Chris Mattmann

Chris Mattmann is the inaugural Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAIO) at UCLA, a first of its kind position in the UC system. In this role he will collaborate with key stakeholders to develop the strategy and roadmap for data and artificial intelligence (AI) innovations. He will help establish practices to monitor the value of the portfolio of AI investments and coordinate with technology service owners to facilitate the adoption of emerging technologies, ensuring that ethical and responsible practices are followed. His work involves identifying areas to leverage advanced data, analytics, and AI across the campus community, significantly advancing the university's digital capabilities in support of UCLA’s mission. Before UCLA, Mattmann was the Division Manager of the Artificial Intelligence, Analytics and Innovative Development Organization at NASA JPL. He was the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer and reported to the CIO. He recently finished a nearly 24 year career at JPL where he conceived, realized and delivered the architecture for the next generation of reusable science data processing systems for NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory, NPP Sounder PEATE, and the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) Earth science missions. Mattmann's work has been funded by NASA, DARPA, DHS, NSF, NIH, NLM and by private industry and commercial partnerships.  He contributes to open source and was a member of the Board of Directors at the Apache Software Foundation (2013-18) and was one of the initial contributors to Apache Nutch as a member of its project management committee, the predecessor to Apache Hadoop. Mattmann is the progenitor of the Apache Tika framework, the digital "babel fish" and widely used content analysis and data analytics framework. Mattmann contributes to TensorFlow, Google’s machine learning platform and has recently finished a book on Machine Learning for TensorFlow, 2nd edition published by Manning Publications. Mattmann is an expert in Artificial Intelligence. Mattmann is the Director of the Information Retrieval & Data Science (IRDS) group at USC and Adjunct Research Professor ("Full Professor"). He teaches and has incepted graduate courses in Data Science, Web Search Engines & Information Retrieval. Mattmann has materially contributed to understanding of the Deep Web and Dark Web through the DARPA MEMEX project. Mattmann's work helped uncover the Panama Papers scandal which won the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism in 2017.