November 2022 Newsletter 🎉🎱🏗️ Active Inference Institute

Hello,

Following are updates from the Active Inference Institute during November 2022.

Institute scale

• We have officially installed our inaugural Board of Directors!
• Congratulations and appreciations to the following Directors: Rafael Kaufmann, John Clippinger, Mike Smith, Dean Tickles, Bleu Knight, and Daniel Friedman.
• Some of our next steps will include selecting Officers who will be involved in day-to-day activities of the Institute. If you are interested in potentially undertaking an Officer role, particularly if you have experience working with nonprofit agencies and/or experience in finance, please get in touch with us.
• As a community-driven open science organization, we provide multiple opportunities for deepening your relationship with the Institute (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, please fill up the Volunteer registration form.
• 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, please complete the internship registration form.
• For some overall updates and strategic overviews, stay tuned for our 4th Quarterly Roundtable Meeting on December 14th at 16 UTC. This video will provide an overview of the major updates at the Active Inference Institute, review affordances for your engagement with the Institute, and point towards our next steps in 2023.

Education

• Our first cohort of the Active Inference Textbook Group has completed the textbook, and is now eligible to take on a facilitator role for continuing cohorts of students. The second cohort has completed the first half of the textbook, and will pick up with the second half at the beginning of the year. The third cohort of the textbook group will begin text in January 2023. If you would like to join this cohort, please fill out the Textbook Group registration form.
• In January we will also start the 3rd cohort of a participatory “Systems Engineering Intensive” (SEI). During these 4 weeks we will discover universal project frameworks based on the third generation of systems approach. These frameworks will help you to reduce uncertainty in your current projects and align the generative model of team members. For joining the study group please fill up this registration form.
• In December, we will begin a series of BookStreams covering the text: “Governing Continuous Transformation- Reframing the Strategy-Governance Conversation”, by Bijan Khezri (see OrgStream #003.1). There will be multiple discussions covering this material. If you would like to participate, please get in touch with us.
• The Active Inference Journal has been making tremendous progress in transcribing and archiving the texts of livestreams. Eventually we will have augmented transcripts and translations for every livestream, and already we have made significant progress in working through our backlog of 200+ livestreams. To stay updated with the current state, 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

• New research paper by Sean O'Connor and Daniel Friedman"Predictive Processing Interpretation of the Mirror Test and Implications of a Reflection Prediction for Human Cognition".
• The Active Blockference project continues on an exciting path, curating implementations of Active Inference and integrating them with the complex systems simulation framework cadCAD.
• Interesting discussion and research topic raised by our Scientific Advisory Board member A. Levenchuk at Ontology Forum on Ontology of third generation systems approach.

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Active Inference Institute