Abstract
Compared to other professions, software engineering is still in its infancy. But having almost reached a point where the code still running at the bottom of many large systems wasn’t written in living memory, there are now some early signs that this phase may finally be passing. The arrival of machine learning assistive tooling means change. Like the arrival of any other new tooling, these tools will change the level of abstraction for some, perhaps this time most, developers. But they also bring with them potentially unique ethical dilemmas, new security concerns, and some very open questions about the future of our profession.
Speaker
Alasdair Allan
Scientist, Author, Hacker, Maker, Journalist, CTO @Negroni Venture Studios, Interim CTO @Evaro
Alasdair Allan is a recovering astrophysicist turned technology troublemaker, and now spends a lot of time gluing things together, or taking them apart. Sometimes those things are companies. He is the CTO of Negroni Venture Studios, and is serving as the interim CTO for the health technology startup Evaro.
He works at the intersection of open hardware, machine learning, data science, and emerging technologies — with expertise in electronics, especially wireless devices, distributed sensor networks, and embedded computing. He's particularly known for benchmarking the new generation of machine learning accelerator hardware and, somewhat inexplicably, for hacking hotel radios.
He previously worked as the Head of Documentation at Raspberry Pi where he led the team responsible for documents that ranged from beginner-friendly tutorials to register-level documentation of new silicon. He was, in other words, the person responsible for writing things down.
He has been an author on over a hundred academic papers, eight books, and has authored several standards dealing with real-time events and application interoperability. Before he recovered from astrophysics 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 GRB 090423 which — 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 a decade later, he is probably still most well known for causing one of the first big mobile privacy scandals.
