The sub-sections of Domains of Application reflect some early collaborative efforts towards curating Implementations of Active Inference across different sectors and systems of interest. This section of the document is not presented as a comprehensive or exhaustive survey in any way, rather more of an invitation to those who would like to steward a section (keeping it updated and relevant) as we develop these synoptic capacities together. Later updates will more deeply reference Production and other resources where Active Inference has been demonstrated across systems.
Along with other modern technical fields, Active Inference faces and addresses challenges of broad relevance such as (i) remote education, workforce development, and competency evaluation, (ii) user experience, ergonomics, and accessibility in a modern global context, (iii) Open Source availability, utility, reliability, and safety, (iv) participation in research and practice-oriented activities (v) cyber- and cognitive-security, (vi) theoretical and practical aspects of artificial intelligence explainability and safety, (vii) social and economic policy integration and management.
Integrations featuring Active Inference are increasingly being found across public and private sectors. These applications are enabled through common education around Active Inference themes, concepts, skills, practices, and tools. As such, there is potential for The Institute to facilitate both the study (theory and research) and professionalization (practice and implementation) of Active Inference within and across myriad sectors and disciplines, and to grow the incipient Active Inference Ecosystem and awareness of Active Inference by facing such challenges proactively and in a fashion aligned with our vision, values, and principles. We hope to achieve this through developing coordinated resources that are accessible to users at all backgrounds and levels of familiarity. Moreover, we aim to develop this nascent research arena by facilitating and/or mediating access to resources for an array of independent projects.
A core reason why Active Inference is being adopted so rapidly is that it provides a flexible, agent- and action-oriented ontology which describes a great array of complex adaptive systems, up to and including human Social cognition.
The Active Inference framework can be used to describe systems at different nested scales. The applicability of Active Inference to multi-scale complex adaptive systems is a source of great explanatory power, and it is also a challenge for the framework’s coherence. Scholars from different disciplines or fields may read Active Inference concepts or constructs differently, and unknowingly build an error into their research ecology which is then propagated forward, thereby hampering progress in the field at large. To our knowledge, the Active Inference Institute is the first scaled attempt at directly tackling that risk by offering Active Inference education to learners of all backgrounds, and by working to specify an ontology that is both particular to Active Inference and broadly accessible. Furthermore, the institute offers accessible onboarding to current best practices in Active Inference research as well as the ability to drill down into specific topics across the broad array of disciplines that are implementing the framework.