Professor Dr Frauke Zeller is Chair and Professor in Design Informatics, Professor of Human-Robot Interaction, and Co-Director of the Institute for Design Informatics at Edinburgh College of Art and The University of Edinburgh.^[1] She is the co-creator and joint creator of hitchBOT, the first hitchhiking robot.^[1] Her work spans Culture and Communities, Health, and AI and Technologies. Her academic affiliations include University College London, Toronto Metropolitan University, Edinburgh Napier University, the University of Edinburgh, Ilmenau University of Technology, and the University of Kassel. Her ORCID identifier is https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6835-2529.

Dr. Frauke Zeller received her Ph.D. (Dr. phil.) in English Linguistics and Computational Philology from Kassel University, Germany.^[2] Afterward, she worked in the Institute of Media and Communication Studies at Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany. Her Habilitation (the 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 conducted research in Canada as well as in the UK at University College London.

In 2013, she was offered a tenure track assistant professorship at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she remained until 2022. She joined Edinburgh Napier University in 2023 as Professor of HCI & Creative Informatics in the School of Computing and Engineering & the Built Environment.^[1,3] In August 2024, she joined The University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art as Chair and Professor in Design Informatics.

Zeller's research expertise spans several areas, such as methods for big data analyses in audience analytics, AI ethics, and Human-Computer and -Robot Interaction. She has been involved in multiple international research projects and has received a range of major research grants, including a Tri-Council grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and has served as a co-applicant and collaborator in a project developing AI-based social robots for pediatric pain management funded by the new UK-Canada AI Research programme. Her other AI-related projects include developing higher education training courses in Responsible AI funded by NSERC, analyzing social media content concerning human rights issues and youth in Central America (RCYP), and developing AI-based technologies such as chatbots for news media outlets and knowledge translation through a SSHRC-funded Partnership project (GJIL and XJO). Other projects have received funding from the European Commission (Network of Excellence) or the German Research Foundation.

Zeller is also the co-creator of hitchBOT, the first hitchhiking robot.^[4] The project garnered broad public interest worldwide, and she has since been working on human-robot interaction and AI-related projects.^[1,5]

Dr. Frauke Zeller has published more than 30 academic papers with more than 250 citations.^[6] Her edited works include Revitalising Audience Research (Routledge, November 2014), edited alongside Cristina Ponte and Brian O'Neill. Her published articles include "The death and lives of hitchBOT: the design and implementation of a hitchhiking robot" (Leonardo, 2017), co-authored with David H. Smith. She also co-authored "Using AI-Enhanced Social Robots to Improve Children's Healthcare Experiences" (2020) alongside Mary Foster, Samina Ali, Sasha Litwin, Jennifer Parker, Ronald Petrick, David Smith, and Jennifer Stinson. In 2022, Zeller and Lauren Dwyer published "Systems of Collaboration: Challenges and Solutions for Interdisciplinary Research in AI and Social Robotics" in Discover Artificial Intelligence. In 2023, she co-authored "Perspectives of Healthcare Providers to Inform the Design of an AI-Enhanced Social Robot in the Pediatric Emergency Department" in Children, alongside S. Hudson, F. Nishat, J. Stinson, S. Litwin, B. Wiles, M. E. Foster, and S. Ali.