2023 Quarterly Roundtable #2

Hello everyone, welcome to the Active Inference Institute quarterly roundtable number two in 2023. It's June 30th, 2023, and this is going to be our quarterly updates and ways that you can participate at the Institute and in the ACTIM ecosystem. So welcome to the Active Inference Institute. We're a participatory online institute that is communicating, learning, and practicing applied active inference. You can find us at the links on this page and note that we'll be transitioning our emails over from activeinference at gmail.com towards activeinference.institute domains. This is recorded in an archived live stream, so please provide us with feedback so that we can improve our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome and we'll be following video etiquette for live streams. Today in the quarterly meeting number two of the year, we'll start at the Institute scale, give some updates at the Institute level, and then we'll look a little bit deeper into primarily education but also research. And then I'll have some closing thoughts by way of a presidential address about where we're at with active inference. And if you're watching live, please write comments and questions in the live chat and we will look to address those during. Okay, so starting with the Institute scale, some updates coming from the Institute. Here's one way that we can visualize the Active Inference Institute in June 2023. We are within the active inference ecosystem as well as within other ecosystems. And we have a nested structure. Alex, would you like to describe this? Yeah, I think for this moment, it's great to see this structure and understand what that is actually in place and working and acting and adapting. And from very beginning, we consider it from perspective of systems thinking and from perspective of active inference, we always think about some kind of mastect and hierarchical structure which can be builded and structured accordingly. So having it right now, like embodied, it's great to see it. Totally agree. At the Institute scale, where these first updates are going to come from, we have the officers, the board of directors, and the scientific advisory board. We have two organizational units, which steward the development and support participation in projects. And projects and learning groups are really where it happens on the ground. And so we're going to talk a lot more about these, but this is the nesting and our own relationship with the ecosystem. Another way to see this is in terms of people and positions at the Institute. So starting from the left, we have casual engagement with our products and services into the niche. So this might be the very video that you're listening to or watching right now, it could be the transcript of this video that you're reading, it might be the active inference ontology, it might be the active blockference software package, there's all these different open source products and services that we provide to the niche. And one moment, you will decide to participate in a project or a learning group. And that can be more towards the learning more towards the doing and leveraging your contributions at the Institute. And some participants will choose to solidify their participation through volunteering or engaging with the internship program, both of which are new and really excitingly developing well. And then we haven't listed any names of the many of you who are in all of these different stages. And you may want to play another role or another position in the Institute, such as the Scientific Advisory Board, Board of Directors or the officers. So a lot of appreciation and thanks to everybody who's shown and not shown on this slide. We are really appreciative of how you all show up for the Institute. Alex, want to add anything on that? Yeah, even from this slide, we can see that a lot of people already involved in activity and provide great insights and different perspective and backgrounds and experience.…