Keynote 1 - Mohammad Hamdaqa (Ecole polytechnique de Montreal)
Beyond the Clouds: A journey and lessons learned
Abstract: Advances in cloud platforms have changed the application development landscape. Cloud platforms abstract the complexity of application delivery to enable the applications’ rapid development and easy management. This changes the way development teams think about and deal with the underlying resources while building and managing their applications. In this talk, I will walk you through my journey of applying the Model Driven Engineering approach to enable organizations that build cloud-native applications to exploit the cloud platform building blocks to realize what we refer to as the malleable application architectural style. The talk concludes with lessons learned and laying the ground for the future application of Model Driven Engineering in practice.
Biography
Mohammad Hamdaqa is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Engineering and Software Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal (Canada), where he leads the Software and Emerging Technologies Lab. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Reykjavik University (Iceland). Hamdaqa received a Ph.D. in Software Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada in 2016. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, a Master of Applied Science (Software Engineering), and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) with a minor in Management Information Systems (MIS). Hamdaqa is interested in the interplay between emerging technologies and software engineering. Particularly, he is interested in how software engineering approaches, methods and practices can be tailored to tame the complexities of architecting, building and deploying distributed and decentralized applications. Hamdaqa has made contributions and published papers in the areas of model-driven software engineering, cloud computing, and blockchain. He is a Member of the IEEE Computer Society (CS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Keynote 2 - Maged Elaasar, PhD (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology)
openCAESAR: A Next Generation Platform for Systems Engineering
Abstract: Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) has had slow adoption by the industry at large. The main reason is that the cost of its adoption (complex formalisms, poor siloed tools, and lack of enterprise support) is far more than its derived value. openCAESAR is an open-source project that tries to change this paradigm. It allows defining a custom modeling stack with semantic web ontologies. Using such stack, it streamlines 6 systems engineering functions on models including authoring, federation, configuration, integration, analysis, and reporting using modern technology frameworks and DevOps approaches. In this talk, we will give an overview of openCAESAR, including its Ontological Modeling Language (OML). We will also highlight its supported functions and use cases and demonstrate its current tools. We will also discuss how the technology is being used by the Jet Propulsion Lab to modernize the systems engineering practice of space projects. We conclude by describing both work in progress and future works.
Biography:
Dr. Maged Elaasar is a Senior Computer Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he technically leads a 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 space missions. Dr. Elaasar also leads the openCAESAR open-source project that provides many of IMCE’s innovations, like the Ontological Modeling Language (OML), not only to JPL but to the industry at large (including players from the aerospace, defense and automotive domains). Prior to that, Dr. Elaasar was a Senior Software Architect at IBM, where he led the R&D of several commercial software and systems modeling tools (like Rational Software Architect) for 15 years. He also represents JPL (and previously IBM) at the Object Management Group where he has led several standards (including UML). Dr. Elaasar is also a part-time lecturer at the CS department of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he teaches Software Engineering. He is also the founder of Modelware Solutions, a consulting company in model-based engineering (MBE) with several international clients. Dr. Elaasar holds a B.Sc. (AUC ’96) and M.Sc. (Carleton ’03) in Computer Science, and a Ph.D. (Carleton ’12) in Computer Systems Engineering. He has published over 75 peer-reviewed papers and 12 US patents.
