AI Researcher · Technology Consultant · Senior Software Developer · Artist
João da Mata
about me
I grew up in the interior of Minas Gerais, where I learned to swim before anything that would later matter, and ran the steeplechase for the state long after the swimming had stopped. At seventeen, the year I took my first job as a designer, I found out I had been colorblind all along — drawn, without knowing it, to a craft that depends on the one thing my eyes refused to do honestly. So I learned to do it by logic instead: memorising where each colour lived along the digital paths, picturing the place it would occupy. I trained as an IT Technician and earned a place at UFMG to study Journalism, working through every year of it because there was no one at home to pay my way.
A professor told me, almost in passing, that I would love Germany. I taught myself the language in five months, won a scholarship, and spent a year in Bavaria — and came home already certain I was moving to Berlin, the way one is certain of things that haven't happened yet. I came back the second time without a scholarship, and worked my way through the master's the same as I always had.
Berlin is where journalism, software, and research stopped being three separate lives. I'm now doing a PhD at TU Berlin on whether journalists stay in real control of the AI meant to help them tell true from false, I build the systems my own studies depend on, and — to my continued surprise — I make art.
PhD in Computer Science
Feb 2025 — Present
A doctoral project at the Quality & Usability Lab on human oversight of AI in professional journalism — whether journalists stay in genuine control of the tools meant to help them tell true from false, how that control erodes under time pressure, and how interfaces can restore it. The work sits at the intersection of human-AI interaction, fact-checking, and AI governance, and draws on Explainable AI and Intelligent Decision Support Systems for verification workflows, within the XplaiNLP group.
Guest Researcher (2025–present) and former Research Assistant (2020–2021). The earlier role addressed AI-based assistive technologies for work rehabilitation; current work focuses on mis/disinformation detection and responsible AI for media verification, evaluating LLM-assisted workflows and explainability methods for fact-checking tools.
Master in Media Science
Oct 2015 — Sep 2021
Completed at the Department of Media Studies, in a programme built around techno-epistemic media literacy — the theory, practice, and archaeology of media. It deepened an understanding of media systems, platform politics, and the infrastructures that shape how knowledge circulates.
The programme's professionally-oriented training included a six-week internship at the Press Division of the German Parliament — drafting press releases, supporting journalists during committee meetings and plenary sessions, and attending Federal Government press conferences.
Bachelor in Communication & Media Studies
Mar 2010 — Jul 2015
A degree in Communication and Media Studies with a specialisation in Journalism, at one of Brazil's leading public universities. The curriculum offered flexible qualifications across journalism, advertising, and public relations, alongside hands-on training at Rádio UFMG Educativa 104.5 FM, covering science, politics, and local affairs in Belo Horizonte.
A government-funded UFMG scholarship opened the way to Bavaria, and summer work extended the stay to a full year. Following five months of self-taught German, the scholarship led to two semesters of Political Science at the University of Augsburg — the experience that set the course for everything that followed, including the move to Berlin.
Information Systems Technician
2004 — 2007
A technical formation at a public school in Ipatinga, Minas Gerais, taken in parallel with secondary education. The course covered programming, database analysis, computer networks, and hardware — the foundation that keeps resurfacing, decades later, in every request to build systems a client, employer, or research project depends on.