2024 Quarterly Roundtable #1

Hello and welcome everyone. This is the Active Inference Institute quarterly roundtable number one for the year on March 29th, 2024. So welcome Alex, thanks everyone. We're a participatory online institute that is communicating, learning, and practicing applied active inference. You can find us at the links on this slide. This is a recorded and an archived live stream, so feel free to provide feedback so that we can improve our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome and we'll follow video etiquette for live stream. If you're watching along live, feel free to put any questions in the live chat and we'll get to them at the end. Well, today we're here in our first quarterly update of the year. We'll give some updates and remarks at the institute scale. Then we'll take a look at the Eduactive and Re-Inference organizational units covering the education and research projects and just talk about moving forward in 2024. Before we jump in, Alex, do you want to add anything? Just a little celebrate for now one year and the first roundtable for this year. Thank you. Yeah, feels like a lot has already happened, but I guess that's why we snapshot it quarterly. So here we go into institute scale updates. Starting with a big picture on where things are at with the institute. Here in the center, we have a representation of the institute and its relationship with the ecosystem. We have institute level functions such as our officers, board of director, and scientific advisory board who help steward and guide directly or indirectly the organizational units focused on education, eduactive, and research, re-inference. And underneath those organizational units are all of the projects that we're going to be talking about. Through the projects is where dissemination, participation, and engagement occurs at the institute, as well as some engagement types that we'll be discussing more in a few slides that are at the institute scale related to philanthropy and partnerships. And following on from the quantum free energy principle work of Chris Fields in the course that he taught last year, we have in this year begun a prepare and measure dual form approach. The preparation and the measurement forms are always open. They're open to proposals and measurements, large and small. We use them for projects within the institute, and we also use it to interface projects in the ecosystem. The proposal or the preparation form describes what the project team is setting up to operate or do, and it outlines explicitly how the team is thinking about their contributions to the accessibility, rigor, and applicability of active inference. Also, teams are able to suggest minimal and higher levels of support that the institute could provide. So, if nothing else is needed from the institute other than a channel and a chat thread or a certain other kind of small support, then things might just begin right then, or maybe they're waiting for some kind of support, or maybe they throw out a high support offer, and one day we hope to be able to fulfill those in support of the ecosystem. And then the other side of the coin, or the other side of the action perception loop, as it were, is the measurement form, which describes what the person or the project or the team did. What did they see, change, and learn? And these measurements reports could be about open source contributions to code and educational materials that people make. It could be, I read a page from a book today, and that enables visibility, communication, and the flow of support to projects. So, we hope that through this project-based engagement and preparation and measurements, we'll have a lot of very interesting affordances and structures to include and accommodate how diverse our community and ecosystem are. Which leads to a common and central and critical question, which is, okay, but how to participate? Well, suffice to say, there's multiple ways to be involved on your own timelines or on ours, and…