Arif Woozeer

Grew up in Singapore speaking French and Mandarin as a brown person, which reliably confused people's attempts to place me. NRIC lists my race as "MAURITIAN" — which is about as close as bureaucracy gets to saying we don't have a box for you. Most of childhood was spent translating: between languages, between cultural codes, between versions of myself that different contexts demanded. It's probably why the work keeps ending up at the same place — problems where the people most affected are the ones the system wasn't designed for.

At Over The Rainbow the work was on an emotion recognition system for youth mental health support; with the Reach Alliance, a multilingual conversational AI for migrant financial literacy. The OTR project drew as much from emotion theory and linguistics as from ML. The Reach Alliance research kept surfacing things — collectivist financial decision-making, multimodal communication preferences — that would've been invisible if we'd started from system design. Still no good word for that kind of work. Something in between technical and ethnographic, maybe.

Before all of that, co-founded Kura — a voice journaling app, five years, 2,500 users, $50K raised. Closed it last year. Still thinking about what it meant.

Somewhere in there the question shifted: less about whether the system works, more about what happens when it fails someone. What recourse do they have? Working through that.

Currently in trade and economic analytics. Reading across economics, philosophy, and whatever won't let go that week — lately somewhere between Nagarjuna and structural gravity models. Training for a half marathon. Slowly working toward DELF B2 in French.

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