Today we’re going to talk to Matei Zaharia. As of this March, he’ll be an Assistant Professor at MIT. He’s currently the CTO at a startup company called DataBricks that uses a rapidly growing piece of software (Spark) he created in the area of “big data analytics.” Spark is powerful and important, but runs behind the scenes for technology entrepreneurs and companies. It doesn’t have the sexiness like a new phone or wearable device that makes the world want to get one immediately. So how did he get it to take off?

This week’s interview is with NASA Scientist Steve Ellis, PhD. Steve is a behavioral scientist by training and is currently working on some pretty incredible stuff in the realm of movement prediction and virtual environment simulation. He’s one of the first early investigators in the area of virtual environments to quantitatively study user behavior in virtual environments. His work has influenced and foreshadowed recent developments like that of the Oculus Rift and some of the technology incorporated into Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci medical telerobot. I had the pleasure of working under him for about 5 years when I was in grad school.