in classes, and I go to lots of events where students of all types will be. Just last night I was at an event called Welcome Black that was hosted by the African American Community Services Agency here in downtown San Jose — with some of our student leaders and faculty and staff leaders, helping again all students, but this was an emphasis on those students who identify or are interested in the Black and African American experience, and it was wonderful. And I was reminded when I was there, the executive director said to me, “You're the only president that has ever come to our agency,” and this wasn't my first visit. So being president and and helping everyone understand that this is a pathway for you comes from the old saying. You have to see it to be it, and that's part of how I think about leading.

[ 07 min 03 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

You touched on a few things that kind of relate back to where I want to take the conversation next, which is you mentioned taking office just after ChatGPT was released, just a couple of months after in the beginning of this explosion. And as you said, San Jose State has offered a master's in AI. You know previous to ChatGPT, the industry has been around prior to ChatGPT but really been an eventful past couple of years for technology's impact on education, higher education in particular, thinking about the workforce and what jobs of the future will.

[ 07 min 41 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

How do you think about shaping, maybe even reimagining, the traditional university model to do what you were just saying — to make sure that every student you know not only has a voice, but is being exposed to what they need to be exposed to. You know, AI, literacy, other things that might be, if not novel, at least more prevalent in the day-to-day at San Jose State being right in the heart of Silicon Valley as it is, how do you think about the university model of the future? Given all of what's happening with technology?

[ 08 min 16 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

Well, I think one of the interesting things about this moment is the pace. Well, we have dealt with change before. We've dealt with new technologies before, but this rapid adaptation of the AI products that are intersecting with our work and our personal lives is faster than anything we've seen before. And then on top of that, the evolution of the technologies, because of the faster processing units — things like GPU and new products that are being launched by NVIDIA — it is allowing this industry to move faster and to solve problems in a way that we have never matched before. So you have two things going on at the same time, right? The acceleration of the new tools and then the acceleration of the technology that's making problem-solving happen even faster and invention, innovation is happening faster. So how we are thinking about this at San Jose State is first of all, ensuring every student at the point of entry has AI development and literacy in their orientation. So building this into orientation building and the ability to learn and use tools in their first experience. Because like the rest of society, it is still emerging. So at San Jose State, just like in the workplace, the speed of adaptation is different.

[ 09 min 42 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

If you're in our engineering and computer science programs, they're very far ahead. And that is really a competitive advantage for our students and the experiences that they have when they come into our programs, because they are placed in vibrant tech companies or companies that are doing manufacturing of any type around the technology industry at a much faster pace just because we're right here with them and they're very connected with our faculty. That is truly a competitive advantage, which has driven that curricular development ahead of when everyone else learned to spell AI. In the other courses, though, I will tell you we have AI influences in art and design. We have AI influences in all of our programs. One of the questions I often ask is, who is teaching the kindergarten teachers? So in our education programs, we are developing and have been modeling programs around building AI into pedagogy, so that your children are being taught by teachers who are learning how to infuse AI into their course curriculum in their school and high school. And everything in between now at the same time, we're wrestling with, how do we ensure ethically, socially responsible use into the curriculum — into thinking, into learning, into teaching. And so what is teaching look like today with the tools? You have people over here in engineering and computer science and companies like NVIDIA that are very ahead of the curve. They're meeting the way. And then you have sort of everything else catching up — and in that catching up part of it is learning by using the tools themselves, and doing case studies and doing assessment and doing research to determine how all of this is impacting our lives. San Jose is at the front of this work and I would also say, in terms of business incubation, which you see other piece that's really exploding, is how do we leverage and capitalize on all of this new development using AI, the city of San Jose under Mayor Matt Mahan's leadership, has really been focused on anchoring our city as the capital of AI, as well as the capital of Silicon Valley.

[ 12 min 01 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

So the new business incubation center by plug and play is literally 2 to 3-minute walk from our campus. We have our own incubator work on our campus that's built in through our innovation team and our curricular teams. And so we have reorganized and restructured our own incubation to be better responsive, more rapid response to what's happening around us, but also to have this pathway to program site plug and play. So Noah, you asked me a question that has so many constellations of connectivity. That it is just everywhere in what we're doing now. There are faculty members who don't think we should be using AI in the classroom, they're still trying to figure out how to do this without supporting cheating or supporting plagiarism, and we're wrestling with those concepts around ethical, social, responsible use. And that I think is the tension point that we were experiencing as a country, that we're experiencing as a society, and also experiencing in our classrooms.

