November 2023 Newsletter ☃️👽🖽 Active Inference Institute

Welcome to the November 2023 updates from the Active Inference Institute.

This is the final week of regular activities at the Institute for 2023, before we mostly conclude this year’s active phase in the 2023 Roundtable #4 on December 8th.

Institute scale

• The Scientific Advisory Board is an informal group that provides the Institute with insight and expertise, while participating in project-based initiatives. If you are interested in joining the Scientific Advisory Board for 2024, please fill out this form! We would love to have the service of engaged and diverse participants in this role. Apply by December 15th to be considered for the 2024 SAB.
• The Activities page has up-to-date information on all the ongoing projects at the Institute (regular meetings and links to documents). We are doing some restructuring of projects and groups between 2023 and 2024, and will provide more information on this later.
• If there is anything that the Institute can do or offer to you, to help you move forward in your work?
• We also look forward to any reflections you have from the year, thoughts about what you would like to contribute in 2024, or what kinds of capacities you are interested in building.

Education

• We are happy to announce a new, conversational Podcast Series, Active Inference Insights hosted by Darius Parvizi-Wayne. The first episode, featuring Karl Friston can be found here on YouTube, and the second episode with Mahault Albarracin can be found here. The audio-only podcast versions can be found here on Spotify. We look forward to new episodes to be released every other week.
• We are now finished with the Chris Fields course "Physics as Information Processing" (all information on the course can be found here), and the course "Constructing cultural landscapes: Active Inference for the Social Sciences" (all information on the course can be found here).
• To register for the Parr, Pezzulo, Friston 2022 Active Inference Textbook Group in 2024, please see here for more information and the Textbook Group registration form, or check out our group’s shared niche directly.
• We had many exciting livestreams this month. Here are just a few highlights:
• GuestStream 64.1 with Elliot Murphy
• OrgStream 05.1 with Anna_Marie Swan
• LiveStream Series #056 — Neural Coding, Predictive Processing, and Cognitive Modeling with Alexander Ororbia; 56.0, 56.1, 56.2
• LiveStream Series #055 — Realizing Synthetic Active Inference Agents with Magnus Koudahl: 55.0 55.1, 55.2
• GuestStream 63.1 with Michael Piekarski
• The Journal project focus on architecture evolving to address scaling concerns, and define use cases for Editors roles. To stay updated with the current state of the Journal, see the Github repository of the Active Inference Journal (and if you are interested to see or improve on our methodology, see the Github repository of the Journal Utilities).

Research

• We continue development on the Active Inference Ontology, bringing accessibility, rigor, and applicability to our growing ecosystem.
• Our Interns are pursuing their interesting research and application directions.
• Let us know if you have any recent publications (papers, blogs, etc) that we may share in future newsletter updates.

Active Inference ecosystem

• If you have any Active Inference related developments or announcements (e.g. new publication, job offerings), please let us know here, and we may include them in coming newsletters.

Let us know via reply to this email if you have any other ideas or questions.

Thank you for the regime of attention and see you around.

Active Inference Institute

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