But guess what?

You've got a chance.

He was my fraternity brother.

Happy people, prosperous communities, have healthy environments for asthma.

She lived in trafficking for four years.

I really felt for a lot of reasons, I felt.

But I didn't have the guts to stand.

In January of 2025.

Doctor Molly Stone became the CEO of IMC.

The Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.

Taking over for IMC founder Doctor Ken Ford.

IMC is a highly acclaimed research institute with campuses in Pensacola and Ocala, Florida.

The Institute's research focuses on AI, robotics, and human performance.

Doctor Stone brings a wealth of experience and energy to his new role.

Prior to becoming CEO of AI Hmsi, he served as Chief Technology Officer for the Air Force Research Lab.

Senior vice president of research at Ohio State University and most recently chief Strategic Partnership Officer for AI, HMC.

His academic resume is impressive as well.

He holds a PhD in biochemistry from Carnegie Mellon University.

We welcome Doctor Morley Stone to conversation.

So thank you so much for being here.

Hey, thanks for having me, Jeff.

Let me start with you as a young man.

Where?

Not that you're old now.

Thanks, Jeff.

Mr.. Where did your interest in science begin or when did it begin, I guess.

Well, I wish I could tell you a lofty story and say this was a childhood goal and none of the above.

There were no scientists or engineers in my family.

My next oldest brother.

So I'm the youngest of four boys.

My, next oldest brother was an officer in the Air Force.

And so he.

And wound up in Dayton, Ohio.

He, took me from Pennsylvania, said, come live with me, go to school out here in Ohio.

Well, then he went ahead and got married and had kids.

And so that meant I had to leave the house.

And so I needed a job.

And so my girlfriend at the time, who's now been my wife of almost 34 years, saw a job posting outside on the bulletin board.

It was for a student internship to work at the labs at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

So I answered the ad.

I got the job as a student intern, and I stepped into a world that I'd say literally changed my life because I had never been in an ecosystem or environment, that was filled with scientists and engineers that were doing, just mind blowing work.

Work that I didn't even know existed.

And, as a student intern, I was thinking to myself, what do I have to do to be in this environment?

So I was I was fortunate enough that, three years later, my supervisor at the time, thought enough of me to recommend an Air Force program that would send people off to do their PhD.

So that's actually how I went to Carnegie-Mellon, was on an Air Force fellowship called the Palace Night program, and, led to a great career.

So I owe all of it.

And I remind my wife every day, owe it to her.

And seeing that job posting on the bulletin board.

It's really neat.

What brought you to Pensacola and I, HMC well, even though officially we've been on the ground here for four years, we've been coming to Pensacola.

I've known you mentioned Ken Ford in the opening and the Institute.

I've known Ken in the Institute, probably for 25 or more years now.

And so when I was with the Air Force Research Laboratory, did a lot of collaborative work with HMC.

Ken was a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.

And so we would meet and talk over issues related to that.

But I would come down here, visit with the scientists.

Of course, you know, part of the genius of HMC is that the areas that the Institute has been built around, they were important in the past, but they're even more important today.

And going into the future, and so would constantly look for different types of research opportunities.

And I would also use our HMC as, as an ability to to convene workshops with some of the best thought leaders in the world.

It's a type of workshop that I, HMC has pioneered called A blue Sky.

And they were very valuable for me as a as a civil servant working for the military, because then I could take a lot of these ideas that would come out of these blue sky workshops and use that to really help shape our future research agendas.

So there's a long history with the Institute, and I've thought highly of it.

Always thought highly of Pensacola.

So when the time is right and the opportunity came to move down here, it was really a no brainer.

How would you if someone just walked up to you off the street and said, tell me in a nutshell, what is the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition?

How would you describe it?

We're a nonprofit research institute that works in the areas that you mentioned in your opening in AI and ML from the beginning in robotics and exoskeletons, in human performance.

And we also add in healthspan and resilience into how we approach the human sciences.

But part of what we do is to really explore the boundaries of what those spaces can hold, not only today, but into the future.

Much of the work that we do is sponsored by the federal government, and primarily the Department of Defense.

In the work that we do.

I think myself and I think many of our staff find that particularly satisfying, that if we can work on research that leads to technology solutions down the road to help our warfighters, that's incredibly valuable service to our country.

And I think we all feel passionately about doing that.

Where do you get the ideas primarily to what you're going to research?

That's a great question.

It's a great question because it's unless you do this for a living, it's often hard to explain to somebody how the confluence of new ideas come.

It's part your background, your training, it's part your colleagues, it's part the environment that you're in.

It's part new discoveries that are happening at labs all around the world.

And it's it's this, this feeding symbiosis of thinking about, oh, I know this about this field, but I just saw this discovery over here.

And if we have this customer has this problem over here, you know, we could combine this together.