[ 13 min 15 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

Back at the beginning of my career, I was a teacher for a handful of years, taught K12 level and technology-related basic computer skills, that kind of thing. And this was in the late 90s, mid to late 90s, just before the first dot com boom. And I remember at the time and particularly when I left teaching and and got more into technology industry jobs, thinking about the impact of the Internet and what would that have on how we teach and how we learn and if instead of having to memorize facts, learning how to go find them, and it's a faster process and maybe you have more brain power leftover for doing stuff with that information. I think about parallels to what's happening now. All the furor around, you know, again right around when you took the Presidency, ChatGPT coming out and there were stories of different places in the US and globally. But in the US school districts banning ChatGPT or that kind of thing, it sounds like, as you were saying, they're faculty members wrestling with it and you're working with them and kind of grappling with it as a whole, but that the approach is to introduce, to expose, to have these conversations around them. You mentioned and I had heard about introducing digital twins and AI avatars to the campus community, something that you did. Can you talk a little bit about that project, that experience and then in particular, how students have reacted and how that kind of shapes your interactions with them obviously, but the universities approach to using these new technologies as you go.

[ 14 min 57 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

So we're integrating AI into everything, and I love your reference to the Internet, you know, with Google was introduced, right, that we are moving through this generative and the Society of a retrieval to generative right and students, young people, always figuring out, you know, the Internet to YouTube to TikTok, you know everything in how learning and discovery occurs and so for San Jose State, I believe we need to lean into it pretty extensively and integrate into everything we're doing, which includes our administrative processes. So high school students are coming to us, transfer students are coming to us expecting to be able to use things like they're using in their practical applications, and so our team really wanted to continue to be ahead of this, so I use many of the tools, AI tools, generative tools on a daily basis and that is helping inform and build my own custom GPT and the like to help me be more efficient in my work.

[ 16 min 05 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

So at the risk of interrupting you, do you have? I was gonna ask, do you have any favorites?

[ 16 min 09 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

Several with our instructional design team. They help me build my GPT with all of my most important work that helps me shape how I can be more productive, and that in and of itself is an iterative process in figuring out how this works, because the technology gets smarter with you and predicting you when you give it who you are. So building that custom GPT isn't is another way to build our own portfolio of work. And I'll come back to that moment with the school too. But let me say to you that part of this was also one of my foundation board members suggested to me that I consider building an avatar and let me know the company that he was using. And so my team did it. We went out and created a custom avatar. Not to be confused with the deep fakes. It’s intentional twinning and we released her. Actually, she made her debut. It's me, but I call her her. She made her debut at Adobe, actually, in Adobe Design Challenge. And then I introduced her to the campus later. This full spectrum of — “this is great. Thank you for leading the way” to “why are you doing this, who asked for this, and how much did it cost?”

[ 17 min 35 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

Do it then why can't I do this in my classroom? So there wasn't a number of really thought-provoking responses that. My AI avatar produces now what I love about the AI avatar and why I did it is I want it to be, as I said earlier, accessible, more accessible, so the Avatar could speak 125 languages. I cannot. So the city of San Jose is one of the top five cities with residents that were not born in the United States. And so I need to be able to communicate in languages that I don't. And also as students are making decisions about where they attend college and their parents are helping them make these decisions, I wanted to be able to communicate with them more personally and the AI avatar allows me to do all of those things in multiple languages, so that was my business need for wanting to create the avatar. But like I said, it created quite the conversation. I want to come back to your question about which tool we're using. As you know, or maybe you've heard the California State University entered into a system-wide partnership with OpenAI and every student, faculty member and staff has access. So I have been extensively using ChatGPT through that partnership, which was announced last February that is available to all of our community. I use some of the other tools, use different tools for different reasons.

[ 19 min 11 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

I'm using ChatGPT quite a bit now and have my custom GPT developed there. In our Faculty Development center, we have had for several years now of faculty development engagement using multiple tools and we have a lot of peer training going on from faculty to faculty. In use cases, which is the big buzzword, on how to best be efficient is what are the use cases for using the various tools, and so we're doing a lot of use cases and helping upscale across the community.

[ 19 min 51 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

Are there specific areas that have faculty and or students have shown the most interest, or curiosity in exploring when it comes to using the AI tools.

[ 20 min 03 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

I think it's across the board. I've talked to students who have had assignments of which they build models that might be solving a policy problem, and they have to interject. You know, the legal perspective, a stakeholder perspective, antagonistic perspective, and they put all this into the AI tool and that helps them to develop a solution. It's an iterative process.

