Alasdair Allan

Alasdair Allan is a scientist, author, hacker, and journalist. He is the author of a number of books, and sometimes also stands in front of cameras. He started his career doing research into the high-energy physics of collision shocks in the accretion disks surrounding white dwarf stars, and contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered. He then gradually drifted sideways into playing with the toys.

After spending some time working with agent-based systems to solve scheduling problems for robotic telescopes he became interested in machine learning, and what later became known as Big Data. From there he 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 him to do a lot of thinking, and work, on what’s now known as the Internet of Things. All of this made some sort of sense at the time.

You can often find him at conferences talking about interesting things, or deploying sensors to measure them. A few years ago he rolled out a mesh network of four hundred sensor motes covering the entire of Moscone West during Google I/O. A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits, and a U.S. Senate hearing. Some years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.