About State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology

State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology

The State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology is a national research laboratory at Nanjing University in Nanjing, Jiangsu, devoted to computer software: how software should be conceived, programmed, verified, distributed and made intelligent. Its attested name uses "Novel", not "New", a small distinction that matters for correctly identifying it in catalogues and citations. The laboratory passed expert demonstration at the end of 1986, began preparations in 1987 and was recognised as a state key laboratory in 1990, after which it passed national inspection and opened to researchers from China and abroad. It has since been rated excellent repeatedly in national evaluations, ranking first in the computer field, and its director is Jian Lv — the name is also rendered Jian Lü and, in some university records, Lyu Jian — an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who has directed the laboratory since 1995 and who later served as president of Nanjing University from 2018 to 2023.

Software is unusual among the subjects of state key laboratories: the laboratory's product is not a material or a machine but methods, theories and systems for building other systems. Yet by 1990, when this laboratory was recognised, it was already clear that software methodology — how large, reliable programs are designed and proven — would decide the pace of computing as surely as hardware would. Nanjing University had been building towards that judgement for decades, and the laboratory gathered the university's Department of Computer Science and Technology and its Institute of Computer Software into a single national centre for the science of software.

Roots in Nanjing computing from 1978

The laboratory is based, in the university's own words, on years of research conducted by the Department of Computer Science and Technology and the Institute of Computer Software of Nanjing University. Nanjing's computer discipline traces to 1958, when the Department of Mathematics set up three computer-related majors — computational technology, computational mathematics and mathematical logic. The Department of Computer Science was established in 1978 and renamed the Department of Computer Science and Technology in 1993; it was authorised to confer doctoral degrees in 1981, among the earliest in China, and it conferred the first doctoral degree in computer software in mainland China. One university account dates the laboratory's own origins to 1978, on the basis of that departmental and institute research; the state key laboratory chronology that follows is the formal one.

The formal steps are consistently recorded. The laboratory passed expert argumentation — the demonstration that a proposed laboratory is scientifically justified — at the end of 1986, started preparations in 1987, and was established and recognised as a state key laboratory in 1990, passing state inspection and opening to domestic and foreign scientists and researchers. The department's own history gives the same sequence: expert demonstration at the end of 1986, completion in 1990, national inspection passed, and opening to the outside world. In the state key laboratory system, opening was not a formality: it committed the laboratory to hosting visiting researchers and sharing facilities, a duty written into the model from the start.

Evaluations: excellent, repeatedly, and first in its field

State key laboratories survive by periodic national assessment, and this laboratory's assessment record is its most quoted distinction. It passed its first assessment in 1993, its second in 1997 and its third in 2002. In 2007 it passed the fourth assessment and was rated an excellent state key laboratory in the area of information science; in 2012 it passed the fifth assessment and was again rated excellent in information science. The university's computer science pages extend the record: since 1993 the laboratory has undergone six evaluations, and since 2007 its results have been excellent for three consecutive times, ranking first in the computer field. Nanjing University summarises the standing in stronger institutional language, describing it as an excellent national key laboratory rated first in the computer category for 15 consecutive years, and the Department of Computer Science and Technology likewise records that the laboratory was ranked first in the country over a period of more than ten years.

Such rankings are the currency of the state key laboratory system, influencing funding, recruitment and survival through reorganisations. A laboratory that holds first place in its category across successive evaluation cycles, as this one is recorded to have done, demonstrates not a single strong cohort but a method of working that renews itself — which is, appropriately, the laboratory's own research subject applied to itself.

Direction under Jian Lv

The laboratory's director is Professor Jian Lv, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the director of its academic committee is Professor Fuqing Yang, also an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Lv has served as the laboratory's director since 1995, an unusually long tenure that spans most of its evaluated life. Born in Nanjing in 1960, he studied computer science at Nanjing University, receiving his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees there — his doctorate in 1988, among the first software doctorates of the era the laboratory grew from — and after his PhD joined the university's faculty, spending 1993 to 1994 as a visiting scholar at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. He was selected into the Ministry of Education's Chang-Jiang Scholars Program in 2000 and elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2013. He became a vice president of Nanjing University in 2010 and served as its president from 2018 to 2023, while continuing to direct the laboratory.

