The Institute's strategy is organized around its motto — Act. Infer. Serve. — and pursued across four areas: Education, Research, Outreach & Engagement, and Methods. Each area is approached at three scales: the participant, the Institute, and the wider ecosystem. Together these give a single, legible frame for how the Institute advances Active Inference as a scientific, educational, and applied practice.
Mission and Motto
The Institute's strategy follows directly from its mission: to advance Active Inference as a scientific, educational, and applied practice; to strengthen cognitive security and healthy information ecosystems; to make research more reproducible and accessible; and to teach and mentor broadly, including under-served communities. The motto — Act. Infer. Serve. — names the orientation that holds these aims together. Strategy is pursued across four areas — Education, Research, Outreach & Engagement, and Methods — and each is read at three scales: the participant, the Institute as an organization, and the wider Active Inference ecosystem.
Education
At the participant scale, we approach a participant's Active Inference mastery as a system of interest. To reflect a plurality of individual priors, expertise levels, and preferences, we develop different educational formats — workshops, discussion groups, online courses, project-based learning, internships, and more — and our preference is to have up to a thousand participants involved in education. At the Institute scale, the organization learns state-of-the-art ways of working and practices across functional domains to build and strengthen organizational capabilities. At the ecosystem scale, the Institute works on education and on reducing research debt for a broad community, developing public video and audio content to spread Active Inference and aiming to reach tens of thousands of people with it.
Ricerca
At the participant scale, we provide affordances to scaffold and launch research and development projects by participants; projects can be driven by participants inside or outside the organization, and the Institute provides relevant support, with the expectation of dozens of research outcomes such as papers and workshop and conference presentations. At the Institute scale, the organization arranges, catalyzes, and participates in Active Inference research projects with long-term impact or public-goods features — such as ontology development and knowledge engineering — and events like symposiums and conferences. At the ecosystem scale, we recognize and seek to carry out, apply, and improve upon research practices from open science.
Outreach & Engagement
At the participant scale, we think of participants as ambassadors of the Institute, and we welcome and support their initiatives to share a voice about Active Inference across situations and communities. At the Institute scale, we aim to set up partnerships with other organizations from academia, industry, and beyond, supporting high-quality science communication, education, and collaboration around research topics such as Active Inference. At the ecosystem scale, we acknowledge the diversity of people's initial conditions — familiarity with language, science, philosophy, and computation — and we develop the Active Inference online journal and create popular-science content for different social media.
Methods
At the participant scale, we educate participants so they grow their expertise across disciplines; because disciplinary expertise entails competency in practices and tools, we take a holistic approach to participant professional development. At the Institute scale, continuous organizational evolution is our fundamental effort — the Institute seeks to obtain and use the most advanced expertise in all practices, applying Active Inference, Systems Thinking, and other first-principles approaches to its own operations. At the ecosystem scale, we share and promote the methods we use through the community to increase the quality and efficiency of collaborations, and we remain open to recommendations for new methods and strategies to consider.
Full materials
This page presents the Institute's standing strategy across Education, Research, Outreach & Engagement, and Methods. Time-specific priorities and planning — and the periodic review of Strategy, Mission, Vision, Values, and Principles — are maintained on the strategy hub and are progressively migrated onto this site.