August 2024 Newsletter 🦋♻️🐧 Active Inference Institute

Welcome to the August 2024 newsletter from the Active Inference Institute.

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Institute updates

• The 4th annual Applied Active Inference Symposium will be November 13-15, 2024 (primarily online, with some possible in-person activities globally). Karl Friston will be the keynote speaker & opening session of the Symposium.
• Currently we are seeking presenters for presentations, workshops, panels, and other sessions that reflect updates and challenges related to applying Active Inference across domains. If interested, please check out the call for presenters and forward it along to anyone who might be a good fit.
• We are also seeking organizations who may be interested in partnership(e.g. collaborating on a session, focus track, or area of application) or sponsorship(supportive financial or in-kind donation in exchange for visibility and other benefits).
• The co-organizer team is excited to provide more updates on the Symposium, and participant registration information, in the months to come.
• Leading up to the November 13-15 Symposium, we will be collaborating on version 2 of our “Active Inference Institute/Ecosystem” paper (see version 1 from 2023). This document provides a key entry point into our field (learning and applying Active Inference) and our organization (laying out the history, structure, participatory affordances of the Institute).
• Collaboration on this project is a vital means for participants (that’s you/us!) to have their voice heard and make a permanent impact in our collective journey. Even with the first version, we use semantic distillation for translation, grant/dissertation writing, and more. Truly this is a unique opportunity to contribute to the Institute/Ecosystem, meet other participants, co-author on a special paper, and get in the game of applying Active Inference. We look forward to an inclusive, engaging, streamlined, meaningful collaboration on this second version. So whether you’ve been with us since (before) 2021, joined more recently, or have been waiting for the right moment to jump off the sidelines — come along!
• If you would like to join this collaborative team — complete this form by the end of September. We will work on this actively in September and October,
• We expect to evaluate and decide upon the next round of Research Fellows during the coming 2 months. If you are interested in applying, please review the application requirements and consider reaching out with questions. If there is someone you think could make an excellent Research Fellow, please send them the link and encourage them to apply.
• The rest of this newsletter is composed of our bundled updates from projects and people in the Active Inference ecosystem. Please complete a Measurement form if you have updates to report.

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EduActive unit updates

See here for all projects and more information on the education work at the EduActive organizational unit.

• The Textbook Group is active in Cohort 7 and Cohort 6, reading through the 2022 Active Inference Parr et al. textbook. This time around we are enjoying informal Math Group sessions with Octopus, working on the fundamental mathematics and context helpful for learning the material in the book. We are using RxInfer.jl for better understanding and applicability of the Textbook. Registration for the Textbook Group is is open here.
• Jesse G (c4tm4nd00 on Discord) from the Neurodivergent Learning Sessions project reports: A couple people from discord and some people I know from IRL met via Jitsi Meet. We had a virtual session discussing perspectives on burnout and learning/productivity.

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ReInference unit updates

See here for all research & development work at the ReInference organizational unit.

• Benjamin Nelson (Linktree, Substack), an Institute intern, reports: Efforts have yielded many artifacts that contribute to the understanding and advancement of cognitive computing frameworks. These works (Paper 1, Paper 2, Paper 3) focus on integrating cognitive computing mechanisms and active inference within a unified framework to enable abstract reasoning and adaptability in dynamic environments. Additionally, reporting mechanisms are embedded within the framework to mitigate the potential for bias affecting results. These deliverables aim to represent a comprehensive body of work that not only advances the theoretical understanding of active inference in cognitive computing models but also provides practical tools and frameworks for developing more adaptive and efficient cognitive computing systems.
• Andrius Kulikauskas and Daniel Friedman report: we submitted a pre-grant funding inquiry to the Templeton Foundation “Active Inference of Absolute Truth” See here for the application as submitted. We hope to share positive updates on this avenue in the future, and will be proceeding in our collaboration regardless of funding outcomes.
• Nassim Dehouche & Daniel Friedman report: We published our first co-authored work: “Enhancing Population-based Search with Active Inference” on ArXiv. We are excited to continue this line of open source research on how Active Inference can inform meta-heuristics and collective intelligence systems. Reach out if you are interested in the project and want to contribute to ongoing/future work.
• Along with a number of other organizations, we collaborated on the open source publication: “Comments Submitted by BlockScience, University of Washington APL Information Risk and Synthetic Intelligence Research Initiative (IRSIRI), Cognitive Security and Education Forum (COGSEC), and the Active Inference Institute (AII) to the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development National Coordination Office's Request for Comment on The Creation of a National Digital Twins R&D Strategic Plan NITRD-2024-13379”. We look forward to continued development on this intersection of Digital Twin technology and Active Inference.

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Feedback & Engagement

Please send in a Measurement if you have any Active Inference-related updates to share. We may include those updates in a future newsletter.

See all ongoing activities and projects, and join the Institute Discord, to get involved with our community.

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

AII Officers

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