West LA Times

Chris Mattmann has been named 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.

“AI is rapidly becoming an important part of teaching, learning, research and administrative functions, making a role like this more important than ever,” said Lucy Avetisyan, UCLA’s associate vice chancellor and chief information officer, who created the groundbreaking position as part of her leadership team. “Chris will help bring our campus together around a shared vision for harnessing the emerging power of data and AI and play a crucial role in helping us navigate complex landscapes related to AI privacy, ethics and security.”

In his new role, Mattmann will collaborate with stakeholders across UCLA to develop and implement a strategic roadmap for data and AI innovations. His leadership will enable the ethical deployment of AI technologies while enhancing UCLA’s capabilities in advanced data and analytics, fostering a culture of innovation and discovery that is aligned with the campus’s mission.

“I am honored to join UCLA,” Mattmann said. “My key priorities are to establish a robust governance framework related to AI and data and to foster campuswide collaboration around AI tools. This will ensure a commitment to ethical standards, leadership and collaboration around this exciting capability and help UCLA and the entire UC system create a future where AI benefits all members of our community.”

With a distinguished 24-year tenure at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Mattmann brings to UCLA his expertise in award-winning technology and data innovation. He most recently served as chief technology and innovation officer at JPL, where he created next-generation data processing systems used in NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory and other earth science missions.

Mattmann also co-invented an Apache Tika framework that can extract data from any file type and simplify it into a common vocabulary. This framework was critical to the investigative reporting behind the Panama Papers, a series of stories by hundreds of journalists worldwide that was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting.

Mattmann contributes to Google’s machine learning platform TensorFlow and is the author of "Machine Learning With TensorFlow." He holds a doctorate in computer science from the University of Southern California (USC) and a public policy executive certificate from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Mattmann began his role at UCLA on June 24.