Alasdair Allan is a scientist, author, hacker, and journalist. He used to work for Raspberry Pi and was the person responsible for writing things down.

He is the author of eight books, and over eighty peer-reviewed papers. Sometimes he also stands in front of cameras. You can often find him at conferences talking about interesting things, or deploying sensors to measure them.

He's known for benchmarking the new generation of Tiny ML accelerator hardware, and for hacking hotel radios.

Some years ago he rolled out a mesh network of five hundred sensor motes covering the entire of Moscone West during Google I/O.

A couple of years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. One of the first big scandals around mobile data it later became known as “locationgate” and caused several class action lawsuits, along with a U.S. Senate hearing. It even got a mention on South Park. Some years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

He has written for Make: Magazine, Motherboard and VICE, Hackaday, Hackster.io, Raspberry Pi, and the O'Reilly Radar.

Alasdair is a former academic. 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.