About Me

Maged Elaasar is a Senior Technology Researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He technically leads a JPL-wide strategic R&D program called Integrated Model Centric Engineering (IMCE). The mission of the program is to transform systems engineering into a rigorous, agile, and data-centric practice, and infuse it in JPL’s robotic space missions. Maged is also exploring approaches to architecting and testing system autonomy. He is also investigating approaches to leverage Artificial Intelligence in the context of systems engineering. Prior to that, Maged was a Senior Software Engineer at IBM, where he led the R&D of various software and systems modeling technologies. Maged is also the founder of Modelware Solutions, a company based in California that provides development, consulting, and training services in the area of model based engineering (MBE).

Maged’s expertise in MBE spans both technology and practice. On the technology side, he currently leads openCAESAR, an open source software solution that aims at streamlining the practice of model based systems engineering (MBSE) for projects building complex cyber physical systems. He is also the PI of other R&D projects related to MBSE. Before that, he led the development of Rational Software Architect and Design Management, both popular commercial UML/SysML modeling tools from IBM. Maged has also been actively contributing to open source modeling platforms like Papyrus. He has also been leading modeling standards at the OMG like SysML (contributor) and UML (co-chair). On the practice side, Maged has been a systems architect, specifying the architecture of complex systems in aerospace, where he has co-developed the Executable Systems Engineering Method (ESEM), which supports automated systems analysis using model execution techniques.

Maged is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is also a lecturer in the Multidisciplinary Graduate Engineering Program at Northeastern University. He is also a research partner to numerous research labs around the world. His research interests span model-based systems engineering, model-driven software engineering, semantic web technologies, analytics technologies, and cloud-computing technologies.

Education & Training

2012 - Ph.D. in Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University

2003 - M.Sc. in Computer Science, Carleton University

1996 - B.Sc. in Computer Science, American University in Cairo