Kirill Danilyuk
I build machines that see.█
Hi there! I'm KD. I run a computer vision group at Avride, an AV company in Austin. I've been working on self-driving for 8 years and shipped projects spanning from sensors cleaning system to 2D and 3D perception. I have a patent for a system that detects a LiDAR scan degradation. Before autonomy, I spent almost a decade shipping web and mobile products at Yandex, ZeptoLab (Cut the Rope) and DRIVE2 as a product manager and developer.
I recently started a hardware + software project called Kadr 
I'm building a sensor suite that can turn real places into training environments for robots. The goal is to explore sensors, build in public and share failures on the way.
Latest in notes
Bottleneck for AI engineers
Rust is about to explode in robotics
Year 2025 for the self-driving industry
Elsewhere
In 2025 I wrote an article for The Insider about the AI race between China and the US, bottlenecks, semiconductors and where it all goes next.
I used to blog for Towards Data Science. One post walked through my real consulting pilot with Mask R-CNN (1.8K likes), another explored spatial transformer networks (1.1K likes). A couple more: Lane detection pipeline with video and Image processing for convolutional networks.
Activities
I had some mild success in Kaggle competitions: Allstate Claims Severity (top 4%, silver medal) and Jigsaw Toxic Comment Classification Challenge (top 1%, silver medal).
I love teaching offline and I think I'm good at it. I've taught at and coordinated several Big Data courses (Hadoop, Apache Spark, ML) for New Professions Lab in Moscow and Luxembourg. I contributed to the Self-Driving Car course by Yandex School of Data Analysis. I ran a 2-day workshop on imitation learning basics for gifted schoolchildren at Sirius Center in Sochi, Russia. At Nebius, I authored the diffusion models part of their online Generative AI course.
I am a big believer in community events. While working at Yandex Self-Driving Group, I ran two highly selective Self-Driving Meetups (in 2019 and 2021) which turned out to be a huge success for participants and team members alike.
I am a certified U.S. private pilot with 200+ hours of logged flight time. I am also a cross-country paraglider pilot and PADI/SSI Advanced Open Water diver.
Photos
