Chris Mattmann is UCLA’s inaugural chief data and artificial intelligence officer. The position is the first of its kind at any University of California campus and one of just a few at universities in the U.S.
In the CDAIO role, Chris 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. Chris will play a crucial role in identifying and leveraging opportunities for advanced data, analytics, and AI across the campus community. By fostering both internal and external partnerships, he will enhance the organization’s pursuit of data and AI solutions, significantly advancing the university's digital capabilities in support of UCLA’s mission.
Chris joins UCLA from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) where he was the Chief Technology & Innovation Officer. Chris has an established track record of conducting award-winning innovative use of technology and data throughout his career. As a Principal Scientist at JPL, he created the next-generation data processing systems used in NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory and other earth science missions. Chris’ work has been funded by NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and private industry. He also contributed to open-source technology development and was a member of the Board of Directors at the Apache Software Foundation (2013-18). Chris was one of the initial contributors to Apache Nutch as a member of its project management committee, the predecessor to Apache Hadoop. Chris is the progenitor of the Apache Tika framework, the digital “babel fish” and widely used content analysis and data analytics framework. His work with this technology led to winning a Pulitzer Prize in Journalism in 2017 for his contribution to the release of the Panama Papers. Chris 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.
Chris earned his Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. He is an adjunct research professor and the Director of the Information Retrieval & Data Science group at the University of Southern California. He also serves as an Associate Project Scientist at the UCLA Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering (JIFRESSE) team in developing leading-edge Earth systems science research. He earned a Public Policy Executive Certificate from the Harvard Kennedy School in 2023.
