Character
Alexandra

Alexandra Elbakyan

(Pirate Queen of Science)

Alma Ata, 06-11-1988  

Period of activity: 2011 — Still active

Geographical classification: Asia > Kazakhstan

Socio-cultural movements

Late modern period / Contemporary period

Groups by dedication

Activists

Technologists > Computer scientists

Scientists

Context of feminine creation

Alexandra Kelbakyan can be related to other contemporary engineers and computer scientists, as for example:

  • Meredith Westafer, a senior industrial engineer at Tesla who leads the design and layout of the company's Gigafactory.
  • Tanya Lattner, President and COO of the LLVM Foundation (compilation project).
  • Karen Casella, engineering lead at Netflix (in charge of making sure users view content securely).
  • Caitlin Kalinowski, head of hardware at Oculus (the division in charge of Facebook's virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift).
  • Aanchal Gupta, Director of Security at Facebook.
  • Reshma Shetty, co-founder at Ginkgo Bioworks, a cutting-edge biotech company that designs synthetic DNA. 

Review

Alexandra Elbakyan is a software developer and neuroscientist from Kazakhstan, best known for founding the Sci-Hub project in 2011, a website that provides free access to more than 60 million recent scientific articles. She has been described as a "hidden intellectual pirate" as well as the "queen of science piracy". Nature magazine listed her in 2016 among the top ten people in science; Ars Technica compared her to Aaron Swartz; and The New York Times to Edward Snowden. 

Activities

  • Reflection on free software [en] [es]
    • Spain > Digitisation > 4th ESO > Digitisation of the personal learning environment
    • Spain > Technology and digitisation > 3rd ESO > Digitisation of the personal learning environment

Justifications

  • IT security specialist.
  • Software developer.
  • Known for having founded the Sci-Hub project in 2011, a website that provides free access to more than sixty million recent scientific articles.
  • Works on neural studies of consciousness.

Biography

Alexandra Elbakyan graduated in Computer Science from the Kazakh National Technical University in Almaty, Kazakhstan, specialising in computer security. During the last year of her degree, she worked on a security system that could recognise people by identifying their brainwave patterns. After graduating, she worked at the Human Media Interaction Group at the University of Twente, on the mind-controlled game "Bacteria Hunt". She later joined the Laboratory of Human Higher Nervous Activity, dedicated to the neural study of consciousness. She is currently working on "The Brain Machine Interfacing Initiative" at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.

On 5 September 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan created Sci-Hub, a website that gives any user immediate and free access to a huge percentage of scientific articles published by major publishers and digital scholarly distributors as soon as they are posted online. Most of these items are only available for a fee of around €20-30 per item on the relevant websites.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan  (16/02/2022)

Works

Creator of the Sci-Hub website on 05/09/2011

 

Bibliography

Wikipedia, 16-02-2022, <https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan>

Didactic approach

This author can be studied in Technology, in the block of communication technologies, from 1st of ESO to 4th of ESO. She can also be introduced in biology as a neuroscientist.

Documents