Data Science & Philosophy · UC Berkeley
Hi, my name is Aarav Minocha.
I'm
I'm a Berkeley student studying data science and philosophy. I'm passionate about mental health, and I mostly build software and chase research questions where AI runs into law & healthcare.
About
When I was thirteen, I used to translate for my grandmother at her doctor's appointments. I would English into the most precise Hindi I could manage. When the doctor asked if she understood, she nodded because I nodded, and that counted as consent. I started building technology so fewer important moments would come down to a nod.
At SUNY Old Westbury I built an AI interface that read tone and emotion in patients' speech, so doctors could understand the worry behind the words. The next year I used deep learning to push low-cost MRI scanners closer to catching Alzheimer's. That project branched into an AI research lab for neurodegenerative disease and mental health that is now Reteena. But clinics kept telling me that fragmented, unclear regulation kept tools like mine from being used clincally.
That sent me looking for the other half of the problem. Now I work on AI in law enforcement and algorithmic pricing at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, and on safeguards for teens from AI chatbots at the Stanford Center for Digital Health. I believe progress needs the technology and the governance moving together.
Projects
The things I'm building right now
A BCI that reasons about what you mean and gets sharper every time you use it, with no recalibration, ever. The latest out of Reteena, the applied AI lab I co-founded.
Read the blog postReads your email, meetings, and calendar, then turns every loose “I’ll send that over” into a tracked task or event, each one linked back to the exact message it came from.
Read the blog postSkills
The tools I use most
- Python
- HTML
- CSS
- R
- JavaScript
- React
- Next.js
- Supabase
- Tailwind
- TypeScript
- Figma
- Playwright
Experience
Now
- ~
AI Risk Intern @ Center for AI and Digital Policy, auditing 50+ AI systems for disclosure, bias, and human oversight
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Research Assistant @ Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, AI agents probing algorithmic pricing under New York's disclosure law
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AI Legislative Policy Intern @ Criminal Law and Justice Center, researching how AI gets used in law enforcement
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Research Assistant @ Stanford Center for Digital Health, safeguards for teens from AI chatbots, and mental-health guardrails for generative AI
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AI Education Consultant @ UNICEF Accessible Digital Textbooks, forecasting adoption for an open-source accessible-textbook pipeline
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AI Education Policy Lead @ Office of Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens, leading a team of 5 Berkeley undergraduates in creating an AI curriculum for California high schools
Before this
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Independent neuroimaging research, using deep learning to push low-cost MRI scanners toward real diagnostic accuracy for Alzheimer's
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Research Assistant @ SUNY Old Westbury NLP Lab, an AI interface reading tone and emotion in patient speech
What I'm up to
- ~Tennis
- ~Going to the gym
- ~Playing the guitar
- ~Skateboarding
- ~Trying every Celsius flavor (mango lemonade winning right now)
- ~Making exclusively matcha ice cream in my Ninja Creami
Music
- Slide Away by Oasis
- Please Do Not Lean by Daniel Caesar
- Just Like Heaven by The Cure
- Forget Her by Jeff Buckley
- Disillusioned by Daniel Caesar
My taste is mostly old British men singing pop songs (Oasis, Blur, the Who), plus Daniel Caesar, who had 5x the listens of my next 4 top artists on my Apple Music Replay (better than Spotify).
In frames
A few snapshots of my life
