Alasdair Allan
My name is Alasdair Allan. I’m a scientist, author, hacker, maker, and journalist. I started my career doing research into the high-energy physics of collision shocks in the accretion disks surrounding white dwarf stars, but gradually drifted sideways into playing with the toys. After spending some time working with agent-based systems to solve scheduling problems for networked robotic telescopes I became interested in machine learning, and what later became known as Big Data. From there I spent time investigating the “data exhaust” and data living outside the cloud inside embedded and distributed devices, and as a consequence did a lot of work on mobile systems. Which led me to do some thinking, and work, on what’s now known as the “Internet of Things.” All of this made some sort of sense at the time.
I was behind one of the first big mobile privacy scandals, uncovering that your iPhone was accidentally recording your location all the time, this eventually became known as “locationgate” and caused several class action lawsuits, as well as a U.S. Senate hearing. Some years on, I’m still not sure what to think about that. I work as a consultant and journalist, focusing on open hardware, machine learning, big data, and emerging technologies — with expertise in programming, electronics, especially wireless devices and distributed sensor networks, mobile computing, and the Internet of Things, and have done several high profile deployments, including a 500-node mesh networked sensor network at Google I/O.
I’m well known for hacking hotel radios, bluetooth beacons, and retro-computing builds. I’ve written for Make: Magazine, VICE/Motherboard, Hackaday, Hackster.io, the Adafruit blog, and the O’Reilly Radar. I’ve authored over eighty peer reviewed papers, and eight books.