Lv's research interests, as his book biography summarises them, include software engineering broadly — formal methods, software methodology and system software — and, in the university's account, computer software, software methodology, network software, agent technology, middleware, pervasive computing, software collaboration technology and web security. He has led the Innovative Research Group on software methodology and technology for the Internet, founded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, since 2009, and has published more than 150 papers in refereed journals and conferences. With Hong Mei of Peking University he is co-author of the 2016 Springer volume Internetware: A New Software Paradigm for Internet Computing, the book-length statement of the research programme described below. Readers should note the name variants — Jian Lv, Jian Lü, Jian Lu and Lyu Jian all appear in sources for the same person — when searching for his or the laboratory's record.

Research directions

The laboratory states five main research directions: novel programming and software methodologies; software quality assurance and automation; distributed computing and system security — rendered in another university account as distributed computing and parallel processing, and elsewhere as distributed computing and system security technology; machine learning and intelligent information processing; and media computing and content processing. Around those directions it studies basic and common problems in novel software technologies, explores important scientific problems in computer software, and follows a guiding ideology its pages phrase as striving for originality in research, making breakthroughs in technology, and promoting industry with achievements. Its positioning is in applied basic research, guided by major national needs and by new trends in software technology, with the academic goal of developing a new generation of intelligent software methods and technology systems.

The laboratory summarises its macro-level research pattern in a formula: one system, two entry points, three levels and four key tasks. The one system, in the fuller computer science account, is an intelligent software method and technology system oriented to the integration of the Internet and human-computer-things; an earlier English account phrases it as the Internet-oriented software methodology and technical support system. The two entry points are software methodology and machine learning. The three levels concern, in the English account, open and Internet-oriented software methodology; intelligent and trustworthy key supporting technology; and ubiquitous and natural basic application modes — rendered in the fuller account as meta-level and network-based software methodology, the key supporting technologies of intelligence and credibility, and the basic application modes of universalisation and naturalisation. The four key tasks are an Internet-oriented reliable framework of software methodology; machine learning and intelligent software supporting technology; integrated — or ubiquitous — distributed application supporting technology; and domain-based semantic media content processing technology.

Internetware: software for an open network

The laboratory's best-known intellectual programme is Internetware, the name proposed by researchers at Peking University together with Nanjing University and the Institute of Software of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for software native to the Internet computing environment. An Internetware system, in the standard definition developed under China's National Basic Research Program (the 973 Program), consists of self-contained, autonomous software entities situated at distributed nodes of the Internet, connected by coordinators in varied interaction styles, able as a whole to perceive changes in an open and dynamic environment, respond by architectural transformation, and exhibit context-aware, adaptive and trustworthy behaviour. Hong Mei and Jian Lv's technical framework for the paradigm is architecture-centric: entities packaged as components, behaving as agents, interoperating as services and collaborating in structured, on-demand ways, incarnated by runtime containers and governed through runtime software architecture, with an engineering methodology that develops entities and their collaborations by transforming software architectures across the lifecycle.

The programme's scale and recognition are documented. Sponsored by successive 973 projects, it drew in researchers from many Chinese universities, institutes and companies over more than a decade, produced a large body of papers, and became a key theme in the national high-technology (863) programme and the National Natural Science Foundation as well. The associated system-software results — runtime software architecture, reflection mechanisms, and the SM@RT approach to architecture-based, model-driven self-adaptation, prototyped on Java EE servers, web services, smartphones and wearables — were published at leading conferences and journals, and the Internetware achievements received national honours including a second-class State Award for Technological Invention in 2008 and a second-class State Award for Natural Science, with the Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware held repeatedly. For this laboratory, Internetware is not a side project but the clearest expression of its founding bet: that as computing moved onto open networks, software methodology itself had to be reinvented, and that a Nanjing laboratory could help write the replacement.

Output, prizes and people

The laboratory's cumulative record, as reported to the end of 2013, gives a sense of its scale. By then it had undertaken more than 560 research projects, including national 973 and 863 projects, national science and technology major projects, distinguished young scholar awards, National Natural Science Foundation projects, provincial and ministerial projects, international cooperation and industry collaboration. It had published more than 5,000 papers in leading international journals and conferences — the laboratory lists venues across artificial intelligence, machine learning, software engineering, databases, multimedia, distributed systems and networking — and 47 academic books. It had won 79 prizes at national or ministerial level, including one second-class National Prize for Natural Science, four second-class National Prizes for Scientific and Technological Progress, two ministerial grand prizes, ten ministerial first prizes and 24 ministerial second prizes, and two of its books had won first prizes for excellent textbooks from the Ministry of Education. It counted three National Outstanding Doctoral Dissertations, six China Computer Federation outstanding doctoral dissertations and four Jiangsu outstanding doctoral dissertations among its students' honours, and it had been granted 130 patents and 61 software copyrights by the end of 2013. A shorter university summary, from a different reporting point, records funding support from more than 400 projects and more than 60 national or ministerial prizes; the figures differ because they were compiled at different dates, and both are best read as dated snapshots rather than current totals.