[ 20 min 29 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

But the tool may be helping them. Think of perspectives that they might not have thought of, and then they have to respond to it. More faculty. They're building programs in that way, right flipping it. How do you use it? There are some students who are using the tools that I've talked to for study guides. There are some students that are using the tools for first drafts. However, we use the tools. It's important if we're going to be writing about things or communicating that we're citing references and saying, this was code developed based on whatever sort of information they might have retrieved from the instrument and also to validate it. And because no these hallucinations exist, but as time goes on, the hallucinations are diminishing, especially if you're building your own custom GPT.

[ 21 min 19 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

Doesn't mean mistakes aren't going to happen, but that's as I say to students regularly, Noah and faculty and staff, “You are still the human in the loop.” We're not trying to replace the human in the loop. You have the tool be your copilot, or your assistant that you're directing.

[ 21 min 42 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

That's how we talk about it and use it as well. And for my own experiences, as I was listening to you describe the approach in these processes and the importance of things like citing information sources and everything. It's the same way that I do my work when I'm writing or I'm preparing for a podcast. And again, it makes me think of out the original rise of the web and the importance that it you kind of shown a spotlight on the importance of media literacy then right and in the same way. Well, here are my sources. But is this a reputable news outlet or is this some guy named Noah in his basement on his computer, right? It's not quite the same, and I think you're astute to point out the influence of pace, both the pace that the tools are being created and the pace that they're being adopted. And neither one of those is slowing down for the other and it just makes everything all at once in kind of a hyperscale mode.

[ 22 min 40 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

Well, you now know the state of California Governor Newsom has announced a partnership with the California State University and several tech leaders at many of the major tech firms, if not all of them, to ensure that California remains competitive. If AI innovation, the economy and the California State University has created a workforce acceleration board that consists of workforce leaders, tech leaders and university leaders and state of California leaders to think about opportunities to work together in things like metrics. What are workforce challenges? How are we ensuring success for holistic workforce readiness and development? From students who are coming through either K through 12, and coming into the university, community College, to being ready for the workforce is a holistic experience.

[ 23 min 32 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

I think we both know that right now in this job market, that first job now looks different here in San Jose for sure, than it did even a year ago or two years ago. And so we have to rapidly keep up with this and that's why I think the knowledge of the tools and how GPT's and the manufacturing components are working to your point about pace, students have to be ready for that. And the tech CEOs from various sectors, they are expecting San Jose State graduate to come into the workforce ready to contribute on day one, and that means a lot around the tech side, but also in their communication skills and their literacy and their ability to make sense of things that are coming at them so they can be effective problem solvers and team players in those companies.

[ 24 min 29 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

So that makes our work at a public university here in Silicon Valley even more important, while we're keeping up with all these other technological advances. But the state of California has really embraced that in a way that is different from other places and a lot of this is validated and things you and I read every day from the bookings reports to the recent study from Stanford about how AI is being used in the workplace. And you know, the fact that the saturation is here in the Bay Area and San Jose in particular, it was in a whole different place. And that's what I love about the work we're doing with NVIDIA.

[ 25 min 07 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

As we think about twinning, you know, you asked me about twinning. We're really thinking about with our city. And we're working towards creating a digital twin using the Omniverse product from NVIDIA. Yeah, to twin the city and have our faculty who are going to actively going to professional development to learn to use the Omniverse tools in particular. So they're teaching students how to do this as they'll be building out that twin and our Public Library, which is accessible to all citizens and all residents of our community. So our job is to stay not only on development, but also thinking about social and Senate good and how we can in those areas along with what the governor is looking at per state workforce competitiveness, what our mayor is looking at for solving civic and social good problems and what we at San Jose State are looking at and ensuring our students are prepared for this broad array of opportunities in the workforce and NVIDIA has been a tremendous partner with us in that work like the GTC conference, you know this last March we did a watch party for GTC.

[ 26 min 21 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

And it was a game changer for students. NVIDIA brought full stop to the university here at our Provident Event Center. But when I walked in there, I didn't recognize the place. They brought all the technology. It was truly like their CEO, Jensen Huang was in the room. The technology was that good.

[ 26 min 50 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

NVIDIA, as a part of that GTC conference, hosted a career panel on campus. They opened this up to all the all the region we had over 3000 students sitting there for over 2 hours, captivated by this technology Rockstar moment with its AI career panel, followed by the CEO's talk that he did up the street here at SAP Center. And then the kicker, they gave a drawing for five GPUs that were signed by the CEO, Jensen Huang.

[ 27 min 23 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

This epitomizes what it means to be in our geography and preparing students — to understand, to get a glimpse anybody that watches any of Jensen Huang’s talks, you get the sense of where how far ahead the company is and how they're thinking about all these technologies. And that's what we need our students to understand going into that. But and this is not the only one. We see Cadence, Synopsys, many other companies do their conventions here and we have an opportunity to hear from their CEOs, but it matters what's happening. It matters where we started about visible role models accessible. This is for you. We want you to be ready for this world of of innovation that's occurring around us.

