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Alicia Gibb

Research and Development Lab Director, BugLabs, New York; Entrepreneur
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Alicia Gibb got her start as a technologist from her combination in backgrounds including: informatics and library science, a belief system of freedom of information, inspiration from art and design, and a passion for hardware hacking. Alicia has worked between the crossroads of art and electronics for the past nine years, and has worked for the open source hardware community for the past the. She currently founded and is running the Open Source Hardware Association, an organization to educate and promote building and using open source hardware of all types. In her spare time, Alicia is starting an open source hardware company specific to education. Previous to becoming an advocate and an entrepreneur, Alicia was a researcher and prototyper at Bug Labs where she ran the academic research program and the Test Kitchen, an open R&D Lab. Her projects centered around developing lightweight additions to the BUG platform, as well as a sensor-based data collection modules. She is a member of NYCResistor, co-chair of the Open Hardware Summit, and a member of the advisory board for Linux Journal. She holds a degree in art education, a M.S. in Art History and a M.L.I.S. in Information Science from Pratt Institute. She is self-taught in electronics. Her electronics work has appeared in Wired magazine, IEEE Spectrum, Hackaday and the New York Times. When Alicia is not researching at the crossroads of open technology and innovation she is prototyping artwork that twitches, blinks, and might even be tasty to eat.

Highlighted project
Alicia's current projects span from kindergarten to high school. At the kindergarten level, she is writing curriculum to introduce electronics through materials children are already familiar with. At the high school level, as part of an NSF SBIR grant, she is building a wireless data collection device to use in physics classrooms that has integrated software and curriculum, and can be accessed by a browser. Her work focuses on building and altering systems for user-centered design and designing for specific environments. Her favorite work of the milieu is the transistor because without it, she thinks we would have many more restrictions and complications within innovation.