By Megan Tyson, University Marketing Communications
Enthusiastic about all things software engineering, it was no surprise in 2007 when Norman Wilde, was appointed William Craig Nystul Professor of Computer Science, Eminent Scholar at the University of West Florida. For 21 years, Wilde has dedicated his time at UWF to research and teaching, bringing real world experience to his students and working closely with prominent American software companies.
“You really have to expect to spend your life learning when you decide to have a career in this field,” said Wilde. “In computer science, every 10 years is a whole new field, so we have to make sure we are always ahead of what comes next.”
Wilde’s current scholarly research focuses on Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA is software architecture with an infrastructure which allows different applications to exchange data with one another as they participate in business processes. As Nystul chair, Wilde has brought SOA research opportunities to UWF for faculty members to work on.
“Our group is just getting started, with each faculty member looking at one part of the SOA elephant,” said Wilde. “We hope that this SOA research will eventually make its way into our course material. If this takes off the way IBM and other major companies are expecting, our students will need to know about it and will hopefully already have experience working with this kind of information.”
Throughout his time at UWF, Wilde has also been working with the Software Engineering Research Center (SERC), a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center, on research and technology transfer projects in software maintenance. Students working on SERC projects get a chance to interact with major software companies both on site and in SERC's bi-annual research showcases.
“Participating in this research and working closely with companies, it’s not uncommon for a student to get an interview on the fly or to get noticed by companies looking for young talent,” said Wilde.
Balancing his research and his teaching opportunities, Wilde’s passion for his job is truly contagious and he admits that he also loves learning from students on a daily basis.
“UWF does a great job of being a happy mean between a research university and the teaching oriented university,” said Wilde. “We’re doing the research and keeping on top of what’s happening, but at the same time, we still get to spend a lot of one-on-one time with our students.”
Wilde received his doctorate in mathematics and operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971. He also spent several years working in developing countries overseas in academic positions with the World Health Organization and as an independent systems consultant.
Learn more about UWF Computer Science at cs.uwf.edu.