Adish Assain Illikkal

Data Scientist at ARTPARK-IISc

I work on computational epidemiology and public health at ARTPARK, Indian Institute of Science. I build forecast models, simulation tools, and data infrastructure for health teams operating under deep uncertainty.

I graduated from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune with a degree in interdisciplinary science. My thesis, supervised by Dr Amit Apte and in collaboration with Steven Lade at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, explored tipping points in social-ecological systems: fisheries collapse, resilience, regime shifts. That grounding in nonlinear dynamics still shapes how I think about models. Less as prediction machines, more as structured ways of reasoning about what could happen and why.

Over the past three years I have worked across most of the applied modelling pipeline: spatial risk models, forecast pipelines, evaluation frameworks, simulation code, and coordination with state health departments. I spend most of my time somewhere between statistics, geospatial analysis, and systems thinking.

More recently, I have been exploring how generative AI can serve as an intelligence layer for interacting with epidemiological models; not to replace domain reasoning, but to make models more accessible to the people who need them. The challenge here is trust: how do you build confidence in AI-assisted inference when the underlying system is already uncertain? This connects to what Andrew Gelman calls the garden of forking paths; the space of analytical choices that quietly shape conclusions before anyone notices.

Outside of work, I read Deleuze, Taleb, Hofstadter, Saltelli. I watch too many films, listen to hip-hop and world music, and like pre-modern art and architecture.