Alasdair Allan

Scientist, author, hacker, and journalist. He used to work for Raspberry Pi and was the person responsible for writing things down.,

Alasdair Allan works as a consultant and journalist focusing on open hardware, machine learning, data science, and emerging technologies — with expertise in electronics, especially wireless devices, distributed sensor networks, and embedded computing. He is known for benchmarking the new generation of machine learning accelerator hardware, and for hacking hotel radios. He previously worked at Raspberry Pi where he led the team responsible for documentation that ranged from beginner-friendly tutorials to register-level documentation of new silicon. Originally an astrophysicist, he has published over a hundred papers, eight books, and has authored several standards dealing with real-time events and application interoperability. As part of his work, he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what — at the time — was the most distant object yet discovered. In the past he has mesh networked the Moscone Center, caused a U.S. Senate hearing, and been mentioned on South Park. But more than ten years on, he is probably still most well known for causing one of the first big mobile privacy scandals.