Speaker Bio

Rashmi Sinha

Rashmi Sinha is a designer, researcher and entrepreneur. She leads the team that created SlideShare (often described as "YouTube for Powerpoint"), and MindCanvas (think online surveys meet online games).

Rashmi received a PhD in cognitive psychology from Brown University in 1998. After moving to UC Berkeley for a PostDoc, she fell in love with the web, and realized that many issues that web technologists think about are really problems of human psychology. She switched departments and worked on search interfaces and recommender systems at the Information School, UC Berkeley. Deciding that she enjoyed practical problems more, she founded Uzanto, a user experience consulting company. Working with clients, using duct tape solutions for online research, she saw the opportunity to create a research platform that went beyond vanilla online surveys. Her company's first venture into products - MindCanvas (launched Nov 2005) - reshapes traditional research techniques like card-sorting, and divide-the-dollar into game-like experiences for remote research. In Oct 2006, Uzanto released its second product - Slideshare, a website for sharing presentations created with Powerpoint /OpenOffice / Keynote. SlideShare is growing fast, letting everyone from teachers, students, conference speakers and venture capitalists share and find presentations on topics as diverse as Chinese history to Web 2.0.

Rashmi writes a blog at rashmisinha.com using a social and cognitive lens to examine people's interactions with technology. She is involved in the HCI community, was one of the founding members of the Information Architecture Society, and co-chairs the monthly BayCHI talk series.