Dr. Norman Wilde

Updated January 8, 2008

Nystul Chair and Professor of Computer Science
University of West Florida
Pensacola, FL 32514

office: (850) 474-2548
fax: (850) 857-6056
email:

Free Speech On-Line

Office Hours.

Biographical Information

Norman Wilde received his Ph.D. in Mathematics and Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971. He spent a number of years working in developing countries overseas: in academic positions, with the World Health Organization, and as an independent systems consultant.

Dr. Wilde has been on the faculty of the University of West Florida since 1986. Since that time he has been working with the Software Engineering Research Center (SERC) on a series of research and technology transfer projects in Software Maintenance and particularly in the area of Dependency Analysis and Software Reconnaissance. He has worked closely with the research programs of Center affiliates Andersen Consulting, Telcordia, Motorola and Northrop Grumman. He is the author of a series of research papers on Software Maintenance as well as a Software Engineering Institute curriculum module on Dependency Analysis.

Dr. Wilde's 1992 paper which introduced Software Reconnaissance was recently recognized as the Most Influential Paper from that year's International Conference on Software Maintenance.

From the Fall of 2007, Dr. Wilde was appointed to the position of Nystul Chair / Eminent Scholar, to concentrate on strengthening the research activities of the Computer Science Department.

Courses

• UWF's eLearning course delivery system.
• A warning about electronic learning and privacy.

• Spring, 2008 - Dr. Wilde is on Sabbatical, but is participating in the Seminar in SOA course, COP4990/COP5990

Projects

Some of the research projects currently being developed by Dr. Wilde and his co-workers at the UWF include:

• Spotlighting the Code: A SERC Technology Transfer Project: This project is experimenting in SERC affiliate companies with the Software Reconnaissance technique for locating important features in large old programs.
• The RECON Software Reconnaissance tool: RECON is a tool for doing Software Reconnaissance on C code which runs under Unix and MS-DOS and is publically available in source form.
• Security Enhancement for Distributed Software Agent Control of Power Systems: This project is looking for ways to improve the security of computer agents similar to those that will probably be used to control the next generation of the U.S. power grid.
• GUMP: The Generic University of West Florida Maintenance Process : This is a defined process for maintaining software that has been used in Software Engineering project courses at the University of West Florida and has also been adapted to provide quality control during the development of research software. The process documents are available for educators and industry as a resource to use in teaching about modern software engineering processes.

Technical reports on several of these projects are available on-line.