Social Artificial Intelligence

Vanessa Evers is a Professor of Social Artificial Intelligence at the school of Computer Science and Engineering at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

She is also a full professor of Human Media Interaction at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

Vanessa Evers currently is Director of NTU’s Institute of Science and Technology for Humanity with the goal to lead multiple research centres and programs in the responsible and cohesive development of innovative technologies and cross-disciplinary research for the benefit of people.

Her research focuses on how people interact with autonomous systems such as robots or agents and cultural aspects of Human Computer Interaction. She is best known for her work in social robotics developing robots that can interpret human social behaviours and engage with people in an ongoing interaction in a way that fits the social context in which they are used, be that at a hospital, school, museum, public spaces, factories or office buildings.

She received a M.SC. in Information Systems from the University of Amsterdam, and a Ph. D. from the Open University, UK. During her Master studies she spent two years at the Institute of Management Information Studies of the University of New South Wales, Sydney. After her Ph.D. she has worked for the Boston Consulting Group, London and later became an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam’s Institute of Informatics.

She was a visiting researcher at Stanford University and has published over 150 peer reviewed publications, many of which in high quality journals and conferences in human computer interaction and human robot interaction.

She serves on Program Committees of HRI, CHI, CSCW and ACM Multimedia. She has acquired approx. 10 larger EU research grants and has been among the 50 most inspiring women in tech from 2016 on wards.