About Creating Passionate Users

The Creating Passionate Users bloggers are all fascinated by brains, minds and what science can tell us about the practice of making users passionate about their lives and tools.

They’re all passionate about the brain and metacognition, most especially-how the brain works and how to exploit it for better learning and memory. Oh yeah, and how to recognize when someone else (including one of us) is applying brain-based techniques to get you to do something.

Kathy Sierra has been interested in the brain and artificial intelligence since her days as a game developer (Virgin, Amblin’, MGM). She is the co-creator of the bestselling Head First series (finalist for a Jolt Software Development award in 2003, and named to the Amazon Top Ten Editors Choice Computer Books for 2003 and 2004). She is also the founder of one of the largest community web sites in the world, javaranch.com. Kathy’s passions are skiing, running, her Icelandic horse, gravity, and her latest favorite thing–Dance Dance Revolution.

Dan Russell is a full-time research scientist and software developer at Google. He has a PhD from the University of Rochester in Artificial Intelligence, but has fully recovered. He is now fully engaged in making computing safe for humans. He enjoys making music, running trails and bicycling… but rarely has enough time for all of these.