About
Mauritius — my parents' home, and the place that has always complicated simple questions about where I'm from.
Research Interests
I build AI systems for people who live between languages and cultures, because I've spent my whole life doing that translation work myself.
Here's the kind of problem I'm interested in: A migrant worker arrives in Singapore, needs to set up a bank account and understand employment contracts, but the financial system assumes you already speak English and understand how CPF works. A youth mentor is supporting someone in crisis over text and needs to figure out if this is something they can handle or if it needs escalation, but the line between "I'm stressed about exams" and "I need professional intervention" isn't always obvious in digital communication, especially across cultural contexts.
My recent work includes building emotion recognition systems for youth mental health support at Over The Rainbow (figuring out what AI should and shouldn't do in high-stakes emotional support), multilingual dialogue systems for migrant financial literacy with Reach Alliance (delivering banking information across language barriers), and research on how conversational AI shapes trust when you're navigating unfamiliar cultural contexts.
The questions I keep coming back to: Where should technology actually come in versus where does it just get in the way? When someone's in crisis, what's the right escalation response, and how do you build systems that support human judgment rather than replacing it? Who gets to decide what counts as "good enough" when the technology shapes access to economic opportunity, healthcare, or emotional support?
The more I work on these systems, the more I realize the hard questions aren't technical. When an algorithm affects someone's access to services or flags their communication as risky, who advocates for them? What recourse exists when automated systems fail? I'm increasingly interested in the gap between building better technology and making sure people can actually push back when systems don't work for them.
I'm trying to figure out what it means to build technology that works across linguistic, cultural, and economic difference without smoothing it all out for the sake of a cleaner model. That means co-design work where the people most affected actually shape what gets built. And it means thinking about what comes after: accountability, escalation pathways, and ways to push back when technology becomes another barrier.
Background
I've always existed between categories. Born to Mauritian parents but raised in Singapore, I grew up looking "brown" but speaking French and Mandarin, a combination that constantly confused people's attempts to place me. My NRIC lists my race as "MAURITIAN," which is about as close as bureaucracy gets to saying "we don't have a box for you." That experience of never quite belonging to one place, always translating between worlds, shaped how I think about technology and who it's built for.
I studied Information Systems at Singapore Management University and spent a semester at University College London. I've co-founded a mental health tech startup and researched conversational AI for development policy. I work across English, Mandarin, and French, which has shaped how I think about language as infrastructure, not just communication.
I've lived and worked in Singapore, Beijing, and London. Each place added to how I think about who gets access to what, and why language often determines the answer. When I build multilingual AI systems or study how emerging technologies get adapted in different contexts, I'm drawing on years of switching between languages and cultural codes. That shapes what I notice when technology fails to account for it.
Current Focus
I currently work in trade analytics, looking at how data, economics, and international commerce fit together. On the side, I volunteer with Over The Rainbow on youth mental health support systems, train with American Dragons Singapore for dragon boat, and stay connected to my previous research with Reach Alliance on conversational AI for migrant worker financial literacy.