May 2024 Newsletter 📤⛎🎹 Active Inference Institute

Welcome to the May 2024 newsletter from the Active Inference Institute.

We are excited to bring updates this month, at the scale of organizational developments as well as Research and Education activities.  

Institute scale

• We are honored to welcome our inaugural cohort of Research Fellows — three individuals who will continue their unique work in the field of Active Inference through affiliation and alignment with the Institute.

  • Anna Pereira will be “cultivating a grass roots impact project (initially through nonfiction literature) to explore rapid dissemination of Active Inference Principles”.

  • Jean-Francois Cloutier will “seek to find out what it takes, at a minimum, for a robot to learn, on its own, how to survive in a world it knows initially almost nothing about”.

  • John Boik will explore “the science-driven, de novo development of new cognitive architectures that are, by design, fit for purpose”.

• The Active Inference Institute has officially been recognized as a 501(c)(3) tax exempt nonprofit organization by the United States IRS. This significant milestone is the result of several years of dedicated effort. We look forward to your input, assistance, support, and co-creativity as we develop philanthropic and organizational capacities over the years to come.

• In our Partnerships program, we are exploring conversations with organizations looking to creatively engage with and meaningfully support (and be supported by) the Active Inference ecosystem. If this might be relevant for your organization or you know someone for whom this might be, we encourage you to get in touch or share information about this program.

EduActive unit

There are currently 12 active projects in the EduActive organizational unit, including the MathArt Conversations project, whose mission is to illuminate MathArt as a synesthesia and to highlight the profound connections between mathematics, active inference formalism, and the arts.

• For the Parr, Pezzulo, Friston 2022 Textbook Group — we will continue from the middle of the book in Cohort 6, and begin from the start of the book with Cohort 7 on July 15th. Here is the link to register for Cohort 7. If you are interested in contributing to the Textbook Group in the coming weeks, check out the project page to see our ongoing work.

• We had a couple great livestreams this month:

  • Livestream #057.1 on “Active Data Selection and Information Seeking” with Thomas Parr and Karl J Friston

  • ModelStream #010.2 with Wouter Nuijten on the RxInfer.jl and RxEnvironments.jl package

  • Insights #22 with Krys Dolega

  • MathArtStream 3 with Jim Zhong and Shanna Dobson on “Categorical Mental Imagery: Visualizing the 4th Spatial Dimension”

ReInference unit

There are currently 9 active projects in the ReInference organizational unit.

• Jeremy Cooper updates from the "Active Inference Account of Belief Updating in PTSD" project: With Jeremy Cooper (primary research for project & modeling), Andrew Pashea (modeling and coding), Haeun Sun (modeling), Angelos Krypotos (expertise in existing literature), We are modeling Cooper’s dissertation according to Parr & Friston’s textbook. We are currently exploring different coding packages to model this dissertation.

• Jan Erik Bellingrath completed his internship and released a paper “The emergence of the width of subjective temporality: the self-simulational theory of temporal extension from the perspective of the free energy principle”.

• Exciting progress is being made by many interns, volunteers, and other participants.

Feedback & Engagement

If you have any Active Inference-related updates (occurring in, and/or far beyond the Institute) that might be publicly shared, please send in a Measurement.

See all ongoing activities and projects, and join the Institute Discord, to get involved with our community.

Let us know via email to blanket@activeinference.institute if you have any other ideas or questions.

AII Officers