3rd SMD and ETD Workshop on A.I. and Data Science: Leaping Toward Our Future Goals

Dr. Lukas Mandrake is the Group Lead for the Machine Learning (ML) and Instrument Autonomy group at JPL, bringing ML techniques to bear against a wide range of applied problems in space, science, and mission operations. 

He is also an enthusiastic and award-winning speaker & educator focused on bringing the promise of ML to new fields and applications as well as science education in general, and passionately works to educate children in science literacy and critical thinking. 

He co-leads the Science Understanding through Data Science (SUDS) initiative to form a collaborative community of physical and data scientists to produce new insights from our vast remote sensing datasets, as well as champions Onboard Science Instrument Autonomy (OSIA) to help summarize and prioritize science observations to empower mission science teams to overcome the bandwidth barrier. 

Prior to joining the MLIA group at JPL, Dr. Mandrake worked for 5 years in ionospheric modeling using GPS signals, built models of rental income vs. apartment amenities for real estate, coded and wrote dialog for several major computer games, and constructed a unique plasma simulator for auroral investigations. He holds a PhD in Computational Plasma Physics from UCLA, 2002 after entering college at the age of 13.