Daniel Havir

• Born and raised in Czech Republic.
• Czech Republic -> California -> New York
• Few things matter a lot. Most things don't matter at all. That's why I can have a laugh about them.
• Trying my best to always be a little underemployed. "You waste years by not being able to waste hours."
• Big fan of people that give a shit about what they do.
• Helped organize the Vesuvius Challenge.
• Captivated by technology. Technology is not software, hardware, or code. It is applied science for practical utility. The wheel was technology; writing was technology. Today, many digital products are the opposite of technology.
• Interested in artificial intelligence¹ and natural stupidity².
  • ¹ mostly reinforcement learning in robotics, large vision models (VLM/VLA) and its applications in the physical world
  • ² cognitive psychology (e.g. Kahneman, Tversky)
• Listening to Bob Dylan a lot.
• Submission grappling to maintain sanity.
• Past work:
  • Started and running Alquist Robotics [2024-]
  • Worked on ML (and RL) for an autonomous robot with the Special Projects Group at Apple [2021-2023]
  • Had a ton of fun working on sensor fusion (LIDAR + camera) models and ML infra at Scale AI [2019-2021]
  • Played with and shipped language transformers, mostly BERT, at Klarity [2019]
  • Built a myriad of applied AI projects in manufacturing, online retail, and pharmacovigilance at GoodAI [2017-2018]
  • Worked on a little bit of everything and was first exposed to start ups at CDN77 [2016-2017]
• Contact / Twitter / Github / LinkedIn