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.