This ASU professor worked with AI before it was cool
This ASU professor worked with AI before it was cool
https://news.asu.edu/20260619-science-and-technology-asu-professor-worked-ai-it-was-cool
Publish Date: 2026-06-19 14:08:00
Source Domain: news.asu.edu
Long before artificial intelligence became a fixture in workplaces, Nancy Cooke was exploring how humans and intelligent machines could work together effectively.
A professor of human systems engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, Cooke is a leader in team cognition and human-AI teaming. Her decades of research laid the foundation for the widespread use of AI into workplaces today — from AI agents counting inventory or writing code to unmanned aerial vehicles.
In 2017, she became the founding director of the Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming, or CHART, in ASU’s Advanced Capabilities for National Security Institute to bring together experts across disciplines to study how humans, AI and robots can work together more effectively to support national security.
As Cooke retires and becomes a professor emerita on June 22, her influence continues to shape a field she helped create.
Human-robot trailblazer
Cooke didn’t become a leader in human-robot teaming as a roboticist or even a technologist. Trained as a cognitive psychologist, she built her career around understanding how teams think, communicate and perform in complex environments.
“Most everything that we do in human systems engineering requires an understanding of human capabilities and limitations, and then putting that together with the technology,” Cooke said.
As a graduate student, Cooke helped develop Pathfinder Knowledge Networks, a way of analyzing how knowledge is organized in the minds of individuals or teams. She later applied that work to team cognition, publishing a landmark 1994 paper that looked at knowledge elicitation methods developed to provide human expert input into expert systems, or what she calls the “AI of the 1980s.”
Her research challenged conventional thinking about teamwork. Rather than viewing effective teams as groups whose members share identical mental models, Cooke argued that…
