Active Inference Institute ~ October 2022 Newsletter

Hello,

Following are updates from the Active Inference Institute during October 2022.

Institute scale

• For some overall updates and strategic overviews, see our 3rd Quarterly Roundtable meeting from the end of September. This 50-minute video provides an overview of the major updates at the Active Inference Institute over the past quarter, reviews affordances for your engagement with the Institute, and points towards our next steps for the end of 2022 and beyond.
• In October we elected our inaugural Board of Directors and are finalizing their status now. We will update on this when we can.
• Once we have officially installed the Directors, we will proceed to electing Officers who will be involved in day-to-day activities of the Institute. If you are interested in potentially undertaking an Officer role, particularly if you have experience working with nonprofit agencies and/or experience in finance please get in touch with us.

Education

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• We have kicked off our internship program with the onboarding of our first participants for learning and work in projects. Complete this form to apply for an Internship.
• We are continuing with two concurrent cohorts of the Active Inference Textbook Group, and the first cohort will complete the textbook at the end of this semester (a 6 month process). If you are interested in joining a future cohort, fill out the Textbook Group registration form. The next cohort will begin at the start of 2023.
• The second cohort of the Systems Thinking “Roles” Intensive course kicked off on October 17th. If you would like to join a future cohort, stay tuned for updates.

Research

• At the Active Inference Journal, we have released an augmented transcript from the GuestStreams with Mark Solms. Our goal and vision at the Active Inference Journal is to have such enriched transcripts for all livestreams, to increase accessibility, discoverability, and utility. Let us know if you are interested to get more involved with the Journal project, which has many opportunities for those interested in editing, text processing pipelines, and more.
• The Robotics project by JF Cloutier continues to develop with bi-weekly open sessions hosted at Discord. See JF’s presentation and roundtable appearance at the recent Applied Active Inference Symposium on Robotics to learn more about this work.

Outreach & Engagement

• Our Livestreams continue to provide interesting and educational content.
• We have several great streams coming up in November including paper discussions and multiple GuestStreams:
• ActInf OrgStream #003.1 ~ Bijan Khezri, November 3 at 20 UTC,

Embedded content

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• “Governing Continuous Transformation: Re-framing the Strategy-Governance Conversation"
• ActInf ModelStream #007.1 ~ Conor Heins, November 15 at 13 UTC,

Embedded content

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• “pymdp — a Python package for simulating active inference agents"
• ActInf GuestStream #031.1 ~ Alireza Modirshanechi, November 30 at 15 UTC,

Embedded content

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• "A taxonomy of surprise definitions"

Register here for more information on participating in Active Inference Institute projects. All backgrounds, time zones, time availabilities, and level of familiarity with Active Inference are welcome and encouraged at AII.

Join the AII Discord to get involved with our community, and join meetings in the voice chat.

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

Active Inference Institute

Thanks for reading Active Inference Institute! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.