July 2023 Newsletter 🧠➿🦾 Active Inference Institute

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

Institute scale

• On July 27, we had our fourth Board of Directors meeting. Our Officers are continuing to work towards obtaining 501c3 tax exempt status for the Active Inference Institute, and involved in several other organizational development initiatives.
• Applied Active Inference Symposium is on August 22nd 2023 — This year, we're thrilled to announce that the theme of our symposium will be: “Enacting Ecosystems of Shared Intelligence: Active Inference as a Cognitive Kernel”. All information on the Symposium Program and exciting presentations can be found here.
• We are continuing to work on our application for the NSF grant “Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE)”, for the Institute to serve as a managing organization in the growing Active Inference ecosystem.
• We are active with our Scientific Advisory Board, an informal group that provides the Institute with insight and expertise. If you are interested in joining the Scientific Advisory Board for 2024, please fill out this form.
• We initiated Video Improvements Project (VIP), starting in August, aimed at enhancing the overall quality, convenience and performance of our YouTube channel. As a participant in this project, you could play a role in updating and refining the metadata of our YouTube videos. Your contributions will directly influence the channel's visibility and accessibility, allowing us to reach a wider audience and make a more profound impact. To confirm your interest, please fill out this form.
• The Activities page has updated timing information on all the ongoing projects at the Institute. We have about 10 synchronous meetings of different types throughout the week — there are many ways to learn and apply Active Inference by contributing to research projects, textbook groups, livestreams, and more.

Education

• We are active in the course "Constructing cultural landscapes: Active Inference for the Social Sciences" with Avel Guénin-Carlut, Ben White, Mahault Albarracin, Lorena Sganzerla, Daniel Friedman. All information on the course and registration can be found here.
• We are active in the Chris Fields course "Physics as Information Processing". There are 6 Lectures, alternating with 6 participatory discussions. All materials and information on the course can be found on our website.
• We have two ongoing cohorts of the Parr et al. Active Inference Textbook Group. To register for the ongoing cohort, please see here for more information and the Textbook Group registration form, or check out our group’s shared niche directly.
• We had many exciting livestreams in July and more are coming up in August:
• Aug 10 at 19:00 UTC, GuestStream #52.1 "Backpropagation-Free 4D Continuous Ant-Based Neural Topology Search" Ahmed ElSaid & Travis Desell
• Aug 23 at 17:00 UTC, GuestStream #53.1 "A case for chaos theory inclusion in neuropsychoanalytic modeling" Alexey Tolchinsky, Mark Solms, Andrea Clarici, Bryn O’Reilly, and Michael Levin
• August 22, for the 3rd Applied Active Inference Symposium, there will be two livestreams. Session 1 and Session 2.
• Aug 30 at 23:00 UTC, GuestStream #054.1 "Geometric constraints on human brain function" James Pang & Alex Fornito
• The Active Inference Journal continues to produce augmented transcripts and translations for every livestream, as a resource for education and research. 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

• We are excited to announce the recent publication of “Generative Research Teams: Active Inference Compositions For Research and Meta-Science” by Daniel Friedman and Jakub Smékal
• The Active Blockference project continues on an exciting path, curating implementations of Active Inference and integrating them with the complex systems simulation framework cadCAD.
• We continue development on the Active Inference Ontology, bringing accessibility, rigor, and applicability to our growing ecosystem.
• Our Interns are pursuing their interesting research and application directions.
• Let us know if you have any recent publications (papers, blogs, etc) that we may share in future newsletter updates.

How to participate in 2023

• See all participation onboarding information.
• Join the AII Discord to get involved with our community and join meetings in the voice chat.
• As a community-driven open science organization, we provide multiple opportunities for deepening your relationship with the Institute (Informal, 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 —see more information and fill out the Volunteer registration form here.
• Interns are Volunteers who are looking for a more intense and structured experience with the Institute. Interns are assigned a mentor from the Institute. If you are interested in the internship, see more information and complete the internship registration form.

Let us know via reply to this email if you have any other ideas or questions.

Thank you for the regime of attention and see you around.

Active Inference Institute

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