Profile picture of speaker named Alasdair Allan

Alasdair Allan

Scientist, Author, Hacker, Maker, Journalist, and Head of Documentation @Raspberry_Pi

Alasdair Allan is in charge of writing things down at Raspberry Pi, where he leads a team that responsible for everything from beginner-friendly tutorials, to register-level documentation of new silicon.

Before joining Raspberry Pi he worked as a consultant and journalist focusing on open hardware, machine learning, and emerging technologies. He is known for benchmarking the new generation of machine learning accelerator hardware, and hacking hotel radios. But, more than ten years on, he is probably still most well known for causing one of the first big mobile privacy scandals.

In the past he has mesh networked the Moscone Center, caused a U.S. Senate hearing, and been mentioned on South Park. Originally an astrophysicist, 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.

Talks and workshops