2022 Quarterly Roundtable #2

All right. Hello. Welcome, everyone. This is the ACT-INF Lab quarterly roundtable number 20, number two in 2022. It's June 29th, 2022. So, welcome to the Active Inference Lab. We're a participatory online lab that is communicating, learning, and practicing applied active inference. You can find us at the links on this slide. This is a recorded and archived live stream, so please provide us with feedback so we can improve our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome, and we'll be following video etiquette for live streams. Today, it's a quarterly roundtable lab meeting. So, we're going to have a lot of updates to share on some of the activities of the second quarter of 2022, and also share a lot of next steps at the project and at the organizational scale. So, let's begin with an introduction slash warmup. We can say hello, and maybe as if it were a paper we were discussing what was just one memory or something that you learned this quarter or some participation that you just want to call out and highlight. So, I'll go first. I'm Daniel. I'm a researcher in California and have a lot to add, but just saw so much amazing participation and development this quarter. Like, without having compiled these slides with everybody, so much would have just, it all happened so fast. And so, looking forward to catching up on this and also building structures so that we can even have more clarity internally and externally about what we're working on. Like, there's just quite a contrast with hopefully this lab meeting and even our previous five or six. And I'll pass it to Blue. Yeah, this quarter was awesome. I think the launch of the textbook group has been like pretty mind blowing for me. That's like a new thing that we've done and yeah, I am enjoying it and looking forward to future cohorts and part two of the textbook group. But that to me was kind of like a pivotal moment in this last three months. And I'll pass to Jakob. So, hi, I'm Merkup. I'm a student in the UK and the textbook group was also the highlight from this quarter for me. And I, one thing that I learned probably would have to be that multi-agent active inference is a lot more interesting and harder than initially meets the eye. And I'll pass it to Alex. Yeah, thanks. I'm Alex. And I can agree that education as a service from the lab is the most important thing for this quarter. So, for study group, as well as for our formats, what we are planning and now preparing for participants and more broader community is the most important thing for now. And I pass it to Ivan. Thank you, Alex. My name is Ivan. I'm in Romania. I'm a researcher in Systems Management School. Last quarter, we, with our team, done a lot of work in case of education as well as in case of administration in a lab, in the lab level. So, I'm looking forward to development for all the directions we are going to. All right, let's get into the projects. So, first, we're going to provide some updates on the project scale. So, these are things that happened during second quarter for a variety of projects. All right. First, as mentioned by several of us here, we began the first cohort of the Active Inference Textbook Group in May 2022. And that'll go through July 2022. And we are working on the first five chapters of this Active Inference Textbook by Thomas Parr, Giovanni Pizzullo, and Carl Friston. And just to give a little taste, though, there's a few other pieces, too, that people who participate in future cohorts will get to experience. There's a collaborative questions and discourse affordance, which has allowed people to introduce basic clarifying questions as well as questions about application and about philosophy. All different kinds of questions have been addressed in a way that really clearly references which part of the text it's about, which page or which figure. And, in fact, all the tables, figures, equations, and so on have been annotated using the platform such that by just clicking on it, you can…