The ECNU School of Software Engineering is a strategic alliance unit of the Shanghai International School of Chief Technology Officer (hereinafter referred to as the CTO School). The CTO School entrusts the School of Software Engineering to carry out the China-Israel Innovation CTO class special program of professional master’s degree in electronic information (software engineering direction), gives full play to the advantages of software disciplines and uses advanced means of teaching to provide systematic information technology innovation ability and compound technology management elite ability for the students who are interested in the future frontier science and technology field.
Founded in January 2002, the ECNU School of Software Engineering (formerly known as Software School) is one of the first batch of 35 demonstration software schools in China and the only demonstration software school approved among the normal universities in China at that time. The first president was Professor He Jifeng, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The discipline of software engineering that the school relies on is one of the key construction disciplines of the ECNU and one of the 211 key construction disciplines of the 11th Five-Year Plan in China. As one of the double-first-class key construction disciplines of the University, the discipline of software engineering was approved as Shanghai First-class Discipline (Class B) in 2012. In the same year, the discipline ranked sixth in China and first in Shanghai in the discipline evaluation results; In 2016, the discipline ranked A in the fourth round of discipline assessment of the Ministry of Education (top 5% in China); it ranked the fifth in China’s Best Disciplines of Software Science in 2019, and its ranking for China's Best Disciplines of Software Science rose slightly in 2020.
The School of Software Engineering now consists of the Department of Software Science and Technology, the Department of Embedded Software and Intelligent Systems and the Department of Cryptography and Network Security. It has a number of laboratory bases such as the National Credible Embedded Software Engineering Technology Research Center, the Trusted Software International Joint Research Center, the Engineering Research Center of Software/Hardware Co-Design Technology and Application Education Department, the Joint Laboratory of International Cooperation on Trusted Software of Ministry of Education, Shanghai Key Laboratory of High Trusted Computing and Shanghai Trusted Internet of Things Software Collaborative Innovation Center.
At present, it has formed a first-class software engineering academic and application research team with certain international influence: 1 innovative research group of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, 1 academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 1 winner of the National Outstanding Youth Fund, 2 winners of the Changjiang Young Scholars Program and 16 winners of the Shanghai Municipal Leading Talents Program, the Dawn Scholars program and other provincial and ministerial talent programs. The School has also attracted more than 10 part-time famous professors, including Turing Award winners, academicians of the European Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Sciences, to participate in the construction of the School.
The School of Software Engineering has built a high-end software talent training mode with international vision, gives full play to the advantage of disciplines faculties, strives to cultivate the high-end software talents with large system architecture design ability, independent innovation thinking and research potential, credible industrial control software design and credible artificial intelligence technology research and development ability to provide intellectual support to the national and Shanghai information field.
Adhering to the school-running philosophy of “Student-centered, Market-oriented and Seeking Development through Innovation” the School sticks to the characteristic road of internationalization of school-running, marketization of operations and integration of production, education and research, and cultivates high-level, practical, compound and international software talents. Guided by Xi Jinping’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, the School aims to build itself into a domestic first-class and internationally renowned software engineering school with discipline construction as the focus and innovative talent cultivation as the goal.