Eh, it's random, but I also belive they take actual player names for NPCs sometimes. A commando trainer in New Preatoria was named Rizza, which was the name of an ingame friend of mine since launch. Showed it to him and we had a good laugh. I still got the screen shots of him standing beside himself. Even if hte NPC was a trando and he was a human.
I think you are right Nyase...I saw an Imperial engineer at one of the camps that spawned around Noc a few months ago....it was named Abos something or another.