December 2023 Newsletter 🥂🕛🧑‍🎤 Active Inference Institute

Welcome to the December 2023 updates from the Active Inference Institute.

It has been an amazing year & we thank you for being a part of it.

Institute scale

• We have restructured project-based participation at the Institute as we round the corner into 2024.
• We are currently seeking proposals for projects that will be active in the first quarter of 2024. If you would like to facilitate (or co-facilitate) an institute-scale or independent project please complete the Prepare form. Only projects with registered facilitators who have completed proposal forms will be listed as Institute activities.
• For projects to retain their active status on the quarterly timescale, Project Measurement forms comprising project updates and outcomes will be completed.
• If you would like to financially support the Institute — we now have a bank account set up for receiving donations. Currently our application to the USA IRS to be a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit in pending. We cannot guarantee our future tax-exempt status, however any donations during this pending state will be retroactively tax-exempt if our status is achieved. In the coming months we will develop affordances for providing different kinds of support to the Institute, for now please contact us at [Contact the Institute](site-contact) if you are interested to be one of our first donors!
• The Scientific Advisory Board for 2024 has been selected! We welcome 9 returning SAB members and 29 new SAB members, and are looking forward to working with them for the upcoming year.
• For 2024 we have retained all 2023 Board of Directors and Officers (Daniel Friedman, President & Treasurer; Alex Vyatkin, Vice President; Bleu Knight, Secretary), and express gratitude for their ongoing willingness to serve. To see our most recent Institute-scale updates from the Officers in video form, see our 2023 Roundtable #4 from December 8th.

Education

• The transcript of the Chris Fields course "Physics as Information Processing" is now published (all information on the course can be found here). Thank you to all the editors and contributors.
• Our conversational podcast series hosted by Darius Parvizi-Wayne, Active Inference Insights, continues. In December there were Insights episodes 003 with John Vervaeke, 004 with Inês Hipólito, and 005 with Marilyn Stendera. The audio-only podcast versions can be found here on Spotify.
• We had many great livestreams this month. Here are just a few highlights:
• GuestStream #065.1 with Phoebe Klett
• GuestStream #066.1 with Adrian Bejan
• GuestStream #067.1 with Andrés Corrada
• To register for the Parr, Pezzulo, Friston 2022 Active Inference Textbook Group in 2024, please see here for more information and the Textbook Group registration form, or check out our group’s shared niche directly.
• The Journal project focus on architecture evolving to address scaling concerns, and define use cases for Editors roles. To stay updated with the current state of the Journal, 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

• If you are interested to facilitate or co-lead a research project at the Institute, please complete the Prepare form so that your project can gain support and active status for 2024.

Active Inference ecosystem

• If you have any ecosystem updates, please complete the Measurement form to share them with the Institute.

See all participation onboarding information, and join the Institute Discord to get involved with our community and join discussions/meetings.

Let us know via email to [Contact the Institute](site-contact) if you have any other ideas or questions.

Thank you for the regime of attention and see you in 2024.

AII Officers

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