Finding Stories in the Data

Jose and I collaborated in the EU funded research project LarKC, building the Large Knowledge Collider, an infrastructure for very large scale reasoning with data on the Web. One of the exciting aspects of that project was the collaboration between computer scientists and cognitive scientists. Jose was absolutely crucial in bridging the gap between those two communities. I remember very well the first meeting where he attended. I assumed he was a psychologist (since he came from MPI), but he kept asking all these hard-core techie questions! Since that first meeting, Jose has continued to impress me with his breadth of knowledge and skills that span different disciplines. He has also impressed me with his creativity in experimental design, with his perseverance in the face of experimental difficulties, and with his intellectual honesty and integrity. It earned him a comment from the project reviewers that they found it refreshing to see somebody give a lucid analysis of negative experimental results, and that they found that analysis more insightful than yet another haleluja-report. I can warmly recommend Jose as a creative and highly capable scientist.