September 2025 Newsletter 🦔🛠️🐚 Active Inference Institute
The second semester of 2025 continues!
For all these updates in video form, and the opportunity to ask questions live, please see the 2025 Quarterly Roundtable #3 ~ 9/26/2025 at 17 UTC
Regular project activities are ongoing and will continue through November. Check out which projects and meetings are happening and see where you might want to get involved.
Read on to find out about the projects and focus areas of the next 9 weeks, and how you can contribute this & next year.
Symposium
The 5th Applied Active Inference Symposium, with a theme of “Industry”, will be on November 12-14, 2025. Karl Friston will be the keynote speakers, and we already have 20+ presenters (livestreams, interactive sessions, and pre-recorded videos). Register now as a Participant. Applications for Presenters will be open through October. We are also seeking organizational sponsors to increase the resourcing and impact of the Symposium — please reach out if you might be able to advocate for this possibility at your organization, or connect us with a suitable sponsor.
All information at
https://symposium.activeinference.institute/
Looking towards 2026
Just shortly for now — it is not too soon to consider how you would like to be learning, researching, and applying Active Inference in 2026, and further if you might be interested in contributing to the Institute as an Intern, Fellow, or member of the Board of Directors or Scientific Advisory Board. For those curious, we encourage you to dive in and catch up with our history, to reduce uncertainty about you might engage in the future. We expect a year full of epistemic + pragmatic value, and developments all around the Institute and Ecosystem.
Updates from Institute Projects
The Textbook Group reports: Activity is ongoing for this interval, with Cohort 8 finishing the book (all recordings viewable here) and Cohort 9 completing the first five chapters.
The Theoretical Neurobiology Group (Karl Friston’s research group meeting) continues to have 1-2 excellent meetings per week. Recordings are available on YouTube, also for those who are available.
Some of highlight livestreams from the last month included:
GuestStream #119.1 with Nick Chater and Robert Mackay on
Thermal Macroeconomics: An axiomatic theory of aggregate economic phenomenaGuestStream #120.1 with Ifedayo-Emmanuel Adeyefa-Olasupo on
Temporal Cognition and the Emergent Properties of ConsciousnessGuestStream #121.1 with Mike Wiest onConscious active inference II: Quantum orchestrated objective reduction among intraneuronal microtubules naturally accounts for discrete perceptual cycles
If you would like to help out with the Audiovisual Production project over the coming few months, there are many roles available “on stage” as well as “behind the scenes”, for example to help plan livestreams, and add value/meaning to the ones already passed. This is an excellent place for contributions from people with all different backgrounds, language skills, and interests in Active Inference.
Updates from Ecosystem Projects
Use the Measurement form for providing updates on your (research, learning, application) work, which we may share in the monthly news letter. Below are some measurements we have gotten over the past month. Thanks to those who are doing the work & sharing it here, and we always look forward to more!
Avel GUÉNIN--CARLUT reports: Significant effort was invested in the “ActInf for Archeology” paper (part of the XSCAPE project, applying the framework developed in Guénin--Carlut, A., & Dubourg, I. (2024). Power, ritual, and identity—A cognitive study of conversion to the Unification Church. OSF to the study of material culture). Providing mentorship and support for the PhD application of a community member.
Jesse Gardner and Vladimir Baulin report: we published a perspective preprint together evaluating directions and advances regarding the prospects of AI with regard to agents: “Is the `Agent’ Paradigm a Limiting Framework for Next-Generation Intelligent Systems?”
From the Symbolic cognitive robotics project, Jean-Francois Cloutier reports: I am making constant progress designing and coding a single-agent, distributed robotic cognitive architecture. The static -sensor and effector- cognition actors (the priori, bottom layer of a society of mind) are now coded and tested. Work has begun coding the dynamic cognition actors (all other abstraction layers). I have updated detailed accounts of belief acquisition and policy construction and execution by cognition actors. All updates on the Github and #sym-cog-robotics AII Discord channel.
From the project Active Inference for Built Environments & CooperActive Systems project, Ivan Metelkin) reports: The White Paper has been released on GitHub. The first three blog posts, as part of the research, have been published on Substack. We are on the first phase of the research which is a problematization.
Interns Harshil Shah and Satyaki Maitra report: We developed a hierarchical active inference model for autonomous drone navigation. Based on affordance theory, the architecture uses an action/policy filtering mechanism based on a latent suitability state. The system was applied to waypoint-based navigation and is now transitioning to real hardware with a lidar and depth camera. Preliminary tests in May showed positive results, and we plan for more extensive testing with the finalized model and hardware integration. Complete hierarchical active inference implementation with affordance-based action filtering (involves Julia/RxInfer). Complete implementation in Microsoft AirSim. Positive preliminary tests and significant progress towards more extensive testing in AirSim and hardware. Significant progress in transition to real quadcopter hardware. Poster presentation accepted for IWAI 2025 (October).
Researchers Ryan Buchanan (author) and Kyle Flynn (consultant)) report: We provided publication for a theory half-a-decade in the making, made progress on ontological questions, and published an interdisciplinary artifact: MULTIMODALITY AND ITS RELATION TO CONSTRUCT-OBJECT THEORY
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