Professor Sam Shen proposes to make curriculum modernization to meet the educational demand of tomorrow’s carbon-neutral lifestyle, which will be supported by technical languages, big data, and artificial intelligence. The technical languages will be computer codes, the languages’ vocabularies will be big data, and the languages’ grammar will be artificial intelligence (AI). Therefore, computer coding, with the help of AI, is not just the language for the traditional community of scientists and engineers, but also for the common language everyone should be able to master. The computer coding democracystrong> is a process to enable everyone to learn and use computer codes with the assistance from AI. With today's AI, as long as you can talk about what you wish to do, AI, such as ChatGPT, can write a computer code to implement your objectives. Next you need to use some coding skills to understand the code and make some revisions. This is like to learn English in school to read, speak and write. In the democratic society of coding, you will focus on reading, and speaking and writting part will mostly taken care of by AI.

As early as 2018 , at at the opening plenary session of the Symposium of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), Shen already pointed out, “The most essential skill a college student will have to learn is the future technical languages based on computers. People will use computer codes to make daily communications, to speak, to write, and to present. Each university student will have to learn one or multiple computer languages, such as Python, but easier than Python. The languages’ vocabularies will be big data. Students will need to learn thousands of big datasets for their effective and accurate communications. The languages’ grammar will be artificial intelligence. Students will need to take machine learning and other artificial intelligence classes so that they can use their technical languages with correct grammar.”

Mathematics curricula will have to be modernized more urgently than other areas, because the future technologies will use more mathematics than ever before. Future mathematics education may need to be more customized to specific majors than before. The one-size-fits-all curricula of mathematics education will not work anymore. This requires a mathematics department to design new curricula for many different disciplines, such as engineering mathematics, biomathematics, climate mathematics, chemical mathematics, psychology mathematics, musical mathematics, fine arts mathematics, computer mathematics, pure mathematics, and so on. The customized mathematics education requires the instructors to be specialized in not only mathematics, but also a customized area as well as statistics and computing. Teaching requires the frequent use of the examples and big datasets from the customized area. Therefore, universities will have to produce more cross-disciplinary PhD’s and make more joint faculty appointments between mathematics and other departments. SDSU Climate Informatics Lab (SCIL) has also been promoting climate data democracy. The massive amount of climate data from various organizations around the world, such as NOAA and NASA, are not only for scientists, but also for the general public. The data can generate numerous economic values and stimulate innovations. SCIL has been using the software technologies similar to video games and Amazon shopping to visualize and deliver real climate data to grandmas and school children, in addition to the conventional climate data users. SCIL released its first data democracy product, 4-dimensional visual delivery (4DVD) of big climate data in 2016. The 4DVD technology has been used in classroom teaching, ranging from elementary schools to the university graduate classes.

After 4DVD, the SCIl lab continues to develop more big data software apps, such as Argovis, iCHARM, and Xslice.