And I can get with Bob down the hall and we could take a new approach to this.

And so it's this evolution.

So it's not sometimes people think it's, you know, the apple falling on Newton's head or this bolt of lightning coming out of nowhere.

It's it's really not like that.

It's this it's this combination of events and background experience and opportunity that all collide to lead hopefully to a new research direction.

Is there a particular area that of what you do that that doctor Stone enjoys your passion?

You're going to make me pick one of my children.

I have one of my children.

Jack Corn is, I can give you a few that that interests me, particularly say personally, in particular, I'm, I'm fascinated with the revolution that's been going on in human science now for, say, the past 15 years.

And unless you're in this or follow it, most people don't appreciate how much the biological sciences or the human sciences have become information science.

And this is by the explosion of genomic work that has gone on.

But combining what's happening in genomics and proteomics and everything we know about the molecular nature, the evolving molecular nature of what makes humans tick.

And I think combining that with competencies that we've had at the institute, like artificial intelligence and machine learning, so that you can make sense of these complicated patterns in these complicated gene networks to help explain an overall behavior phenotype for why some person responds and another person doesn't respond.

You know, I think those are just endlessly fascinating questions and areas to mine.

On the hardware side, if we take a look at some of the work that we've been doing in exoskeletons, we've made great strides over the past couple of years in really taking them from being.

I would use the term clunky electromechanical devices that are hard to move in, hard to operate, etc.

and now turning them into devices that move with the fluidity and ease of natural human movement so that they're unobtrusive and just really mimic the movements that the operator wants to go in.

And then you start to combine that with what we can do to enhance the functionality of those exoskeletons so that they have greater insight to the human, where such as we can use wearable sensors to feed physiological sensors, physiological data into these electromechanical devices, to move them from being this dumb device to something that's smarter and has greater state awareness of what the operator is doing, but also incorporating just things like what's evolving with large language models, so that you can start to incorporate different types of language controls into the device so that the operator is sitting there and saying, I'd like to get up and go to the kitchen.

The device now has some understanding of what that means to get up and go to the kitchen, and you're getting out of this paradigm of having to operate it with controls or some other type of clergy device, compartmentalizing the energy demands of the batteries on this device is reworking the cabling, incorporating new actuators, incorporating new sensors in the joints that actually sense the movements that the person wants to go, go in and execute.

But all that's for a program that is funded by the Department of Energy, and these are for workers that work at nuclear remediation sites.

Obviously, not a great environment.

Sure.

And so these workers have to wear incredibly heavy personal protective equipment.

They have to carry oxygen tanks on their back.

And so anything we can do to offload this incredible stress that's on their musculoskeletal system and to take that burden off of them, of course, that has the immediate effect that the Doe's interested in.

Is that a worker can only work for 20 minutes in this type of setting before they have to take a break.

So if you can extend the useful work period, there's value to doing that from a longer term perspective.

You can just imagine the toll that this has on the human body.

So anything that you can do to offload those stressors from the workers musculoskeletal systems, helping to prevent, further downstream health effects from carrying this load day in and day out, hour after hour.

Obviously, there's a lot of benefit to doing that as well.

Haven't you guys also done some work as far as helping people who have suffered like spinal cord injuries?

We have, we have worked with, different types of paraplegics to help restore mobility.

We continue to do some of that work, although it's at a lower level compared to the work that we're doing with the Department of Energy.

But, you know, people focus on some of the immediate aspects of we just want to help them get up and down steps.

And by the way, we we benchmark our progress in these fields by competing in international competitions with groups from around the world.

And we always place, very high in those competitions as well.

But, you know, what people often don't appreciate is the psychological aspect of it.

And what I mean by that is we've worked with, wounded service members who through, a variety of tours or episodes in theater, are paralyzed from the waist down.

They're these are active, robust people that have now been relegated to this chair.

And just the idea of getting up out of the chair and being able to stand erect, being able to look another human in the eye again and not be looked down upon.

I mean, it often gets very emotional for those service members, I'm sure.

So there's, like you said, an incredible psychological aspect.

It's way beyond, the hardware and what you're trying to enable when we mention robotics.

Tell me what you're doing at IMC in the form of robots.

Well, the the particular type of robots that we focus on are bipeds.

Okay.

So that's so platforms that have two legs.

Okay.

And the reason we do that is that if you go all the way back to the beginning of the Institute, the institute was not about developing technology for technology state.

The core mission then, now and into the future is about developing technology that leverages and extends human capability.

So taking that and applying it to how we approach robotics, we want to build platforms that can go out and do work in a world that's made for humans.

If it's going to be a useful teammate for me or for my team, it has to be able to do work in a world made for humans.

And so that means being able to go up steps, turn valves open and closed doors, all of the things that we take for granted.

But if you had a wheeled or tracked system, it'd be virtually impossible to do that.

