Ilya Ilyankou

PhD candidate at UCL in GeoAI • Co-founder & CTO at Safest Way • O’Reilly author

London, England, United Kingdom

About

• PhD candidate at UCL SpaceTimeLab (funded by EPSRC and Ordnance Survey), working at the intersection of GeoAI, NLP, and HCI • Co-founder and CTO of Safest Way, a Geovation-backed safety-centric pedestrian navigation platform • O'Reilly co-author of Hands-On Data Visualization

Experience

  • Summer Intern (Responsible AI) at Nokia Bell Labs
    Jun 2026 - Present · 2 mos

  • Co-founder & CTO at Safest Way
    Oct 2024 - Present · 1 yr 10 mos

    Safest Way is a personal safety journey planner that helps people walk safer using crime, lighting, CCTV, and built environment data. Launched in London and Northern Ireland, we're backed by Ordnance Survey's Geovation and advised by Ed Parsons (ex-Google, Ordnance Survey). Read about us on the BBC News: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2pndkmk0ko

  • Doctoral Researcher at UCL SpaceTimeLab
    Oct 2023 - Present · 2 yrs 10 mos

  • Demonstrator in Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London
    Oct 2025 - Apr 2026 · 7 mos

    Lab demonstrator for Data Analytics, Data and Knowledge Management, Information Security, Computer Networking, and Mobile Computing courses

  • Intern at The Alan Turing Institute
    Oct 2025 - Dec 2025 · 3 mos

    Applying AI to decarbonisation problems through the ADViCE project (AI for Decarbonisation's Virtual Centre of Excellence) within the Data-Centric Engineering team