Chris Mattmann (born October 29, 1980) is an American

data scientist Data science is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processing, scientific visualization, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge from potentially noisy, struct ...

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 agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) in La Cañada Flintridge, California, Crescenta Valley, United States. Founded in 1936 by Cali ...

(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 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 Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. It provides a software framework for distributed storage and processing of big data using the MapReduce programming model. Hadoop wa ...

, in May 2013 Mattmann joined the

Board of Directors A board of directors is a governing body that supervises the activities of a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government agency. The powers, duties, and responsibilities of a board of directors are determined by government regulatio ...

at the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation ( ; ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open-source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the ...

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 USC Viterbi School of Engineering (formerly the USC School of Engineering) is the engineering school of the University of Southern California. It was renamed following a $52 million donation by Andrew J. Viterbi, co-founder of Qualcomm. ...

. 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 The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets ( overlay networks) that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. Through the dark web, private computer networks can communica ...

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 Adva ...

and NASA JPL on the

Memex A memex (from "memory expansion") 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 w ...

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