Ron Vetter, professor and former chair of the Department of Computer Science at UNCW, will serve as editor-in-chief of the international magazine Computer. Vetter will serve a two-year term starting at the beginning of 2011 while he continues to teach.

Vetter is also the cofounder and CEO of Mobile Education LLC, the company that gives UNCW students, among other services, real-time shuttle bus location information, answers to questions via text from Randall Library staff and DubHunt—the text message based scavenger hunt.

One of the reasons Vetter says he likes working at UNCW is because he has the freedom to pursue opportunities like these. “That’s one of the reasons I’m here,” said Vetter, adding that he likes teaching and working with students in the environment that a relatively small campus like UNCW provides.

Computer is the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society, with nearly 85,000 members worldwide. Vetter has been involved with the publication for 15 years. He started out writing a monthly column “Internet Watch” about what was new with the Internet in the days when the now ubiquitous Internet was just a baby. The IEEE Computer Society’s digital library, including scholarly articles from Computer, is available to UNCW students through Randall Library’s e-Resources.

As the new editor-in-chief, Vetter plans to take “greater advantage of the digital revolution” by enhancing the magazine’s online format with multimedia content, according to a press release.

“The question is: will people embrace digital?” Vetter said.

He hopes to transform the online version of Computer to make it compatible with the newest technology like smart phones and iPads. “We need to slice it and dice it to make it more manageable and interesting,” he said.