Frauke Zeller
frauke zeller

Dr Frauke Zeller

Professor

 0131 455 2372

  F.Zeller@napier.ac.uk

   

Biography

Dr. Frauke Zeller joined Edinburgh Napier University in 2023 as Professor of HCI & Creative Informatics in the School of Computing and Engineering & the Built Environment. Her research expertise spans several areas, such as methods for big data analyses in audience analytics, AI ethics and Human-Computer and -Robot Interaction. She received her Ph.D. (Dr. phil.) from Kassel University, Germany, in English Linguistics and Computational Philology. After that, she worked in the Institute of Media and Communication Studies at Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany. Frauke's Habilitation (highest academic degree in Germany) research project dealt with methods to analyze online communities. From 2011 to 2013 she held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, funded by the European Commission, and was researcher in Canada as well as the UK (University College London). She was offered a tenure track assistant professorship at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2013, where she stayed until 2022. Frauke has been involved in multiple international research projects and was awarded a range of major research grants, among them a Tri-Council grant (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, SSHRC), and has been co-applicant and collaborator in a project that develops AI-based social robots for pediatric pain management, funded by the new UK-Canada AI Research programme. Other projects are related to AI, such as developing higher education training courses in Responsible AI (funded by NSERC), analyzing social media content related to human rights issues and youth in Central America (RCYP), the development of AI-based technologies like chatbots for news media outlets and knowledge translation (SSHRC funded Partnership project, GJIL and XJO). Other projects were funded by the European Commission (Network of Excellence) or the German Research Foundation.
Frauke has been holding a range of research-related positions, such as director of the Centre for Communicating Knowledge, director of The Creative School Catalyst (a research catalyst and facilitator), she was DAAD Research Ambassador, and is still advisory council member of GAIN.
Frauke is also the co-creator of Canada’s first hitchhiking robot - hitchBOT. The project garnered broad public interest all around the world, and since then, she has been working on a range of human-robot interaction and AI-related projects.

School

Research Groups

Themes

Research Areas

Esteem

Advisory panels and expert committees or witness

  • Member of Advisory Board of German Academic International Network
  • Steering Group & Working Group Chair: COST Action IS0906: Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies
  • Strategic Advisory Board Member: Integrated Project Digital Business Ecosystems (6th Framework Program).

 

Fellowships and Awards

  • Knowledge Mobilization and Social Engagement Award at Toronto Metropolitan University
  • Top 30 Innovators Award from Silicon Valley Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum
  • Marie Skłodowska-Curie International Fellowship

 

Grant Funding Panel Member

  • Research Ambassador for German Academic Exchange Service

 

Invited Speaker

  • Humanities and Social Sciences in a BrAIve New World
  • A New Human-Robot Interaction Design and Evaluation Framework
  • The Role of Social Media in Human-Robot Interaction
  • Of Robots, Humans, and Communications: The Media and Communication Dimension in Human-Robot Interaction
  • The Audience Lab
  • Dimensions of Social Media in Human-Robot Interaction
  • In Search of the Perfect Robot Language: Towards a New Kind of Robot Science
  • The 3rd Workshop on Public Space Human-Robot Interaction (PubRob 2016)
  • hitchBOT at the Royal Canadian Institute of Science
  • The first hitchhiking robot - hitchBOT: Invited keynote at Social Media Week Hamburg
  • hitchBOT: Invited keynote at the Silicon Valley Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum (SVIEF)

 

Media Activity

  • hitchBOT. The hitchhiking robot: Presentation at the world premiere of Roboticize Me
  • hitchBOT Media Coverage & Interviews

 

Non-executive Directorship

  • Director of The Creative School Catalyst
  • Director of Centre for Communicating Knowledge (The Creative School and ProCom)
  • Director of the Centre for Communicating Knowledge (CCK),
  • Programme Director of Explanatory Journalism Uptake and Impact project
  • Director of Audience Research Lab, The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University
  • Director of Audience Research Lab

 

Public/Community Engagement

  • Founding Member: Ryerson-wide 'AI & Data-Science Network (AIDa’s Network)'
  • Marie Curie Alumni Association - North America Chapter Management Team and Co-Ordinator of Canadian Sub Chapter

 

Visiting Positions

  • Visiting Scholar at Massey College
  • Invited Visiting Researcher Humboldt University, Berlin

 

Filter by

Date


58 results

When Tradition meets Immediacy and Interaction: The Integration of Social Media in Journalists’ Everyday Practices

Journal Article
Zeller, F., & Hermida, A. (2015)
When Tradition meets Immediacy and Interaction: The Integration of Social Media in Journalists’ Everyday Practices. Sur le journalisme/About journalism/Sobre jornalismo, 4(1), 106-119
Journalists in Western liberal democracies face similar challenges in melding existing, hierarchical models of media production with emerging communications technologies where...

