Adish Assain Illikkal

Data scientist. Evaluating models and AI systems in health.

I work on computational epidemiology across clinical and public health, much of it with ARTPARK at the Indian Institute of Science.

I graduated from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune with a degree in interdisciplinary science. My thesis explored tipping points in social-ecological systems: fisheries collapse and regime shifts. I worked with Amit Apte at IISER Pune and Steven Lade at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

That interest in systems carried into my public health work. I build spatial risk models, forecasts, simulations, evaluation frameworks, and the data infrastructure around them, often with state health departments. In my own work, I keep the method tied to the decision it is meant to inform.

I have also been working on natural language interfaces for analytics: systems where people can ask questions of data and models without having to write the code themselves. The hard part is not the interface. It is trust. Every generated answer carries analytical choices inside it, and those choices need to be visible enough to question.

My work on AI in clinical and public health is about guardrails and evaluation. Before a system answers a clinician or a programme officer, I ask the same questions every time. Does it refuse when it should? Where did the answer come from? How wrong has it been before? I design for those from the start.

Outside work I read philosophy of science and watch a lot of films. I listen to a lot of hip-hop, and I like pre-modern architecture.