About Me

Nicolas Rouquette is a Principal Computer Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He is responsible for the technical strategy for JPL’s R&D program called Integrated Model Centric Engineering (IMCE) including specifying the Ontological Modeling Language, OML, as a carefully-designed restriction of standards-compliant OWL2-DL augmented with SWRL rules; organizing collaborative model-centric systems engineering as workflows involving man-machine interactions and using GIT, a proven technology for content-addressable storage, for cryptographic assurances of provenance and traceability to occurrences of workflow processes.

Prior to working on the IMCE initiative, he worked on JPL’s Mission Data System where he implemented a component-based software architecture style in C++ for modularizing and architecting the MDS software.

Prior to MDS, he worked on JPL’s Deep Space One where he pioneered agile software development techniques based on model-driven code generation techniques as The 13th Technology of Deep Space One using Mathworks’ Stateflow. Applying information encoding techniques, he pioneered generating comprehensive yet compact telemetry accounting for all of 32 Stateflow machines in DS1’s Fault Protection system providing unprecedented clear insights into the spacecraft’s fault protection behavior. Since DS1, code generation techniques have been applied systematically to all of JPL’s flagship spacecraft flight software development.

Education & Training

1995 - Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Southern California, USA

1988 - M.Sc. in Computer Science, University of Southern California, USA

1987 - Ingénieur ESIEE Paris, 1987