Papers
115
Total Citations
3,922
H-Index
34
About
Vanessa Evers is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction, social robotics, and AI ethics, whose work has fundamentally shaped how we design and evaluate robots intended to operate alongside people in everyday environments. Best known for developing frameworks to measure robot acceptance, her widely cited toolkit (261 citations) and companion studies have given designers and engineers practical instruments to assess how users — particularly elderly populations — respond to assistive robotic technologies. Her investigations into social presence, conversational expressiveness, and enjoyment as drivers of acceptance have collectively garnered hundreds of citations, establishing her as a leading authority on the psychological dimensions of human-robot relationships. Evers has also contributed landmark work in real-world deployment, most notably the SPENCER project (262 citations), in which a socially aware robot successfully guided passengers through busy airport environments. Her research extends into cross-cultural considerations of autonomous decision-making, challenging Western-centric design assumptions, and into the broader governance of ethical AI systems (207 citations). Across more than a decade of influential scholarship, Evers has consistently bridged social science and engineering, producing research that is both theoretically rigorous and directly applicable to the robots increasingly woven into public and domestic life.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 2Measuring acceptance of an assistive social robot: a suggested toolkit261 citations · 2009
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- 6The Influence of a Robot's Social Abilities on Acceptance by Elderly Users129 citations · 2006
- 7Relational vs. group self-construal113 citations · 2008
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- 9Studying the acceptance of a robotic agent by elderly users94 citations · 2006
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