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 contexts), 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 already 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 proper 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 is being deployed in contexts that shape 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 makes a decision that 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 ensuring people have real power to challenge systems that don't work for them.
I'm trying to figure out what it means to build technology that supports people across difference—linguistic, cultural, economic—rather than flattening that difference into something a model can process more easily. That means co-design work where the people most affected actually shape what gets built. And it means thinking hard about what comes after: accountability, escalation pathways, and ways to push back when technology becomes another barrier instead of a bridge.
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, Singapore's identity card, lists my race as "MAURITIAN," a bureaucratic acknowledgment that I didn't fit neatly into the standard boxes. This third culture identity — never quite belonging to one place, always translating between worlds — has fundamentally shaped how I approach technology and human experience.
I studied Information Systems at Singapore Management University and spent a semester at University College London. My path has been varied — from co-founding a mental health tech startup, to researching conversational AI for development policy. I work across English, Mandarin, and French, which has shaped how I think about language not just as communication, but as infrastructure for access, understanding, and power.
I've lived and worked in Singapore, Beijing, and London—each place adding another layer to how I think about who gets access to what, and why language often determines the answer. This cross-cultural lens runs through my technical work: when I build multilingual AI systems or study how emerging technologies get adapted in different contexts, I'm drawing on years of personal translation work. I know what it feels like to constantly shift between languages and cultural codes, and that shapes what I notice when technology fails to account for that reality.
Current Focus
I currently work in trade analytics, exploring the intersection of data, economics, and international commerce. On the side, I continue volunteering 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.