On December 30, 2021, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued the Notice on Announcing the List of the First Batch of Characteristic Demonstration Software Schools (Department of Higher Education [2021] No. 40). There are 33 universities including USTC, Peking University and Tsinghua University on the list. The School of Software Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China (SSE USTC) gets listed in the first batch of characteristic demonstration software engineering schools, with its key development emphasis on new platform software and embedded software.

To thoroughly follow General Secretary Xi Jinping's important speech at the National Conference on Cyber Security and Informatization, and to cultivate talents in the characteristic software industry, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, in June 2020, jointly issued the Notice on the Distribution of Guidelines for the Development of Characteristic Demonstration Software Engineering Schools (for Trial Implementation) (Department of Higher Education [2020] No. 11), planning to build a wide variety of characteristic demonstration software engineering schools in the fields of key basic software, large-scale industrial software, industrial application software, new platform software, and embedded software. To develop a batch of characteristic demonstration software schools, we need to explore the integrated path between industry and education of software talents with Chinese characteristics, catering to the industrial need of the characteristic software talents, promoting key software technology breakthroughs, software industry ecosystem, national software literacy, and a group of demonstration high-quality software talents.

In recent years, SSE USTC has actively served the national major strategic needs, deepened the integration of industry and education, and built a new model of cultivating software talents driven by national major strategic and industrial needs in the field of new platform software and embedded software centered on artificial intelligence applications and intelligent computing platform. The school has actively cooperated with key institutions such as the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the 38th and 32th research institutes of CETC, Aerospace Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Cambricon Technology and undertaken a series of R&D projects including National Science and Technology Major Projects, The Special Fund for Strategic Pilot Technology of CAS, and Key Programs of National Natural Science Foundation of China. The school has made major progress in the three areas of embedded intelligent basic software, system software and application software, and built a completely independent and controllable intelligent computing platform based on domestic processors. The platform has served more than forty research institutes, universities and enterprises, supporting the research and development of some projects for the national strategic needs, and has reaped a wide variety of fruits in various satellite-based and vehicle-borne systems. Additionally, focusing on cultivating talents in the autonomous and controllable intelligent computing platform software, the school emphasizes on the engineering practice for students, sets up engineering innovation practice projects led by key cooperation institutions in the first year of students' study, and develops a range of courses, supporting teaching materials and experimental contents. Among them, two courses have been evaluated as national high-quality courses, and multiple textbooks have been selected as the planning textbooks by the Software Engineering Education Committee of the Ministry of Education.