I’m Aliza Faruk. I live in India, where I build AI systems that actually ship.

I’ve been fascinated by brains for as long as I can remember — how they work, why people do what they do, what makes one person keep going when another stops. Psychology and science were the subjects I read past the syllabus, because they were the only ones that changed how the world looked afterwards.

Research was a reflex. In sixth grade I got stuck on plant deficiencies — the idea that how you treat a plant changes how it grows — and kept pulling until I found serious people had spent years on the same question. A childhood question could turn out to be an entire field. Around then I picked up a harder one I’ve never put down: how much of what you can achieve is decided by the way you talk to yourself.

AI was the one field where the thing I was curious about and the thing I could build were the same. My first model was a perceptron on a house-price dataset in a Colab notebook — an unglamorous starter problem, except my father is a real estate agent, so it was learning from conversations I’d grown up overhearing. Seven iterations to get it close, the work all in the data and in finding the model that fit the problem. Garbage in, garbage out stopped being a slogan.

Today I build AI systems that ship, at the intersection of code, cloud and AI, and the dots keep joining up. What I work on learns, fails and gets corrected in the same messy way I once wanted to understand in people — still the question I asked about plants in sixth grade, with better tools.