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aallan/README.md

Hey 👋

My name is Alasdair Allan, I work as a consultant and journalist focusing on open hardware, machine learning, data science, and emerging technologies — with expertise in electronics, especially wireless devices, distributed sensor networks, and embedded computing.

I’ve actually had a pretty odd path to where I am now, I’m on my third, maybe fourth career now. I started as an astrophysicist, doing research into the high-energy physics of collision shocks in accretion disks surrounding white dwarf stars. But then I sort of drifted sideways into playing with the toys.

After spending a few years building an agent-based system to schedule a network of robotic telescopes, I became interested, and did a bunch of work around, machine learning and what later became known as Big Data. I spent a lot of time investigating the “data exhuast” and data that lives outside the cloud, in embedded and distributed devices. Which is how I got interested in cellphones and microcontrollers.

In fact I got really rather interested in sensors and mashing them together with the, then new, smart phones. I ended up writing a few books about that, including one on how to get RS-232 devices to talk to an iPhone, and it was during this period in my life that I was responsible for causing one of the first big privacy mobile privacy scandals, which later became known as "locationgate." This caused a US Senate hearing, and got me a mention on South Park. A decade later, I'm still not sure what to think about that.

I then spent a few years as a technology journalist for the most part writing, and talking, about the maker movement and the sometimes new (and sometimes recycled) things that were happening there. Laterly, I also did a bunch of work around the new Tiny ML movement, the folks attempting to cram machine learning inferencing onto microcontrollers, and while I was doing that I spent a lot of time talking to the folks at Raspberry Pi.

Which is how I ended up heading up documentation for Raspberry Pi leading the the pre-launch effort to document their new RP2040 microcontroller and Raspberry Pi Pico board and other new products, including the flagship Raspberry Pi 5.

After leaving Raspberry Pi I have gone back to writing and talking about the things that interest me.

All of this sort of made sense at the time.

How to reach me 📫

You can find me on social in the following places:

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  1. benchmarking-ml-on-the-edge benchmarking-ml-on-the-edge Public

    Benchmarking machine learning inferencing on embedded hardware.

    Python 22 1