Arif Woozeer

Grew up in Singapore speaking French and Mandarin as a dark person, which reliably confused people's attempts to place me. NRIC lists my race as "MAURITIAN". 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, questions 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 turning up things (collectivist financial decision-making, multimodal communication preferences) that would've likely been invisible if we'd started from system design. It's funny because there is still no good word for that kind of work. Something in between technical and ethnographic?.

Before all of that, co-founded Kura: a voice journaling app, five years, 2,500 users, $50K raised. Closed it last year but I'm still thinking about what it meant.

Every project hit the same wall in that the technical problem was solvable but what was underneath it wasn't: who it was designed for, what assumptions it made about the user. I've run out of ways to answer that question with a better tool.

Currently in trade and economic policy. Reading across economics, philosophy, lately somewhere between Sartre and structural gravity models. Always training for a better half marathon timing (first and most recent one was a 1:49). Slowly working toward DELF B2 in French and beginner Portuguese.

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