Alasdair Allan is the author of  Learning iPhone Programming, Programming iPhone Sensors, Basic Sensors in iOS, Geolocation iOS, iOS Sensor Apps and Arduino and Augmented Reality in iOS, all published by O'Reilly Media. He is a senior research fellow in Astronomy at the University of Exeter. As part of his work there he is building a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes which, acting autonomously, will reactively schedule observations of time-critical events. 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 business writing bespoke software, building open hardware and providing training. He sporadically writes blog posts about things that interest him, or more frequently provides commentary about them in 140 characters or less.