Profile
Dr. Maged Elaasar is the Founder and CEO of Modelware, the company behind OML Code, the Neurosymbolic Systems Engineering platform.
He has 30 years of experience in modeling and systems engineering across industry, government, and academia. He has spent over 12 years at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where he serves as principal investigator for the Integrated Model Centric Engineering (IMCE) program, an effort to make systems engineering more rigorous, agile, and data-driven across complex space programs. He is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at UCLA and in the Multidisciplinary Graduate Engineering Program at Northeastern University, as well as at the University of Arizona. He previously spent 13 years at IBM leading R&D on flagship modeling tools, earning 12 US patents and the distinction of IBM Master Inventor.
He is the lead developer of openCAESAR, an open-source platform for ontological modeling and analysis used on large-scale engineering programs, and has contributed to international standards at the OMG as UML co-chair and SysML contributor. He has authored nearly 100 peer-reviewed papers, serves as President of the INCOSE MENA Chapter, and chairs the onto:Nexus Forum.
Through Modelware Labs and openCAESAR, he has spent more than a decade translating foundational research and large-scale engineering experience into OML Code, making that rigor available to organizations engineering complex systems.
Education
- Ph.D. in Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Canada, 2012
- M.Sc. in Computer Science, Carleton University, Canada, 2003
- B.Sc. in Computer Science, American University in Cairo, Egypt, 1996
Leadership Roles
- President, INCOSE MENA Chapter (2025–now)
- Chair, onto:Nexus Forum (2024–now)
- Primary Investigator, Modelware Labs (2020–now)
- Lead Developer, openCAESAR Project (2020–now)
Selected Awards
- CRITICAL Funding — ConOps Modeling and Analysis (2025)
- SURP Funding — Developing OML CoPilot (2025)
- SRTD Funding — Autonomica: V&V of Autonomy (2022–2024)
- Best Paper Award, MODELSWARD Conference (2018)
- IBM Master Inventor, Plateau 3 (2012)
Selected Publications
- Elaasar, M., Oakes, B., Kamburjan, E., Hamdaqa, M., Hamou-Lhadj, A.: “Bridging the Semantic Web and Model-Based Systems Engineering with the Ontological Modeling Language,” International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), 2026.
- Amar, S., Elaasar, M., Bhattacharya, S.: “Beyond Syntax: Method-Compliant AI Assistance for Low-Resource Modeling Languages,” MDE Intelligence Workshop, co-located with ACM/IEEE MODELS, 2026.
- Elaasar, M., Hamou-Lhadj, A., Oakes, B., Hamdaqa, M.: “Model-Based Systems Engineering Perspectives: A Survey of Practitioner Experiences and Challenges,” ACM/IEEE MODELS Companion, 2025.
- Elaasar, M., Rouquette, N., Wagner, D., Oakes, B., Hamou-Lhadj, A., Hamdaqa, M.: “openCAESAR: Balancing Agility and Rigor in Model-Based Systems Engineering,” Systems Analysis and Modeling (SAM), 2023.
- Elaasar, M., Rouquette, N., Jenkins, S., Gerard, S.: “The Case for Integrated Model Centric Engineering,” Model-Based Enterprise Summit, 2019.
Standards & Patents
- Author, Diagram Definition (DD) 1.0, OMG Specification (2012)
- Contributor, UML 2.5 Diagram Interchange and BPMN 2.0 Notation, OMG Specifications
- Holds 12+ granted US patents in modeling and software engineering, including US 8,966,437, US 8,689,173, and US 8,386,997.