Alasdair Allan 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. On the side, Alasdair runs a small technology consulting business writing bespoke software and building open hardware, and is currently developing a series of iPhone applications to monitor and manage cloud based services and distributed sensor networks.