At the time of its main English profile the laboratory had 57 permanent researchers, 35 of them professors and 52 holding PhD degrees, including one academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, fellows of the ACM's distinguished scientist grade, IEEE, IAPR, IET and AAAI, three Chang Jiang Scholars, and multiple winners of the National Science Fund for Distinguished and Outstanding Young Scholars and other national talent schemes. Its team on software methodology and technology for the Internet won recognition as an Innovative Research Team of the Ministry of Education in 2005 and a Science Fund for Creative Research Groups award from the National Natural Science Foundation in 2007, with rolling funding continued in 2011 and 2014. The laboratory today relies on Nanjing's Department of Computer Science and Technology, School of Software and School of Artificial Intelligence, and on the national first-level key discipline of computer science and technology.

Service, exchange and academic citizenship

The laboratory's members have served the field's institutions extensively. Its profile records service on the information science expert committees of the 973 and 863 programmes, the general expert committee of the National Science and Technology Major Program, advisory and expert committees of the National Natural Science Foundation's major research plans, the disciplinary assessment team of the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council, the China Computer Federation and its technical committees, the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, the United Nations University's International Institute for Software Technology, the ACM China Council and IEEE bodies in Nanjing, together with editorial roles for Chinese and international journals and chairing roles at academic conferences. In academic exchange, the laboratory has established collaborations in research, development and graduate education with partners in more than a dozen countries and regions, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, France, Japan, Singapore, Canada and Australia, and has hosted national and international conferences.

That service record matters to the laboratory's identity. A methodology laboratory influences its field as much through standards, programmes, journals and trained referees of ideas as through its own papers, and the density of committee and editorial roles held by its 57 permanent researchers is evidence of a small institution with outsized gatekeeping presence in Chinese and international computer science.

Institutional setting at Nanjing University

The laboratory does not stand alone: it is the research crown of one of China's strongest computing schools. Nanjing University's School of Computer Science — established as the Department of Computer Science in 1978 and renamed a school in 2024 — describes the laboratory as having held the top position in China for over 15 years, and reports that the school's software engineering and artificial intelligence programmes rank at or near the top of international CSRankings. The department integrates the first-level national key discipline of computer science and technology, the state key laboratory, and a creative research group of the National Natural Science Foundation, and its faculty of more than 100 members supplies the laboratory's wider teaching and supervision base.

The university states the laboratory's strategic goals in correspondingly broad terms: to increase its international influence through prospective and creative exploration of new software methods and technology; to make substantial achievements in the application and industrialisation of key software technology and systems; and to function simultaneously as a base for systematic foundational research, for new software technology research and application, for cultivating high-level talent, and for self-innovation and practice — with the stated purpose of placing China on the international high ground of software development and promoting the leap-forward development of its software industry.

Why this laboratory matters

The State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology matters for three verifiable reasons. First, longevity with distinction: recognised in 1990 and directed since 1995 by Jian Lv, it has converted three decades of operation into a documented run of excellent national evaluations, ranked first in the computer field. Second, intellectual agenda-setting: through Internetware and its surrounding work on methodology, distributed and trustworthy systems, machine learning support and media computing, it helped define how Chinese software research responded to the Internet era. Third, human capital: thousands of papers, dozens of books, national dissertation prizes and a faculty dense with fellows and national award winners mark it as one of the places where China's software researchers are made.

For directory accuracy, the essentials bear repeating plainly: the name is State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, with "Novel"; the seat is Nanjing University in Nanjing, Jiangsu; the milestones are expert demonstration at the end of 1986, preparation from 1987 and recognition in 1990; the director is academician Jian Lv, with academician Fuqing Yang chairing the academic committee; and the five research directions — programming and methodology, software quality and automation, distributed computing and system security, machine learning and intelligent information processing, and media computing — remain the laboratory's own stated map of its work.