Organizing Committee

Robert Karban - Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

Robert Karban is the CAE Software and Systems Environment Chief Engineer in the Systems Engineering and Formulation Division at NASA/JPL. His team provides an environment for engineering modeling, supporting systems engineering and analysis activities, leveraging and integrating with the Software Environment. Both are provided to 4000+ engineers as the institutional platforms for systems and software engineering and analysis. Robert is internationally recognized as an industry leader in MBSE and MBE using his leadership role in the OpenMBEE community and as NASA representative at the OMG for SysML to align the different model based aspects. Prior to that, he developed control and instrumentation systems and software for large telescopes at the European Southern Observatory, pioneering MBSE for large systems applying model driven technology, and for particle accelerators at the European Organization for Nuclear Research. His career started at Siemens Medical developing System Software, and he received his M.S. in Computer Science from the Technical University of Vienna/Austria.


Ahsan Qamar - Ford Motor Company

Ahsan Qamar is a technical specialist for model-driven engineering (MDE) within the systems engineering organization at Ford Motor Company. His team is responsible for maturing the systems engineering practice at Ford, by researching, developing, and implementing modeling methodologies and applying them to vehicle programs. This is being applied to over 100 features and several system/component development workstreams within software, mechanical and electrical domains. He is also a principal investigator on Ford sponsored research with academia on Visual Analytics application to Safety and Reliability, and Variant Management. Ahsan is also a reviewer for research projects and research publications within MBSE and Safety internationally. Prior to Ford, Ahsan was a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech where he successfully managed and delivered research projects on MBSE for robotic manufacturing, inconsistency management, and tool interoperability for Flanders Make, Boeing and John Deere. He has a multidisciplinary background in control design, mechatronics, embedded systems and Model-Based Systems Engineering. He graduated with a MSc. in Electrical Engineering from Aalborg University Denmark, followed by a PhD. in Mechatronics from KTH-Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.


Robbie Robertson - Sedaro Technologies

Robbie is CEO and Co-founder of Sedaro Technologies, a provider of cloud-based satellite mission design and systems engineering software. He was previously the first employee and Product Development Manager at Ibeos, a space avionics provider. At Ibeos, Robbie managed the design, manufacture, and test of small satellite products. Robbie received his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and Ph.D. in Applied Physics and Space Engineering from Virginia Tech, where he led the mechanical design of three space plasma instruments for the LAICE CubeSat mission. Robbie has held research positions developing physics-based models of spacecraft attitude and orbit dynamics at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Air Force Research Laboratory, and the German Centre for Quantum Engineering and Space-Time Research.


Erich Lee - Lockheed Martin Corporation