July 2024 Newsletter 🎮👽🌀 Active Inference Institute

Welcome to the July 2024 newsletter from the Active Inference Institute.

For a up-to-date overview and presentation of all updates from the Institute, see our 2024 Quarterly Roundtable #2 video.

Institute scale updates

• We are just getting started on planning for the 4th Applied Active Inference Symposium, to be held in late 2024! Read here for more information on the previous three Symposia. For now — especially if you are interested in joining our participatory co-organizer team, and/or getting involved in other ways (financial or in-kind donation, presenting a lecture or workshop), please complete this form.
• We are delighted to announce our first organizational Partnership, with First Principles First. We will share more on this Partnership, and another soon to be announced, next month! We are excited to engage with the Active Inference ecosystem in creative and synergistic ways.
• Many Research Fellows and interns from around the world are developing amazing projects and learnings. We look forward to more individuals joining their activities with these programs, and hearing update from Fellows/Interns in the months to come.
• The rest of this newsletter is composed of our bundled updates from projects and people in the Active Inference ecosystem. Please complete a Measurement form if you have updates to report.

EduActive unit updates

See here for all projects and more information on the education work at the EduActive organizational unit.

• The Textbook Group project at the Institute reports: We are active in Cohort 7 and continue Cohort 6. We are enjoying, and other learnings, informal Math Group sessions with Octopus. We are using RxInfer.jl for better understanding and applicability of the Textbook, and for building skills and pathways. Registration for the Textbook Group is is open here.
• The Active Inference Journal project at the Institute reports:

with Holly, Dave, Alex, Journal project applied and received $500 computational grant from Cohere.

• Audio-Visual Production project at the Institute reports: Several exciting livestreams took place last month. These include: GuestStream #083.1: Embodied Intelligence with Joshua Bongard, GuestStream #076.2:Active Inference Circle Book Project and Things Update with Anna Pereira GuestStream #084.1, and GuestStream #082.3 and .4: The Projective Wave Theory of Consciousness with Robert Worden and Assessment of the Brain Wave Hypothesis with Robert Worden , also with guests David Rudrauf, Kenneth Williford, Karl J Friston, and Alexander Ororbia.

ReInference unit updates

See here for all research & development work at the ReInference organizational unit.

• Jeremy Cooper from the Active Inference Account of Belief Updating in PTSD project reports: with Andrew Pashea, Haeun Sun, Angelos Krypotos, We have been researching pre-existing Active Inference models to learn how to build our model using the code. As well, we have been researching other accounts of Active Inference conceptualizations that can inform us of elements we need to consider in our model.
• JF Cloutier from the Symbolic Cognitive Robotics project reports: I articulated how an artificial agent animated by a society of mind autonomously synthesizes valued beliefs from observations in the context of wellbeing measures, and how it constructs related action policies and then carries them out. I summarized the project and progress made to date in a presentation.
• Daniel Friedman reports: In CodeStream #002.1 “Synthetic Intelligence for Pre-Meta-Science (The Infinite GrAnt Imaginarium)” from today, I did a pre-meta-Scientific analysis of 476 pre-grants related to Active Inference entities and relevant programs. All the code is open source in the Institute’s Active_InferAnts code repo.

Feedback & Engagement

Please send in a Measurement if you have any Active Inference-related updates to share. We may include those updates in a future newsletter.

See all ongoing activities and projects, and join the Institute Discord, to get involved with our community.

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