This ASU professor worked with AI before it was cool

Long before synthetic intelligence turned a fixture in workplaces, Nancy Cooke was exploring how people and clever machines may work collectively successfully.

A professor of human methods engineering within the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, Cooke is a frontrunner in crew cognition and human-AI teaming. Her a long time of analysis laid the inspiration for the widespread use of AI into workplaces in the present day — from AI brokers counting stock or writing code to unmanned aerial automobiles. 

In 2017, she turned 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 deliver collectively specialists throughout disciplines to check how people, AI and robots can work collectively extra successfully to assist nationwide safety.

As Cooke retires and turns into a professor emerita on June 22, her affect continues to form a area she helped create. 

Human-robot trailblazer

Cooke didn’t develop into a frontrunner in human-robot teaming as a roboticist or perhaps a technologist. Trained as a cognitive psychologist, she constructed her profession round understanding how groups assume, talk and carry out in complicated 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 mentioned.

As a graduate pupil, Cooke helped develop Pathfinder Knowledge Networks, a means of analyzing how information is organized within the minds of people or groups. She later utilized that work to crew cognition, publishing a landmark 1994 paper that checked out information elicitation strategies developed to supply human knowledgeable enter into knowledgeable methods, or what she calls the “AI of the 1980s.”

Her analysis challenged standard excited about teamwork. Rather than viewing efficient groups as teams whose members share equivalent psychological fashions, Cooke argued that profitable groups rely on how individuals coordinate their totally different experience.

“I didn’t think that made a whole lot of sense when you talk about things like surgical teams with the nurse and the surgeon and the anesthesiologist,” Cooke mentioned. “Do they should have the identical information to be crew? I do not assume they do.”

That perspective ultimately led Cooke and her collaborators to develop the theory of interactive team cognition, which focuses on the interactions among teammates rather than the knowledge each individual possesses. A landmark 2012 paper helped establish the approach.

Over time, Cooke has expanded these concepts beyond human teams. As autonomous systems have become more integrated into workplaces, her work has taken on increased relevance. 

In 1997, she began studying unmanned aerial systems and the crews that operated them, years before drones became commonplace. In 2008, she conducted some of the first research on human-autonomy teaming.

Her crew discovered that folks usually place an excessive amount of belief in AI teammates, adapting their habits to match the expertise even when the AI is performing poorly. The findings highlighted a problem that is still central to AI growth in the present day: Effectively using AI relies upon not solely on succesful expertise, but in addition on people understanding its limitations.

“I feel like I must keep reminding people that humans have capabilities that AI cannot replicate: social and emotional intelligence, moral/ethical reasoning and more,” she mentioned. 

Cooke sees parts of her lifelong work mirrored in how AI is built-in in the present day when people crew with AI to do issues that neither may accomplish alone, making the method higher and extra environment friendly. An instance she highlights is an organization referred to as Scientific Systems that conducts search and rescue with canine, people and drones in a means that takes the very best from every of them. 

“We have an ideal team using human intelligence, combined with the drone’s wide visual field of view and the dog’s superior olfactory senses,” she mentioned. “I get excited when I see a true integration of human and artificial intelligence. This is what my research is about.”

Recent navy operations additionally illustrate the ideas her work has helped develop. In June 2025, Ukrainian forces smuggled greater than 100 drones into Russian territory before launching them and attacking 5 Russian air bases. The shock assault, lauded by some as “ingenious,” broken or destroyed an estimated 20% of Russia’s long-range aviation fleet. 

“This is not AI alone, but a combination of human ingenuity and AI/drone capabilities,” Cooke mentioned. 

Engineering the longer term, one pupil at a time

Cooke is impressed by the varied backgrounds college students deliver to human methods engineering at ASU, from laptop science and engineering to psychology. Each perspective contributes contemporary concepts. Blending these other ways of considering is an effective instance of crew cognition in motion.

In her 23 years at ASU, she has suggested 48 college students on their grasp’s theses and graduated 15 PhD college students, with six in progress. 

Current PhD pupil Savannah Bradley mentioned considered one of Cooke’s best strengths as an advisor is the way in which she helps college students as individuals, not simply researchers. 

“She is incredibly validating, supportive and reassuring, and she consistently reminds her students that they are not alone,” Bradley mentioned. “It is honestly difficult to put into words how much her guidance and mentorship have meant to me.”

Bradley is a fourth-generation scorching air balloon pilot. Her curiosity in aviation led her to check mechanical engineering. But when contemplating her PhD path, she discovered her need to grasp what causes aircraft crashes and to enhance aviation security extra intently aligned with human methods engineering.

“Understanding and supporting the human element in aviation ultimately felt like the most meaningful path toward improving safety,” she mentioned.

Bradley mentioned studying about crew cognition from one of many foremost specialists within the area has been an incredible alternative. Cooke’s husband, Steven Shope, can be a scorching air balloon pilot.

“Because of her guidance, I found my research path of studying drone-based search and rescue teams and developing ways to better support operators in high-consequence environments.”

Advancing CHART’s mission

Cooke’s mentorship has secured her legacy, as a former PhD pupil will lead CHART after her retirement. 

Professor Jamie Gorman first met Cooke again in 2000 when he was accepted as a grasp’s pupil at New Mexico State University. She confirmed him an unmanned aerial car, or UAV, mission she and her crew had been engaged on whereas finding out one thing they referred to as “team cognition.”

“They didn’t just study it; they sought to tap into it to change behavior,” Gorman mentioned. “That visit really inspired me.”

Gorman mentioned it rapidly turned clear that Cooke and her crew had been addressing an rising, vital want in navy and industrial human components. And the thought actually took off.

Their paths crossed once more on the finish of his first yr when he offered a poster about his cognitive psychology experiment. 

“Nancy came by and asked me to explain my work,” Gorman said. “At the end of the conversation she asked if I wanted to work with her over the summer, and so it began.”

Gorman mentioned the imaginative and prescient of CHART is seamless human-machine collaboration by means of teaming. The finish aim is creating applied sciences that allow machines to anticipate and adapt to people on the fly, whereas preserving distributions of affect within the human-machine relationship that respect humanity.

Besides serving to her six PhD college students end their levels, Cooke seems ahead to spending extra time with her three grandkids, touring and catching up on studying. 

“Most of my career, I’ve had a lot to read, but it’s not reading for fun,” she mentioned.

Throughout her profession at ASU, Cooke appreciated ASU’s values of principled innovation and multidisciplinary collaboration. The concept of taking a bunch of principally psychologists and placing them in an engineering school supplied school with that rather more connection to individuals from different disciplines and the entire theme of principled innovation. 

“A lot of what ASU is about makes it a prime place to innovate and to build new things,” Cooke mentioned. “I still get contacted by people who are trying to build centers like that to say, ‘How do you do it?’”