Branislav (Bran) Selic, is President and Founder of Malina Software Corp., a Canadian company providing IT consulting and training services. He is also Director of Advanced Technology at Zeligsoft (2009) Limited in Canada and a Visiting Scientist at Simula Research Laboratories in Norway. On the academic front, he is currently adjunct professor at Monash University (Australia), a visiting researcher at the University of Sydney (Australia), and an honorary professor at Wuhan University (China). In the course of 45+ years of professional experience in industry, he specialized in software design and implementation in a variety of technical domains including robotics, financial systems, aerospace, telecommunications, subsea oil and gas, software development technologies and methods, modeling languages, and real-time and distributed operating systems. In 2007, Bran retired from IBM Canada, where he was an IBM Distinguished Engineer, responsible for setting the strategic direction for IBM Rational’s software development tools. Prior to that, as an entrepreneur, in 1992, he co-founded ObjecTime Limited, a successful hi-tech start-up focusing on advanced software development tools. (ObjecTime was acquired by US-based Rational Software in 1999, which was later acquired by IBM.) Bran has pioneered the use of model-based engineering methods in real-time and embedded applications and has led the definition of several international standards in that domain, including the widely used Unified Modeling Language (UML). In 2016, his contributions were recognized with a Career Award by the Steering Committee of the MODELS Conference in 2016.
He is the principal author of two technical books, editor of six others, and has over 100 publications in various technical journals and conferences. Bran is on the editorial board of two scientific journals. In the past, he was a general chair of several technical conferences and has participated in numerous conference programme committees. In addition, he is a frequent invited speaker at such events. Bran holds a Mag.Ing. degree in Systems Theory (1974) and a Dipl. Ing degree and Electrical Engineering (1972), both from the University of Belgrade in what was once Yugoslavia.
His interest in the Modelia initiative is motivated by the clear and as yet insufficiently explored potential behind AI-based computer automation in support of model-based engineering (MBE). Although MBE is predicated on greater exploitation of computer automation much still remains to be done in this domain, both in terms of theory and practical application.

Xavier Le Pallec is Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Lille University (France) where he received his PhD in Computer Science in 2002. From 2003 to 2007 he was member of the Trigone Laboratory, working on the Technology Enhanced Learning area. Since 2007, he is researcher at the CRIStAL Laboratory. He was a Visiting Researcher at the University of Namur (Belgium) during 2012.
From 2002 to 2012, he explored how to apply Model Driven Engineering to different areas such as Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Technology Enhanced Learning and Multimodal User Interaction, as evidenced by his (50+) publications. Since 2012, he focused on human factors in modeling, with a particular interest on visual aspects. Regarding this topic, he has collaborated with different researchers (from Grenoble, Paris, Namur, Goteborg) and participated in the organization of related groups or events (for instance, national (French) group on Software Engineering / User Interaction, the Human Factors Modeling workshop at the MODELS conference, etc.).
His interest for the Modelia project is to identify how AI can help to software practitioners from a human factor point of view, i.e., the cognitive dimensions in which AI can be useful and/or the interaction mechanisms that are necessary to create or evolve it.

Marco Brambilla is associate professor at Politecnico di Milano and leads the Data Science Lab at DEIB. He is active in research and innovation, both at industrial and academic level. His research interests include data science, software modeling languages and design patterns, crowdsourcing, social media monitoring, and big data analysis. His involvement in this project is mainly related to the application of data analysis and machine learning (descriptive and predictive) over software development processes, software artifact evaluation, and software/tool usage.
He has been visiting researcher at CISCO, San Josè, and University of California, San Diego. He has been visiting professor at Dauphine University, Paris.
He is co-founder of Fluxedo, focusing on social media analysis and Social engagement, and of WebRatio, devoted to software modeling tools for Web, mobile and business process based software applications. He is the author of various international books and research articles in journals and conferences, with over 200 papers. He was awarded various best paper prizes and gave keynotes and speeches at many conferences and organisations. He runs research projects on data science and industrial projects on data-driven innovation and big data.
He is the main author of the OMG standard IFML. He participated in several European and international research projects, editorial teams of scientific journals, and organization committees of conferences.

Maged Elaasar is a software architect at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, where he is leading the Integrated Model Centric Engineering (IMCE) R&D program, whose mission is to develop a rigorous Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) practice and infuse it in space projects. In this context, he is leading the project Open CAESAR (https://open-caesar.github.io/), which helps streamline a methodology-driven, integrated development process for complex systems. Prior to that, Maged was a software architect at IBM, where led the development of the Rational Software Architect™ family of UML and SysML tools. He is also the NASA (and previously the IBM) representative at OMG, where he contributes to standards related to software and systems modeling. He is also the founder of Modelware Solutions, a consulting firm in the area of software and system engineering. Maged holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Carleton University, 2012), and a M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Computer Science (Carleton University, 2003, American University in Cairo, 1996). His research interests include model-based engineering of complex systems, semantic web applications, and cloud-based technologies.

Antonio Vallecillo Antonio Vallecillo Antonio Vallecillo is Full Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Málaga. His research interests include model-based software engineering (MBSE), open distributed processing (ODP) and software quality.  He is involved in several standardization activities within AENOR, ISO, ITU-T, and the OMG, being co-editor of ISO/IEC 19793 (UML4ODP) and of the revised version of RM-ODP (ISO/IEC 10746-2/3). He has organized several international conferences, including ECOOP 2002, TOOLS 2010, MODELS 2013 and ECOOP 2017, has served as PC Chair for conferences such as TOOLS, ICMT, ECMFA, QoSA, and ICSOC, and is in the editorial board for the Sosym and JOT journals. He has been Vice-President of Postgraduate and Doctoral studies at the University of Málaga (2012-2016), and the President of the Spanish Society on Software Engineering (SISTEDES) between 2014 and 2018. Since 2017 he coordinates the Computer Science and Information Technologies (INF) area of the Spanish Research Agency (AEI). 

He is currently working in incorporating flexibility to MBSE notations and tools so that they are able to more faithfully represent and reason about complex physical systems. AI can play a relevant role in this context, and therefore his interests in the Modelia initiative.