INTELLIGENT CONTROL AND AUTOMATION SYSTEMS: Mike Cooley’s Vision of Socially Responsible, Human-Centred Technology

Michael Cooley was a founding member of the Human Centred Systems movement, which
argued for a symbiosis in which the complementary strengths of machine and human were balanced in
the development of automation and control systems. Cooley’s pioneering work and the research that
followed, placed social effects and human factors at the heart of intelligent human-machine systems
development and profoundly influenced the CC9 group of IFAC technical committees. In this paper we
concentrate on his vision of human-machine symbiotics, applying it to web-based intelligent systems
engineering. Following a survey of the literature the paper concludes that human-machine systems
engineering praxis, as embodied in contemporary ontology engineering methodologies, overlooks
critical aspects of human knowledge and craftmanship. Some basic principles are established by which
to enhance and reframe systems development methodologies, and human-machine control and
automation systems engineering research trajectories are offered to address the gaps.