Chris Mattmann is the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer and the Division Manager for the Artificial Intelligence, Analytics and Innovation Development Organization in the Information Technology and Solutions Directorate (ITSD) at NASA JPL. Dr. Mattmann is also JPL's first Principal Scientist in the area of Data Science. The designation of Principal is awarded to recognize sustained outstanding individual contributions in advancing scientific or technical knowledge, or advancing the implementation of technical and engineering practices on projects, programs, or the Institution. He has over 17 years of experience at JPL and has 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. Mattmann was the first Vice President (VP) of Apache OODT (Object Oriented Data Technology), the first NASA project to enter the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and he led the project's transition from JPL to the ASF.

He contributes to open source as a Director at the Apache Software Foundation where he was one of the initial contributors to Apache Nutch as a member of its project management committee, the predecessor to the Apache Hadoop project. Mattmann is the progenitor of the Apache Tika framework, the digital "babel fish" and de-facto content analysis and detection framework that exists.

Mattmann is the Director of the Information Retrieval & Data Science (IRDS) group at USC and Adjunct Associate Professor. He teaches graduate courses in Content Detection & Analysis & in 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.