Episode 06: Chris Mattmann - NASA's data scientist

Chris Mattmann, NASA's Principal Data Scientist and general technology and software guru, shares insights from a life devoted to innovation and the implications for each of us.

Chris Mattmann wears a dizzying number of hats: from Principal Data Scientist (the first ever) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to a professor at the University of Southern California and Director of the Information Retrieval and Data Science Group (IRDS) there, to a board member, treasurer, and active contributor to the pioneering open source community, Apache. Chances are if there is something going on in the tech community, Chris is somehow involved. 

At NASA he applies these skills and his unique ability to see what’s coming next to infuse the technologies that NASA needs to push the frontiers of humanity. Chris is a true visionary and pioneer.

To me, Chris has been a profound mentor and a friend. During the two wonderful years that I spent at JPL, Chris consistently exposed me to the ’new’ and the ’novel’, giving me a glimpse into his unique way of seeing the world. Every time he and I talk, I come away completely saturated with ideas, bursting with energy, and in awe of his insight. 

Show Notes:

• Apache Open Source Software Foundation (first mention during introduction 4:00)

• Apache projects mentioned: Tika (26:30), Nutch (15:10), Hadoop (36:05)

• Chris mentions his undergraduate university “SC” - refers to “USC” or the University of Southern California (6:11)

• Chris’ resume and the ‘web of activities’ he is involved in (7:15)

• “It’s all got to relate to one another” -Chris quote (7:15)

• Similar to Tim Ferriss’ “scratch your own itch"

• “JPL” referred to (8:05) - the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

• USC as a ’systems perspective’ school (8:25) - i.e., systems thinking

• ‘Architect software’ (8:35)

• ‘Big software systems’ (8:53)

• Search engines (9:43)

• Similarities between web search and science data search (11:56) - see, for instance, Google’s devotion to a search engine to look through science data

• At 12:15 Chris discusses the drastic changes in data and computation with newer Earth Science missions, specifically comparing the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO, and OCO-2) mission to the Quick Scatterometer (QuickSCAT) mission. In the ‘Drawing inspiration from the grid’ section of this article, he writes about the eye-opening comparison

  • QuickSCAT over a ten year mission lifetime produced ~10 Gigabytes of data

  • OCO over three months produced ~150 Terabytes (150000 Gigabytes)

  • Here’s an intuitive comparison that shows how a Gigabyte compares to a Terabyte and a Petabyte

• Shift to ‘open source’ (17:58)

• Chris’ professor at USC, Ellis Horowitz (19:44)

• Really Simple Syndication (RSS) news feeds (19:50)

• What is a developer? (21:10)

• Audio changes around 22:00 when Chris switched to a phone call to record

• One of Chris’ mentors (specifically on the Nutch project) Jérôme Charron (22:11)

• The French version of Nutch

• Information deluge (24:55)

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy babel fish (27:10)

• Chris talks about the ‘universal interpreter tool’ with respect to dealing with different types of data, but the lesson has much broader implications across society: how does one listen to, understand, and relate to those around them?

• The *amazing* Apache Tika software capabilities (28:00 - 30:00)

• Number of file types on the internet: >1400! (28:09)

• The Panama Papers (30:05)

• Python and Java programming languages (31:03)

• Data science (31:31)

  • Individuals that Chris mentions: DJ Patil, Jeff Hammerbacher, Hillary Mason

  • Data science Venn diagram

  • NoSQL

• Doing the ‘hard work’ and paying attention to your weaknesses (38:45)

  • Seth Godin thoughts

  • Tim Ferriss thoughts: "What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do."

  • Cal Newport thoughts: “deep work"

• Chris’ advisor at USC, Nenad Medvidovic (41:02)

• The person who told Chris about the importance of writing and research and opened his eyes that he “could be excellent at it"

• Be recent and topical and practical (42:25)

• Lightning round show notes (44:08): 

  • One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard

    • Given to Chris by Tom Soderstrom, JPL 

  • Chris on Twitter: @chrismattmann

• Chris’ Five-Cut Fridays playlist (50:20)! https://tinyurl.com/ChrisMattmann-FiveCutFridays

• Other notes not explicitly mentioned, but highly relevant: 

  • Catherine Devlin PyCon keynote talk on open source

  • Excellent article that muses on the broader implications of open source

  • Chris’ excellent article “Cultivating a research agenda for data science"

  • Critical broader lessons from the show:

    1. ’Scratch your own itch'

    2. Draw parallels between your work and your life and connect seemingly disparate areas (like this show connects, e.g., art and science) to make new discoveries

    3. Pay attention to the small things 

    4. The idea of ‘completeness’ and lifelong learning (and the ‘Lifelong Kindergarten' MIT Media Lab Group)

    5. What you need to learn may not always be apparent or clear. Be empirical and try things out

    6. Add concreteness to your abstract ideas through examples - be recent, topical, and practical

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