[ 28 min 16 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

And so as you were speaking, there were a few different questions under the umbrella of workforce preparedness and future economy, and the AI-driven economy and how you prepare students for that. And you were kind of addressing them as you spoke. And it made me wonder in the career panel, you mentioned the students being held wrapped for two hours listening. What were they hearing — more importantly for this conversation, What were they asking? What are the students, families,and faculty members thinking about? What are they concerned about, excited about when it comes to this new economy and finding that first job?

[ 29 min 02 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

So there's a number of AI-Influenced, career-centered activities that are occurring in San Jose, but then I think that's a competitive advantage that we have. So GTC is one of them, but with many other companies, along with just our own internal resources, holding these kinds of conversations with mentors and sponsors who are all in the various tech companies around the Silicon Valley that are also in many cases, San Jose State graduates, but not necessarily. So the trepidation exists. And so students get an opportunity to come in. They're asking how do I get prepared? What are you looking for? And Noah, besides the technical proficiency, it's still, “Am I a good problem solver? Am I curious? Can I communicate and the basic hygiene of can I get to work on time?”

[ 29 min 58 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

When I hold up my responsibilities as a solid employee, good citizen of the company, wherever I end up some of those things get reiterated that all of these other parts of who you are still matter. But being prepared for this world of change and you as a human being, showing up as your authentic self to create this future that doesn't yet exist is part of what we is reinforced back to our students. But there is some degree of technical proficiency that's going to be required and some degree of understanding how the tools work, even if you're not designing and building, that you understand the logic models to create effective props to manage your life, to manage your projects, to manage your work. Now, not everyone that graduates from San Jose State is going to be an engineer or computer scientist, so they hire from all of our disciplines or sociologists or psychologists. Our Business School, they work in human resources, they work in accounting, they work in finance, they work in marketing, they work in sales and training and development. So there is a whole ecosystem. And then in the nonprofit business, the nonprofits also are looking for our graduates to have a competitive advantage, to understand how to use AI in offices and work that's often lean and under resource.

[ 31 min 23 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

Right, that, that idea of AI being a superpower? Nonprofits. Absolutely they could use it.

[ 31 min 28 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

So it's everywhere, and that's really part of what we're telling our community. Yes, engineering and tech is one element, but it's not the only one. That's why we're embedding AI into everything we're doing in the social sciences, business school, humanities and the arts, education, and the like.

[ 31 min 48 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

How do you think about the use of AI for social good? And San Jose State’s mission and values, and then just in general, you're talking about being a human being and the notion of tools being tools and they're somewhat agnostic — and it's how we choose to use them that really makes the impact. How does San Jose State influence and drive the discussion around AI and social good?

[ 32 min 13 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

So part of the social good is understanding who our consumers are. And I think about social good as we think about municipalities, right? So cities, counties, state employees, university employees, we're public workers. We work for the public good. And so part of it starts with, are we in the public good, knowledgeable? So the upscaling component — we have worked with funders, philanthropic organizations that have helped fund our university to work with our local cities, our local city, San Jose in particular, to upskill to create curriculum that allows us to upskill so that we're developing solutions for common problems, that's why the digital training opportunity to to train the city is so important. So we can get ahead of things that are everyday life challenges.

[ 33 min 05 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

Like is the bus on time? Where are their major potholes? Where are their major safety hazards for pedestrians, bicycles, children and the like? So some of that is going to be wrapped around this social good and all been good. So for us ourselves to be educated, then we look at how does the everyday Citizen who has a a library card, come to the library and get some basic knowledge and basic information to participate in city governments, like a civics master class, for example, or AI master class when they're learning as a resident, how to use tools to advance their civic causes or social causes. So we could imagine that happening in a workshop in a public Library. So that's part of what we're trying to do.

[ 33 min 55 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

Again, with an AI innovation hub in our library and also digital twinning of the city. And then as you and I were just talking about, how do nonprofits think about this? So how can it help to solve expedient routes for food delivery programs like Meals on Wheels or our food bank programs and the like. So the use cases, which is really I think one of the gold cards that's still being developed — what are the use cases ? As learners and as adult, it's even more of a challenge that we're learning the new technologies and trying to imagine, “Now how do I use this to do my job,” where the use cases sometimes are flipped. So that's where the social good is also occurring in creating active and relevant use cases to help people as we transition to this general economy from the retrieval economy.

