Big Data The NASA Way

Chris Mattmann, a senior computer scientist at the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories will be speaking at the ITEX conference next week

When the Curiosity rover arrived on Mars two months ago it was just about the best public relations exercise that NASA could have hoped for, short of actually landing a human on the red planet. "They've really done a lot for the agency to make people think it's cool to work at NASA again," says senior computer scientist Chris Mattmann, who works at Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL), one of ten NASA centres.

Mattmann is speaking at the ITEX conference in Auckland on November 8 at the Viaduct Events Centre. He has worked for NASA since he was an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, when he took a part time academic position. While not directly involved in the Curiosity mission, Mattmann has worked on Apache (the open source software foundation) data processing and information integration software projects that help power NASA's planetary data system -- the archive for all its space missions...