Arif Woozeer

I grew up in Singapore speaking French and Mandarin, and my NRIC lists my race as "MAURITIAN." Most of my childhood went into translating between languages and getting used to people not quite knowing what to make of me.

During national service in the police force, I attended incidents involving people in acute distress, some of them mental health related, and it made me think about what had happened before I got there, and whether anything could have gone differently.

At the Reach Alliance, I researched multilingual conversational AI for migrant workers' financial literacy, while at Over The Rainbow my Affective Computing capstone became OTR Copilot, an AI-augmented tool for peer mentors. Later, as a peer listener, I had more direct conversations with people about their problems, which changed what I thought an AI system could — and probably more important, what it couldn't do — in that setting.

I also co-founded Kura, a journaling app for young people. Five years, S$50K+ in pre-seed funding, around 2,500 users across Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, and pilots with NUS and Duke-NUS, before sun-setting it.

These days I work on trade and economic relations between Southeast Asia and the Americas, and now spend a surprising amount of time on things like why the gap between Brazilian and US interest rates moves capital the way it does.

Outside work I read across economics and philosophy — currently Nāgārjuna and structural gravity models, which have nothing to do with each other. I'm working towards DELF B2 in French, picking up Portuguese slowly, and running when I can.

You can reach me at arifwoozeer@gmail.com or via LinkedIn, GitHub, and Goodreads.