Alasdair Allan
Senior Research Fellow, University of Exeter
Alasdair Allan is the author of Learning iPhone Programming and iPhone Sensor Programming published by O’Reilly Media. He is a senior research fellow in Astronomy at the University of Exeter, and as part of his work there he is building a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, can reactively schedule observations of time-critical events and carry out complex long term monitoring of variable objects. Notable successes include contributing to the detection of the most distant object yet discovered, a gamma-ray burster at a redshift of 8.2. Alasdair also runs a small technology consulting company writing bespoke software, building open hardware and providing training. He sporadically writes blog posts about things that interest him, and more frequently provides commentary about them in 140 characters or less.