About
I like building things that solve real problems.
The work I find most meaningful is usually hard, messy and not solved by one discipline alone. Sometimes the answer is a product. Sometimes it is a policy, an operating system or an institution. What keeps me interested is being able to take a problem that is not working well and build something that makes it work better.
That is what drew me to policy and operations early in my career. During the pandemic, I worked on supply chain resilience and saw how much better decisions could be when technology and data were used well. We reduced parts of disruption impact analysis from days to hours, which mattered when teams had to make decisions quickly and with incomplete information.
In the years since, much of my work has involved building things from scratch. At Open Government Products, I worked on 0→1 products such as ReadLiao, which was deployed in public hospitals to make difficult documents easier for patients to understand and reduce operational load at admission and discharge. I helped build the early learning products, programmes and foundations that became the Institute of Digital Government. Today, I lead AI-enabled anti-scam products that help detect and disrupt scams across websites, mobile networks, social media and messaging platforms.
Does it save someone time? Make something safer? Help someone understand something they could not before? Give an organisation a better way to solve a problem?
That question is also behind DatastorySG, a pro-bono initiative I started to help young people learn data and AI. We have now reached close to 900 students. As AI makes it much easier for anyone to build, I have become increasingly interested in a bigger question: how do we help more people turn their own ideas into things that benefit their communities, while giving them the judgment to use these tools safely and responsibly?
Looking ahead
Building technology that is useful in the real world.
That is where I hope to spend more of my time. I am interested in building and shaping AI systems that have meaningful social impact, whether through product, Trust & Safety, fraud and risk, or AI policy and governance. I want to work on technology that is ambitious, but also useful, safe and accessible to the people it is ultimately meant to serve.
Say hello
I’m always happy to meet people working on ambitious AI problems and technology with meaningful social impact. The easiest way to reach me is on LinkedIn. You can also explore what I build on GitHub or email me directly.