May 2025 Newsletter 🌛🌷📜 Active Inference Institute

Logistical and Big picture updates

• This May 2025 newsletter will update on what has happened during this month, and give a few pointers towards what the second semester may bring.
• Activities at the Institute will continue during June 2025, then we will have a July summer break, during which most projects will pause and prepare for the next phase. From August through November 2025, we will have a second semester of activities, resuming with re-activating projects only, then have December 2025 off as winter break.
• So between now and the June 27 (Quarterly Roundtable #2 and June newsletter), we encourage you to complete a measurement form with any of your research, learning, and development milestones from the first half of 2025. This will allow give your work visibility, and allow us to highlight the ecosystem’s progress and directions halfway through the year!

Updates from Institute Projects

• We are currently in early planning stages for the 5th Applied Active Inference Symposium, to be held in November 2025. At this point we are seeking Presenters (who would like the present work or lead a workshop), and Sponsoring organizations (who would like to support the work with financial or in-kind donations). Email us with subject line [SYMPOSIUM] if you have any interest or questions here.
• The next round of review for Institute Research Fellows, will be in the coming month. So if you are considering applying for this position (or would like to encourage anyone else to apply), please have your completed application submitted by June 27.
• We are in the planning phases for some in-person activities over the coming months and years. More information on this will be forthcoming. For now, if you will be in place-time of Spain in July 2026, or California in late 2025 (or just more generally help support this kind of in-person work), get in touch.
• The Theoretical Neurobiology (TNB) Group meetings continue. Information on how to join these weekly meetings can be found at the project page.
• Some highlight livestreams from the last month included:
• MathStream #013.1 with Alexis Toumi on DisCoPy: Monoidal Categories for Active Inference
• GuestStream #108.1 with Christo K Thomas on Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence for Emergent Semantic Communications
• Active InferAnt Stream #014.1 with Daniel Friedman on Generalized Notation Notation: From Plaintext to Triple Play (and associated Github repo for GNN)
• GuestStream #106.1 on Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems

Updates from Ecosystem Projects

• Registration is open for the 6th International Workshop on Active Inference, to be held 15-17 October 2025 in Montreal, Canada
• The Discovery Engine project (Vladimir Baulin, Austin Cook, Janna Lumiruusu, Andrew Pashea, Shagor Rahman, Benedikt Waldeck, Daniel Friedman) reports:
• We have released two papers: ResNei: Solution Design Document and The Discovery Engine: A Framework for AI-Driven Synthesis and Navigation of Scientific Knowledge Landscapes. Together these two documents lay out some design, philosophical, and technical elements of a Research Discovery Engine & Research Neighborhood system.
• About our group’s work, from the design document: “Rhizomes are interconnected rooted vegetables that grow laterally. Similarly our team grows ideas sideways—remotely, asynchronously, sometimes chaotically—but always connected through shared questions, determined inquiry, and the belief that knowledge grows better together.”
• Quoting from the design document: “ResNei — Research Neighbourhood — is an AI-augmented environment designed to transform how we discover, analyse, and connect ideas.”
• Quoting from the technical paper: “By converting literature into a structured tensor and enabling agent-based interaction with this compact representation, the Discovery Engine offers a new paradigm for AI-augmented scientific inquiry and accelerated discovery.”
• The next steps for our team include consolidating, clarifying, and extending code development, synthesizing design components, and improving our collaborative efforts and strengths.
• If you are interested in this project, we are currently seeking collaborators with interests or background in scientific research, learning, collaboration, supporting or using interactive and interpretable AI platforms. Additionally we are seeking financial and in-kind support to ensure this projects continuation. Please get in touch if you have any ideas or leads towards collaboration or funding for this exciting project!
• From the Multiagent Modeling project, Andrew Pashea reports: I have published a Zenodo draft publication “CogniticNet: A Multi-Agent Sandbox GUI-based Application” and associated GitHub repository. See screenshots (1, 2). This work entailed code development; basic working functionality; GUI design; basic conversation orchestration; basic user-configurable LLM settings and API key handling; knowledge extraction encoding scheme.

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Here is the entry point for 2025, giving ways to get involved with the Institute and Ecosystem this year.

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