Alasdair Allan (he/him)

Alasdair Allan is a British scientist, author, hacker, maker, and journalist. An expert on the Internet of Things and sensor systems, he’s famous for hacking hotel radios, and caused one of the first big mobile privacy scandals which eventually became known as “locationgate”.

He works as a consultant and journalist, focusing on open hardware, machine learning, big data, and emerging technologies — with expertise in programming, electronics, and especially wireless devices and distributed sensor networks. He has written eleven books, and also writes regularly for Hackster.io and other outlets.

A former astronomer, he also built a 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.