Now
LiveApril 2026 · Durham, NC
Studying
Freshman spring semester at Duke. I'm taking a range of classes across mathematics, econometrics, climate change, cultural anthropology and regional studies (European Union). The challenges of the future are going to require us to think across fields, and that's exactly what I've been priming myself to do. Still figuring out majors, but that's not urgent: learning comes first!
Outside of formal class, I'm working on Andrew Ng's Deep Learning & Neural Networks course on Coursera to learn about how AI models work. This is a generationally important technology, and I find the need to go beyond being a consumer / back-seat driver in the AI push. I think the biggest fork in the road ahead is that between people who decide to use AI to replace their thinking, and those who play some kind of active role in the AI conversation - whatever that might look like.
I think my biggest interest within this conversation on AI relates to its ethical development and usage. To that end, I am now pursuing BlueDot Impact's AGI Strategy Course to learn more about potential futures for AI in the future, and what we can do to ensure responsible development. Complementing my study with BlueDot Impact, I am also playing around with finetuning models on Unsloth's open source Colab notebooks.
Reading
- Doing Good Better— Will MacAskill
- Air-Conditioned Nation, Revisited— Cherian George
- Ethics in the Real World— Peter Singer
Building
Working (together with Duke DevLab & a PhD student) on a paper analyzing the effectiveness of supply chain traceability initiatives in reducing agriculture-driven deforestation in Cotê d'Ivoire. Efforts to reduce deforestation through Coasean bargaining (Pigouvian taxes/subsidies) have not efficiently reduced deforestation due to insufficient pass-through.
Supporting the Himalay Unnati Mission (HUM), an Indian NGO that builds partnerships for development in the Indian Himalayan Region. We're writing a white paper / strategic overview for them, to explain key challenges in the IHR, government approaches, and how HUM is supporting their mission as an implementation partner. I'm impressed at the robustness of a civil society approach in dealing with such fundamental challenges. Perhaps there is merit in a more civil-society oriented approach that can more acutely understand ground realities.
On the founding exec of the Duke Southeast Asian Community - an organization intending to build a tighter network of Southeast Asians at Duke. We're looking into programming and cultural outreach so that each and every Southeast Asian feels right at home at Duke.
Exploring ideas around using dialogue circles & restorative processes to promote well-being centered democracy in Singapore. Getting trained on restorative processes as part of the Duke Kenan Institute of Ethics's ReWork Lab, led by Ada Gregory. I attended a weekend training session last week on restorative facilitation.
Thinking about
- How institutions encode values, and whether that’s fixable
- The tension between legibility and nuance in public writing
- Whether economic growth and ecological sustainability are actually compatible
- What it means to write clearly about complex systems
This is a now page. A single page that answers “what are you up to these days?” Updated occasionally when things shift.