This page is a log of what I’ve already done. If you’re curious about what I’m doing right now, look at what’s at the top of my mind. And to learn more about why I do what I do, read about my evolutionary purpose.

Chronological is tired. Categorical is wired. I tend to hop around industries and themes, chasing interdisciplinary problems that span multiple types of work. So, what follows is my life, decomposed into somewhat legible categories.

Startups

Clay: Building silent speech interfaces, by fusing vibration sensors, bio-signals and audio to detect ultra-quiet whispers in any environment. Backed by 1517 fund.

Happily Ever After: Venture built a preventive healthcare startup at Mistletoe, which used wearable data + actuarial data to provide proactive health advice.

Gathered a group of 100+ health professionals, built a sleep improvement app in collaboration with researchers from the NUS Sleep and Cognition Lab, and designed a decentralized healthcare system based on Cuba and community networks.

Beep: a voice-first chat application that used AI transcription and voice generation to provide two-way interoperability between audio and text communication.

Technical Work

Neurotech:

• Researched and developed a novel multiplexed star electrode array to address the challenges of cross-session variability in silent speech recognition systems. Paper and technical documentation available here.
• Won 2nd place at the IEEE BR41N hackathon, building a system to convert emotions into live music with EEG.

Biotech: contributed to modular bioreactors at Dynacyte. Helped to redesign their cloud IoT backend with MQTT, boosting reliability and reducing command lag times by 10x.

Space: designed and built a STM32 based cube satellite, for the EG1310 module at the National University of Singapore in 2017. I also gave a short talk about it, at Hackware v3.14.

Robotics: with my friend, Isaac Tay, I worked on a swarm robotics platform called Sentibots. The project was was a finalist in the Singapore Science and Engineering Fair 2016, and was formally published at the IRC-SET 2016 conference.

Embedded Systems:

• Made a custom 16-bit microprocessor on a Xilinx FPGA, complete with its own instruction set architecture. And, as always, talked about this at Hackware.
• Worked on automated embedded system verification and testing pipelines for warehouse robots at Hope Technik.
• Contributed to a embedded-friendly certificate management system at MicroSec.

Software:

• Maintaining AI Tools for Obsidian, an plugin that adds powerful semantic and generative search to Obsidian. It has 200+ ⭐ on GitHub!
• Built sellingx.io to facilitate peer-to-peer resale of student clubbing tickets. In 5 days, we had 600 daily active users and moved about 300 pounds of money…. then Stripe deplatformed us for violating their Terms of Service.
• During National Service, I developed military software infrastructure including internal booking/tracking systems and a custom educational platform.
• Did client side interface design and development for the MicroSec Intrusion Detection System.

Tech for good: worked on a sonar powered wearable that uses haptic feedback to help to the visually impaired, during a local hackathon (Hack n Roll).

Random websites:

• colorga.me - a fun game to do with colors
• Color Me - a personality test, you guessed it, also based on colors

Misc. projects for fun:

• An FPGA audio synthesiser
• Real time visualization tool for neural network training
• Kerbal Space Program hardware gaming console

Writing & Talks

Neurotech:

• Gave a talk about magical technologies at This Next Thing 2024.
• Talked about silent speech as a human-machine interface at Foresight Vision Weekend 2023.
• Gave a couple of talks on the OpenBCI platform and its limitations.

Education: spent 6 months deeply exploring alternate realities around preserving meaning in educational systems, a preference for academies over universities and protocols to encourage life-long learning. During this time, I built knowledge graphs, a digital microuniversity, and a thought-apprentice matching system. Wrote about some of the ideas here, here and here. Done in collaboration and with support from Audacity, a Singapore based impact collective.

Some of my writing that I’m especially proud of:

• Technology’s ultimate purpose is vitality
• Insurance shouldn’t wash cars
• Institutionalized Learning

Communities

President of UCL Entrepreneurs: a student society where I worked with 30 executives to serve over 1000 ambitious members who are passionate about pursuring entrepreneurship as a career.

Community Steward at Audacity: an impact collective based in Singapore which focuses on a values-based culture to solve issues in communities, food, energy, work, education, healthcare and urbanisation.

Kernel Block 7 Fellow at Kernel: a peer-to-peer learning network of awesome individuals.

Founding member at Makerforce: a small collective of developers, makers and thinkers from NUS High School, who love to build stuff.

Personal Culture

Words: I love to read. Favourite blogs include Astral Codex Ten, Not Boring, Ex Urbe, Ribbonfarm, Subpixel Space. Favourite books include Godel, Escher, Bach, Braiding Sweetgrass, Reinventing Organizations, and Thinking Fast and Slow.

Coffee: Training to be an amateur barista, one pour at a time. I’m not going anywhere without my Baratza Encore, Aeropress and a bag of kiss the hippo’s George Street Blend.

Fitness and Longevity: I dealt with an eating disorder as a teenager, and so I care very deeply about the well-being of my mind, body and soul. I gym regularly, stick to a 16-8 intermittent fast and try my best to eat foods that are full of life.

and just to round it off, I also play chess badly, watch lots of trashy romantic comedies, and occasionally write poetry.