His enthusiasm for big data projects is contagious, but when asked how he came to have a career as a NASA computer scientist, he says it's a "lame story".

He grew up playing video games, but it wasn't until his last year at high school when working on the student Yearbook that he worked with Adobe Illustrator and decided he needed to understand more about computers. So he followed some of his friends into the computer science department at college.

"I have no secret to being successful at computer science other than hard work and then sticking my head in the books and deciding I was going to do well," Mattmann says.

At the ITEX conference Mattmann will talk about his work with the Square Kilometre Array project. The $1.9 billion project will be split between an Australia-New Zealand consortium and a consortium of African nations led by South Africa.

This means New Zealand has been left on the outer edge of the project, but Mattmann says there is plenty for New Zealanders to be fascinated about.