So that's why we've always focused on that particular form factor.

Sure.

So it truly can be a teammate with the human in work and in an environment that that needs to operate in.

So with that, we've gone through now many different generations of our humanoid platform.

I'm excited about, the next version we're getting ready to embark on.

It's called Squad Bot three.

This is funded by the Office of Naval Research.

In a lot of developing these platforms, is focusing on what the Department of Defense calls the 3D doll dirty and dangerous.

So these are environments and jobs that if you don't have to send a human into it, let's not send a human into it.

And so this has started to focus on everything from onboard firefighting on ships, to more recently, trying to develop these platforms to engage in what are called breaching exercises.

So when you get a breach, this is where usually you're sending us service members.

Into a hostile building or compound.

You have to get through that door.

That door's almost always secured.

So that means a human going in, placing charges or kicking that door open.

As you might imagine, extremely hazardous job, high casualty rate.

If we can start to have a robotic platform that can do that, take the human eye, that loop, there's a tremendous amount of benefit in doing that.

And so we have recently demonstrated our platforms doing this breaching exercise.

And that is what's directly led to this new phase of work with the office of Naval Research.

One of the other things that I know you work on, and of course, it's the thing everyone is talking about now, is artificial intelligence.

So let me we talk about it all the time.

But what is it?

What is AI?

Well, that's a great question because everyone now wants to compartmentalize, AI and then they'll interject ML but they'll they try and use it synonymous with all the work that's primarily happening in a very narrow niche.

And that's the explosion of capability that has happened around neural nets and the application of neural nets.

And it really dovetails off of the the groundbreaking work that was done to actually look at combining these neural nets into something that are called deep neural nets.

And they are very useful at recognizing patterns.

But most people at the flip side don't understand or appreciate the limitations that are often found in those approaches, because ultimately these are statistical machines they go through and they look at patterns in data, and then they calculate the most probable statistic outcome.

And then you see that manifest in things like large language models, which everyone talks about.

But there's no reasoning or how you and I would interpret knowledge or intelligence behind that.

It's just following statistical patterns.

So what it does is that it takes the human language and it converts it into symbols, and then it puts statistical probabilities on how these symbols follow each other.

And so when you ask it a question, the boy hits the ball with a it knows statistically that bat has the highest probability of being the word to complete that sentence, but it has no intrinsic intelligence about what a bat is or what hitting a ball is as an activity.

It just knows statistically that pattern is what should be repeated.

Again, a very powerful tool, a very powerful technique.

But if you step back and look at the whole world of AI, it is much broader than that.

But many of the subdisciplines within AI have been overshadowed by a lot of the hype that you see right now, and things like large language models.

When you talk about the subdisciplines, which one are you most excited about?

I see you're asking me to pick my children again.

I am, I am partial in many ways to some of the foundational areas that our HMC helped lead, decades ago, which are things like reasoning and uncovering the best ways that you can actually implement human level reasoning.

Inside an algorithm, inside code that actually gets at this point of how do you make something less of a Ken uses this term, and I love it less than a less of a stochastic parrot.

And more of something that actually begins to get at the knowledge that's represented in the command or in the environment or the task that you want it to do.

And so I've always been particularly, partial to that.

How do you think these endeavors are going to change our life?

And I don't I'm not trying to put you on the spot here, but just in the next five years, 5 to 10 years.

So I figured you might ask a question like that.

Okay.

So I figured and here.

So because oftentimes people who aren't in science and technology like to ask somebody who is in science and technology, where are we going to be at in X in 5 to 10 years?

And my my pat answers, I wish I knew.

And I always say that if people who prognosticate, either just taking their best guess, but more than likely it's going to be wrong and it's going to be gone.

It's going to be wrong for many of the reasons in our earlier discussion that we had.

There's so much that's going to happen at the confluence of technology, new discoveries, new serendipitous events that are going to all combine to change these directions wildly in not just five years, but in three years, in two years.

And so that's why we focus on in the the we hear, you know, as Ken and I talk about this a lot, we focus less on trying to be, prognosticators of where we're going to be in five years and instead focus on higher, the very best scientists and engineers we can, and then put them in an environment where they can let their creativity, their competency, their desire to want to drive a field forward, be unleashed and be enabled such that that it's the environment that's going to lead to the discoveries in five and ten years, not a roadmap.

I'm not saying that this box is going to follow.

This box is going to follow this box.

That makes perfect sense.

But when you put it in that perspective, let me jump ahead real quick and talk a little bit about we were talking about human performance.

I know you have a brand new building.

I know you're conducting clinical trials right now.

Tell me a little bit about that.

Well, obviously we're extremely proud of it.

It's a brand new 40,000 square foot building.

But the thing I like the most about it is that it's this brick and mortar instantiation of the vision that we wanted to have and how we approached health and resilience and performance.

