Chris Mattmann (born October 29, 1980) is an American
data scientist
Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge from data across a bro ...
currently working as the Principal Data Scientist and
Chief Technology and Innovation Officer in the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) at the
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeedi ...
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center in the City of La Cañada Flintridge, California, United States.
Founded in the 1930s by Caltech researchers, JPL is owned by NASA ...
(JPL) in Pasadena, California. He is also the manager of JPL's Open Source Applications office. Mattmann was formerly Chief Architect in the Instrument and Data Systems section at the laboratory.
Mattmann graduated from the
University of Southern California (USC) in 2007 with a PhD in Computer Science studying with
Dr. Nenad Medvidović and he went on to invent
Apache Tika
Apache Tika is a content detection and analysis framework, written in Java, stewarded at the Apache Software Foundation. It detects and extracts metadata and text from over a thousand different file types, and as well as providing a
Java libr ...
with Jérôme Charron. Apache Tika is a widely used software framework for content detection and analysis. Mattmann later wrote a book about the framework titled Tika in Action with Jukka Zitting, which is published by Manning Publications.
Chris Mattmann's work on Tika and other projects was heavily influenced by open source both at NASA and within the academic community. After creating Tika, and helping to create other projects including
Apache Nutch
Apache Nutch is a highly extensible and scalable open source web crawler software project.
Features
Nutch is coded entirely in the Java programming language, but data is written in language-independent formats. It has a highly modular architec ...
an open source web crawler and the predecessor to the big data platform
Apache Hadoop, in May 2013 Mattmann joined the
Board of Directors at the
Apache Software Foundation where he served until March 2018 and held roles including Treasurer, Vice Chairman, and Vice President of the Legal Affairs Committee.
During this time, Chris worked to apply open source principles to data management problems inspired by his work at NASA in Earth and Planetary science, and in engineering. Mattmann maintained an affiliation with USC as an Adjunct Associate Professor and in order to continue to do research on open source and data management, he created the Information Retrieval and Data Science Group (IRDS). IRDS includes diverse students in the areas of data science, information retrieval and informatics and the group exists within USC's Viterbi School of Engineering. The focus of the group is on cross disciplinary data and content analysis work applied to the science, business, engineering and information technology (IT) domains.
At NASA, Mattmann's work has been applied to a number of space missions including
Orbiting Carbon Observatory 1/2, NPP Sounder PEATE, and the
Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) Earth science missions. Mattmann was also one of the principal developers of the
Object Oriented Data Technology platform, an open source data management system framework originally developed by NASA JPL and then donated to the Apache Software Foundation.
More recently, Chris has been focused on Dark Web and automated data processing technologies and has been leading research teams working with
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
and NASA JPL on the
Memex
Memex is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with microform documents and described in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of ...
project. This project involves data discovery and dissemination from the Dark Web.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mattmann, Chris
Living people
1980 births
NASA people
USC Viterbi School of Engineering alumni
American scientists
21st-century American engineers
American computer programmers
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
American aerospace engineers
Computer science writers
University of Southern California faculty
People from Santa Clarita, California