Speaker - Paul Gardner-Stephen

Associate Professer Paul Gardner-Stephen is an open-source developer, humanitarian technologist, engineer and academic who has been working on solutions to freedom of civil communications since 2010, including founding the Serval Project, a system for resilient off-grid communications among mobile phones, with numerous publications in the field. Having spent considerable times in Pacific Islands, as well as having lived and worked in remote areas, Paul has a strong understanding of the challenges that arise when communications infrastructure is damaged, disabled, or simply missing. Paul is also a founder of the MEGA65 open-source retro-computing project, which is now a successful open-source product, with almost 2,000 MEGA65s now creating joy for 8-bit enthusiasts, with its FPGA recreation of the never-released Commodore 65 (not the Commodore 64) (see https://mega65.org and https://github.com/mega65), and continues to contribute to the hardware, software and FPGA work on this community-led project, including a hand-held variant.