Emotionalisierte Berichterstattung? Wie die Presse in Großbritannien, den USA und Deutschland über die Folgen des Erdbebens und des Tsunamis in Japan berichtete

Book Chapter
Zeller, F., Arlt, D., & Wolling, J. (2014)
Emotionalisierte Berichterstattung? Wie die Presse in Großbritannien, den USA und Deutschland über die Folgen des Erdbebens und des Tsunamis in Japan berichtete. In J. Wolling, & D. Arlt (Eds.), Fukushima und die Folgen - Medienberichterstattung, Öffentliche Meinung, Politische Konsequenzen (183-209). Ilmenau: Universitätsverlag Ilmenau

What a Hitchhiking Robot Can Teach Us About Automated Coworkers

Other
Zeller, F., & Smith, D. H. (2014)
What a Hitchhiking Robot Can Teach Us About Automated Coworkers. [Online article]

Big data in audience research: A critical perspective

Book Chapter
Zeller, F. (2015)
Big data in audience research: A critical perspective. In F. Zeller, C. Ponte, & B. O’Neill (Eds.), Revitalising Audience Research (261-278). New York, NY: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315762821
What does big data 2 mean for contemporary and future audience research? Does it simply have methodological implications, such as giving up traditional methods for the sake of...

Introduction: Revitalising audience research: Innovations in European audience research

Book Chapter
Zeller, F., Ponte, C., & O’Neill, B. (2014)
Introduction: Revitalising audience research: Innovations in European audience research. In F. Zeller, C. Ponte, & B. O'Neill (Eds.), Revitalising audience research: Innovations in European audience research. New York: Taylor & Francis
This chapter explores the premise that the nature of audiencehood itself has changed within the contemporary digital environment, in ways that has both conceptual and methodol...

Online-Forschung und Big Data

Book Chapter
Zeller, F. (2014)
Online-Forschung und Big Data. In M. Welker, M. Taddicken, J. H. Schmidt, & N. Jackob (Eds.), Handbuch Online-Forschung: Sozialwissenschaftliche Datengewinnung und -auswertung in digitalen Netzen (424-451). Köln: Herbert von Halem

Revitalising Audience Research: Innovations in European Audience Research

Book
Zeller, F., Ponte, C., & O'Neill, B. (Eds.)
(2015). Revitalising Audience Research: Innovations in European Audience Research. New York, NY: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315762821
The revitalisation of audience studies is not only about new approaches and methods; it entails a crossing of disciplines and a bridging of long-established boundaries in the ...

The Hitchbot’s guide to travelling across a continent

Other
Zeller, F., & Smith, D. H. (2014)
The Hitchbot’s guide to travelling across a continent. [Online article]

Automatic Human Utility Evaluation of ASR Systems: Does WER Really Predict Performance?

Conference Proceeding
Favre, B., Cheung, K., Kazemian, S., Lee, A., Liu, Y., Munteanu, C., …Zeller, F. (2013)
Automatic Human Utility Evaluation of ASR Systems: Does WER Really Predict Performance?. In Proc. Interspeech 2013 (3463-3467). https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2013-610
We propose an alternative evaluation metric to Word Error Rate (WER) for the decision audit task of meeting recordings, which exemplifies how to evaluate speech recognition wi...

Special issue on Mediated urbanism

Journal Article
Ridell, S., & Zeller, F. (2013)
Special issue on Mediated urbanism. International Communication Gazette, 75(5-6), 429. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048513491892

Pre-Napier Funded Projects

  • Collaborator: “Group singing to support social wellbeing and communication in adults with communication disorders”.
  • Co-Investigator: “CREATE in Responsible Development of AI (RAI)” project
  • Principal Investigator: “Social Impressions of Robots”
  • Co-Investigator and programme director: “Global Journalism Project”
  • Co-Investigator: “Using AI-Enhanced Social Robots to Improve Children’s Healthcare Experiences”
  • Principal Investigator: “Negotiation and Gender Pay Parity: Exploring the Role of Mobile Tools for Learning and Practicing Negotiation”.
  • Collaborator: “Pepper/Watson for Healthcare”
  • Principal Investigator: "Social Robotics and AI for Healthcare Communication"
  • Principal Investigator: “Leveraging AI and Robotics for Healthcare”.
  • Principal Investigator: “Participatory Urban Planning”
  • Project Partner: Rights for Children and Youth Partnership
  • Co-Applicant: SSHRC Partnership Development Grant
  • Co-Author: Funding for Media Analysis Lab
  • Co-Author: Funding for Media Analysis Lab
  • Grant Proposal Input: “Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies”
  • Co-Author: Network of Excellence on Digital Ecosystems
  • Project Coordinator: Joint Master Program Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany
  • Co-Author: Grant funding for development of mobile technologies' usage in Higher Education teaching
  • Project Management: Neue Medien Universität at Kassel University, Germany
  • Funding for Computational Linguistics Lab

Current Post Grad projects