The College of Software of Nankai University established in 2001, is one of the first national exemplary software colleges. With the addition of software engineering as a first-level discipline (discipline catalog code: 0835) in 2011 under the approval of the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council, Nankai University’s software engineering was one of the first to be acknowledged as a first-level discipline to grant doctoral degrees. In 2013, Nankai University’s software engineering has been selected as one of the key disciplines of Tianjin. In 2017, Nankai University and Binhai New Area signed a cooperation agreement to jointly build the College of Software. In 2021, the College was approved to be Tianjin's Characteristic and Exemplary Software College Construction Unit, and the software engineering major was approved as National First-Class Undergraduate Major Construction Site.
After 20 years of development, the College has formed a complete talent training system integrating undergraduates, graduates and doctoral students. A group of outstanding young leaders in the software industry have been cultivated, represented by Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, and Hu Yao, the founder of Waterdrop Medical Crowdfunding, and they have produced a huge social impact. It also becomes one of the most influential highlights of China’s software colleges construction.
The College of Software has a high-quality teaching and research team with stable research directions and outstanding innovation and collaboration capabilities. There are currently 48 faculty members, 23 full-time and experimental teachers, including 6 professors, 8 associate professors, and 9 with intermediate titles. A reasonable talent echelon structure provides strong support for the long-term development of the College. In recent years, a group of international-level research and industry-university-research results have been achieved in the fields of intelligent information processing, management information systems, software engineering and software methodology, embedded software and information security, and graphics and image processing, etc. During the “Thirteenth Five-Year Plan” period, a total of 72 scientific research projects including national projects, provincial and ministerial projects, international cooperation projects, and horizontal projects with project funding of more than 54.32 million yuan, among which a total founding of 51.02 million yuan is for the national key research and development program of intelligent software platform research and development hosted by Dean Zhang Yuzhi as the director of the project. 14 invention patents and dozens of software copyrights have been achieved. Professor Gao Tiegang was selected as one of the most cited Chinese scholars in the field of computer science published by Elsevier for five times, and Mr. Zhang Shenglin won the IEEE ISSRE Conference Best Paper Award.
At present, taking the opportunity of the cooperation between Nankai University and Binhai New Area to build software college, the College is planning a new development blueprint and strives to gradually build the college with “Nankai character, Chinese characteristics, and world-class level” after several years of construction, so that the College of Software of Nankai University can become a training base for high-level innovative and entrepreneurial talents in the software industry in Tianjin and China.
(Data as of November 2021)