And so what I mean by that, the tagline for how we wanted to approach this is from the molecular level up to the whole human.

And we laid out the building to reflect that.

So everything on the first floor of the building, it's filled with labs to do a whole human assessment, everything from overall, neurocognitive assessments, simulations, intervention centers, biomechanics, you know, all of these things are about the whole human assessment.

But then when you get up to the third floor, there's not a whole human assessment to be found.

Everything moves from tissue to cells to molecular level.

As you go down that third floor.

And then the exciting piece is that as you work through this deconstruction, these these levels of organization, of, of what makes us humans, you get down and you figure out some of these genomic fingerprints.

Now you have this, the ability now to reconstruct it back, and you get to answer these questions back to if, if you're doing a particular regimen and I'm doing the exact same regimen, but you're responding and I'm not, what are the molecular antecedents?

What are the molecular signatures that are responsible for these differences in our response.

So that's interesting even a of itself.

But then asking for those that aren't responding, well what can I do about it.

Is there another type of intervention, another type of way I can approach this particular training to actually get somebody who's non responding to actually to respond?

So to me those are this is where the future of human science is going.

And I'm just glad that we were able to build a facility that allows us to bring that vision a reality.

Now I understand you are doing some clinical trials now, right?

We are what is that and what's what do you hope to to learn.

But it it really dovetails on what I was just telling you from the standpoint it's this is funded by.

So underneath the National Institutes of Health there's a national institute on aging.

This effort is funded at looking at a subject population that's 60 and over.

And what we want to understand is this heterogeneity of response.

So again if we have 100 people going through the exact same protocol that's combining both resistance training, anaerobic training.

And over here on one section I have a group of 20 people that are amazing responders.

They're seeing huge gains in their aerobic capacity, huge gains in skeletal muscle mass, etc.. And then I have another group of 30 down here that aren't responding at all.

We want to understand at a molecular level what are their signatures?

What are the what are the players that are responsible for this heterogeneity of response across the spectrum of participants?

And then back to that, the fundamental question I was raising to you earlier.

For those that aren't responding, how do we approach their intervention?

How do we approach their training differently, such as they move from a population of being non-responders to being a responder?

Because again, that's that's the key to approach something like Healthspan.

We want everybody who's down here is not a non who's down here in the non responding camp to move up to the responding camp.

Yeah.

So that you can impart the benefits of things like exercise, whether it be a combination resistance or probing to respond positively and have that enhanced quality of life as they age.

Interesting.

We've got about two 2.5 minutes left here.

Let me get you to address what you guys are doing right.

Hmsi in the way of community outreach, I know you have camps for young folks and, you know, speaking engagements from scientist, podcasts, all kinds of great stuff.

Yeah, we do, and I, well, let's start with the podcast because that's that's certainly near and dear to cannon.

I'm thankful the cannon, his emeritus role is going to continue to to honcho the, our Stem talk podcast.

So as of last count, that has around 4.5 million downloads of those different, interviews.

You know, the format that we wanted to bring to that, to Ken, really wanted to bring to that was, of course, to tell the story of the scientist or the engineer and to, first of all, starting with what got them excited in this career path, what took them down this road and then really unpack a lot of the different, aspects of science that are unfolding around us every day.

And to have this true discussion of ideas, this democracy of ideas, and not just, walk, in step with the orthodoxy.

And so that's why I think it's one of the things that's more most valuable about it.

And then you mentioned our evening lecture series.

We bring in a prominent, figure once a month, both in the spring and fall semesters.

We open that up free to the community.

It's usually a packed house.

Yeah.

And, and again, I encourage people to get on the mailing list if they're not already, so they can see the speakers that we have coming in.

Certainly many thought leaders from around the world.

And very proud of that lecture series mentioned our Science Saturdays.

This is where we work with elementary school aged kids, to bring them in one Saturday a month to teach them hands on science.

And again, you know, our goal here is to infect them with the science bug early on so that they understand the joy of discovery, the joy of doing hands on and that, you know, it's not just some old white guy in a lab coat.

It's actually for everyone.

And they can have a great time.

And it's really a a very special occupation.

And then you just mentioned robotics camp.

We just wrap that up.

It's incredible, incredibly popular, offering that we have so popular here in Pensacola.

We just had to add a third week of programing for that.

But it's great to work with these different age cohorts and begin to show them the basics of robotics.

Awesome.

Doing some wonderful things.

By the way, I'm a huge fan of Stem talk.

Oh, thank you so very much, Doctor Borelli Stone.

He is the CEO of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.

You can see more of our conversations online at sre.org/com sessions, also on the PBS video app and on YouTube.

I hope you enjoyed our program.

Thank you so very much for watching.

I'm Jeff Weeks.

Take great care of yourself.

We'll see you soon.

There we go.

It's better now for some reason.