[ 34 min 52 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

Your thoughtfulness on the subject — not surprising, given your role and your background, but it's really appreciated. Thinking through the the micro and the macro at the same time, right, and as you said, public university public benefit, what are all the different ways that these tools and it's like any other technology except perhaps it's much faster and more impactful than the ones before, or many of the ones before anyway, but thinking about how these tools can permeate all these different parts of society as how you think about social good, I think is is really just a great way to think about it.

[ 35 min 27 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

Well, I was just going to say that you reminded me that we have faculty that are using AI for social good problem solving and what really I've seen as well as some of the output of that is that students who may be multilingual or trilingual and may live in different areas of California or the region bring their own authentic experience. How they're thinking about social goods that may solve to your point micro population challenges or microcosms without giving up their authentic culture. And this integration of solving social good problems, and I'm watching that in practice with our faculty, who are in some cases are doing statewide looks at these problem-solving using social tools. So I think it's important to remember that we're asking students as they're learning to learn, to solve these challenges in their own home communities and out freely unaccelerated benefit that we're receiving now with the tools.

[ 36 min 36 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

That's great. So you've talked about this throughout the conversation and I don't know how I could follow up. You're saying you're working on a digital twin of the campus. But as we wrap up, what else is on the horizon? Are there any new collaborations, initiatives, maybe even research directions that you can speak about, that you're excited to share?

[ 36 min 59 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

So one of a couple of things you know at San Jose State, we've got an AI-related curricular innovation going on. So you can expect to see our curriculum and the programs that we offer here to continue to emerge in ways that are in some cases reactive and in other cases, hopefully proactive with our tech partners in tools not yet developed. So I think this human-centered interaction with robots and living and working in space are things that you're going to see coming from us over this rapid period of time. And we're we're already embedded in some of those conversations and things happening in space, which is just sort of mind bending, right?

[ 37 min 44 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

It's exciting.

[ 37 min 45 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

The other is we're really wanting to ensure we provide incentives to all of our faculty to lean into their research, especially if it is related to these new emerging industries and research opportunities and working with tech companies to understand what their research needs are where our faculty can be alongside. Finding that if we are more focused and granular on what we need that tech companies can respond to that more rapidly and responsibly when we know what that looks like and that's something we're still meshing together on.

[ 38 min 28 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

The Omniverse is the best example I have that we really want to do this and oh, by the way, then we need to teach all the teachers, teach all the faculty members who will lead this and guide it and take it in another way, but to get everyone to baseline. So being in NVIDIA when they can take those courses or go over into the laboratories, there is a big opportunity for everyone.

[ 38 min 53 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

Amazing.

[ 38 min 54 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

The other thing that we don't know yet, but I would imagine with all the business incubation focus that our mayor has and earlier this week the mayor issued checks to the first 5 winners of the AI economy projects that are being incentivized here in the city.

[ 39 min 20 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

It's the first time, and according to the mayor, no other city has done this yet. So I think you're going to see business incubation and Business Innovation and we're going to see it here coming from our students and what they're making in the proverbial garage, which is different now, right?

[ 39 min 39 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

Great.

[ 39 min 39 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

And in our Business School, for example, Noah this semester, so it's coming soon, funded by Plug and play. Our faculty in the Business School created a program called the Spark Academy. And Spark Academy is teaching AI entrepreneurship innovation to high schoolers on our campus. And so all of this is being seeded to mature in this next generation in response to your question about what's next. And there's a lot.

[ 39 min 57 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

Fantastic. For listeners who want to learn even more — maybe you want to plan a visit to campus if they're local, think about applying. Is the website the best place to go?

[ 40 min 20 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

Yes, come to sjsu.edu. Anybody who wants to talk can always DM me on social media and we do respond. I do respond. So it's exciting and we're happy to talk further about this as we all develop curriculum for you tomorrow.

[ 40 min 38 sec ]

Noah Kravitz:

Cynthia. Doctor Teniente-Matson. Again, thank you for taking the time to come on the podcast and more importantly, congratulations and continued success with all the work you're doing, it is an exciting time to be alive. And as a parent with a child rapidly approaching the end of high school, I'm excited for their future if they go on to college by this conversation, it's really heartening to hear about the ways that as an educator, but in, as we've talked about this really unique situation, geographical and sort of proximity to just this history of technology innovation — it's really great to hear about all the thoughtful and practical ways that you're approaching these partnerships and the new technology, and just how to work with and serve your students. So best of luck and continued success.

[ 41 min 25 sec ]

Cynthia Teniente:

Thank you. Take Care now and I look forward to talking to you again soon.