March 2023 Newsletter 🎢 🫠💮 Active Inference Institute

Welcome to the March 2023 updates from the Active Inference Institute.

To see these updates in video form (43 minutes long), see our Quarterly Roundtable from today.

Read on to see updates & opportunities for your engagement.

Reply to this email if you have any questions or ideas.

Institute scale

• The Activities page has updated timing information on all the ongoing projects at the Institute. We have about 10 synchronous meetings of different types throughout the week — there are many ways to learn and apply Active Inference by contributing to research projects, textbook groups, livestreams, and more.

• We will have our third official Board of Directors meeting in April.  

• Our 2023 Officers (Daniel, Alex, and Bleu) are continuing to push to obtain 501c3 status as well as funding for the Active Inference Institute.

• We have started activities in 2023 with our Scientific Advisory Board. The Scientific Advisory Board is an informal group that provides the Institute with insight and expertise. If you are interested in joining the Scientific Advisory Board in a future cohort, please fill out this form.

Education

• During early 2023 we have two ongoing cohorts of the Parr et al. Active Inference Textbook Group. To register for an upcoming cohort, please see here for more information and the Textbook Group registration form.

• We started organization for Chris Fields course on "Physics as Information Processing". There will be 6 Lectures, alternating with 6 participatory discussions. All materials and information on the course can be found on our website.

• We are impressed with the progress of our first Fundamentals of Active Inference group, who is working through a textbook in progress by Sanjeev Namjoshi. See here for more information on this Fundamentals group.

• We have concluded covering the “Governing Continuous Transformation” textbook by Bijan Khezri. We will have a final discussion in approximately 3 weeks that is open to everyone who has engaged with the material through either reading the text or watching the BookStream series (see playlist here). Please get in touch if you would like to engage in this final discussion session.

• We have had multiple great livestreams this month, including:

  • Livestream #052.1 and #052.2 with Lancelot Da Costa on the work “Geometric Methods for Sampling, Optimisation, Inference and Adaptive Agents”

  • Livestream #053.1 and #053.2 with Michael Walker, Héctor Manrique, and Karl J Friston, on their pair of papers “Snakes and Ladders in Paleoanthropology” & “To copy or not to copy…”

  • GuestStream #040.1 with Wanja Wiese on “Could large language models be conscious? A perspective from the free energy principle”

  • OrgStream #004.1 with Shrey Jain on "Plural Publics".

• The Active Inference Journal is continuing to produce augmented transcripts and translations for every livestream, as a resource for education and research. To stay updated with the current state of the Journal, see the Github repository of the Active Inference Journal (and if you are interested to see or improve on our methodology, see the Github repository of the Journal Utilities).

Research

• The Active Blockference project continues on an exciting path, curating implementations of Active Inference and integrating them with the complex systems simulation framework cadCAD.

• We continue development on the Active Inference Ontology, bringing accessibility and rigor to our growing field! Special progress during February 2023 was made on applications of the Active Inference Ontology to philosophical questions.

• Our Interns are pursuing their interesting research and application directions.  

• New papers released this month by Institute participants include:

  • “A variational synthesis of evolutionary and developmental dynamics” by Karl Friston, Daniel Ari Friedman, Axel Constant, V. Bleu Knight, Thomas Parr, John O. Campbell.

  • Let us know if you have any recent publications (papers, blogs, etc) that we can share in future newsletter updates.

How to participate in 2023

• See all participation onboarding information.

• Join the AII Discord to get involved with our community and join meetings in the voice chat.

• As a community-driven open science organization, we provide multiple opportunities for deepening your relationship with the Institute (Informal, Volunteer and Intern). All backgrounds, time zones, time availability, and level of familiarity with Active Inference are welcome and encouraged at AII.

• Volunteers are active learners who want to contribute to ongoing projects at the Institute. There is no limit to the type or number of projects that Volunteers can be involved in and drive (e.g., study groups, livestreams, marketing activities, publications, symposiums, applied research, etc.). If you are willing to join us, see more information and fill out the Volunteer registration form here.

• Interns are Volunteers who are looking for a more intense and structured experience with the Institute. For the duration of the internship, Interns will engage in both educational and research activities. Interns are assigned a mentor from the Institute. If you are interested in the internship, see more information and complete the internship registration form.

Let us know via reply to this email if you have any other ideas or questions.

Thank you for the regime of attention and see you around.

Active Inference Institute