Contact Information:
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Viterbi School of Engineering
University of Southern California
941 W. 37th Place
Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center 338
Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA
Senior Computer Scientist
Instrument and Data Systems Section
Data Management Systems and Technologies Group
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
4800 Oak Grove Drive M/S 171-264
Building 171, Room 283
Pasadena, CA 91109, USA
I am an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department within USC's Viterbi School of Engineering. I teach the course CSCI 578: Software Architectures (most recently, it was taught in Spring 2012) and I teach CSCI 572: Information Retrieval and Search Engines (most recently, it was taught in Spring 2013). See the Teaching section below for more information.
From September 2003 to August 2007, I worked in the Software Architecture Research Group, a research group within the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California, directed by Dr. Nenad Medvidović. I received my B.S. degree in Computer Science from USC in 2001, and my M.S. degree in Computer Science, with an emphasis in Multimedia and Creative Technologies, from USC in 2003. In July 2007, I defended my Ph.D. and graduated from USC. If you're looking for my Ph.D. dissertation, it's available here.
The overarching theme of my research is the design of large-scale, distributed, data intensive systems. My dissertation research investigated software connectors and their properties in highly distributed and voluminous data-intensive systems. The research area grew out of the growing need at NASA and other scientific research institutions and universities to understand the tradeoffs amongst available off-the-shelf classes of data movement technologies, such as client/server protocols including RMI, CORBA, and SOAP, peer-to-peer mechanisms, such as Bittorrent, or JXTA, grid technologies, such as GridFTP, and event-based technologies, such as publish-subscribe systems.
During the day I primarily masquerade as a senior computer scientist in the Instrument and Data Systems section, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. At JPL, I am a contributor to Object Oriented Data Technology (OODT). OODT is an open source, data-grid middleware used across many scientific domains, such as planetary science, cancer research (go figure), and computer modeling, simulation and visualization. For more detail on OODT you can check out my ICSE 2006 paper that appeared in the Software Engineering Challenges and Achievements track. In case you are interested in my other work, my CV is available here. And, if you're really bored, though old, my research statement is a decent read.
I've completed a book with Jukka Zitting called Tika in Action set to be published by Manning Publications in the Fall of 2011. You can get early access to it through Manning's Early Access Program (MEAP).
Teaching

Semester |
Role |
Course Title |
Instructor |
| Spring 2013 | Instructor |
Dr. Chris Mattmann |
|
| Spring 2012 | Instructor |
Dr. Chris Mattmann |
|
| Summer 2011 | Instructor |
Dr. Chris Mattmann |
|
| Spring 2011 | Instructor |
Dr. Chris Mattmann |
|
| Summer 2010 | Instructor |
Dr. Chris Mattmann |
|
| Spring 2010 | Instructor |
Dr. Chris Mattmann |
|
| Spring 2009 | Instructor |
Dr. Chris Mattmann |
|
| Spring 2008 | Instructor |
Dr. Chris Mattmann |
|
| Spring 2007 | Teaching Assitant |
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| Spring 2005 | Teaching Assitant |
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| Fall 2004 | Teaching Assitant |
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| Spring 2004 | Teaching Assitant |
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| Fall 2003 | Teaching Assitant |
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Summer 2003 |
Senior Grader |
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Spring 2002 |
Senior Grader |
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Fall 2001 |
Senior Grader |
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Summer 2001 |
Senior Grader |
Publications of Note

- C. Mattmann. A vision for data science. Nature, Vol. 493, No. 7433, pp. 473-475, January 24, 2013.
- C. Mattmann, D. Crichton, A. Hart, S. Kelly, C. Goodale, R. R. Downs, P. Ramirez, J. S. Hughes, F. Lindsay. Understanding Open Source Software at NASA. IEEE IT Professional – Special Theme on NASA Contributions to IT, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 29-35, March/April 2012.
- C. Mattmann, N. Medvidovic, S. Malek, G. Edwards, S. Banerjee. A Middleware Platform for Providing Mobile and Embedded Computing Instruction to Software Engineering Students. IEEE Transactions on Education, Vol. 55, No. 3, pp. 425-435, August 2012.
- D. Crichton, C. Mattmann, L. Cinquini, A. Braverman, D. Waliser, A. Hart, C. Goodale, P. Lean. Sharing Satellite Observations with the Climate Modeling Community: Software and Architecture. IEEE Software, Vol. 29, No. 5., September/October 2012, pp. 63-71.
- C. Mattmann, D. Crichton, A. Hart, S. Kelly, J. S. Hughes. Experiments with Storage and Preservation of NASA’s Planetary Data via the Cloud. IEEE IT Professional – Special Theme on Cloud Computing, Vol. 12, No. 5, pp. 28-35, September/October, 2010.
- C. Mattmann, A. Braverman, D. Crichton. Understanding Architectural Tradeoffs Necessary to Increase Climate Model Intercomparison Efficiency. ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 1-6, May 2010.
- C. Mattmann, D. Freeborn, D. Crichton, B. Foster, A. Hart, D. Woollard, S. Hardman, P. Ramirez, S. Kelly, A. Y. Chang, C. E. Miller. A Reusable Process Control System Framework for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory and NPP Sounder PEATE missions. In Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Intl’ Conference on Space Mission Challenges for Information Technology (SMC-IT 2009), pp. 165-172, July 19 - 23, 2009.
- C. Mattmann, D. Crichton, N. Medvidovic and S. Hughes. A Software Architecture-Based Framework for Highly Distributed and Data Intensive Scientific Applications. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE06), pp. 721-730, Shanghai, China, May 20th-28th, 2006.
- C. Mattmann, J. Garcia, I. Krka, D. Popescu and N. Medvidovic. The Anatomy and Physiology of the Grid Revisited. In Proceedings of the Joint Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture & European Conference on Software Architecture, pp. 285-288, Cambridge, UK, September 14-17, 2009.
- D. Woollard, N. Medvidovic, Y. Gil, and C. Mattmann. Scientific Software as Workflows: From Discovery to Distribution. IEEE Software – Special Issue on Developing Scientific Software, Vol. 25, No. 4, July/August, 2008.
- C. Mattmann, D. Crichton, A. Hart, C. Goodale, J. S. Hughes, S. Kelly, L. Cinquini, T. H. Painter, J. Lazio, D. Waliser, N. Medvidovic, J. Kim, P. Lean. Architecting Data-Intensive Systems. In Handbook of Data Intensive Computing, B. Furht, A. Escalante, eds. 1st Edition. Springer Verlag, 2011.
I no longer maintain an exhaustive list of my publications. The easiest ways to stay up to date with them would be to scope out my CV, or to check out Google Scholar, or DBLP as it provides a reasonably up-to-date list of my publications, including links to electronic copies of the articles from publisher sites.
Open Source Development

- Treasurer and Executive Officer, Apache Software Foundation.
- Member, Apache Software Foundation (first one from NASA to boot).
- PMC Member, Apache's Object Oriented Data Technology (OODT) project.
- PMC Member, Apache's Spatial Information Services (SIS) tool.
- PMC Member, Airavata, Apache's e-Science grid portal project
- PMC Member, Apache's Gora Object Relational Mapping technology.
- Project Management Committee (PMC) Member, Committer, Apache's open source search engine project, called Nutch.
- (Former) VP, PMC Member and Co-Founder, Apache's content analysis and detection toolkit, called Tika.
- (Former) Project Management Committee (PMC) Member, Apache's family of search-related software, Lucene.





