2021 Quarterly Roundtable #2

hello everyone welcome to the actin flab and to our 2021 quarterly roundtable number two it's june 1st 2021 and we're excited to be sharing with you some updates and some plans for our lab if you're watching it live feel free to ask questions or provide ideas in the live chat or afterwards you can do that in the comments welcome to the active inference lab everybody we're a participatory online lab that is communicating learning and practicing applied active inference you can find us at our links here on this slide this is recorded in an archived live stream so please provide us with feedback so that we can improve on our work all backgrounds and perspectives are welcome here and we'll be following good and normal video etiquette for live streams today in the quarterly round table number two we're going to first start with a brief rehearsal of some of our lab goals and that will serve to update as well as to motivate then we will go through each of the three organizational units of the lab dot edu dot coms and dot tools and be providing updates on what has happened over the last quarter and about where we want to be going in the coming quarter any thoughts uh at the outset or we can go right into the goals so cool here are act and flap goals for the one slide here we've just put up a screenshot of our updated website because we want our website to be the point of reference and the sort of interface for our lab to the external world so our first line there is the goal of act lab is to produce cutting cutting-edge research and enable real-world applications of active inference and enabling architecture in the systems engineering way of thinking about enabling systems can be hardware it can be software it can be people and teams so by thinking broadly about what actually enables real world applications of active inference it will hopefully help us stay open to enabling what needs to be enabled and catalyzing what needs to be catalyzed steven and then anyone else with a raised hand yeah i think that point you make about what needs to be enabled is a good one because there's this idea of pushing beyond what's currently possible if that makes sense in terms of how these applications happen so i think one thing that has been quite interesting is that practical applied desire to apply active inference has been quite fertile so even if it's actually happening or it's that edge of trying to make it happen i think that's a good struggle to be together in and i think in tools we'll return to talking a bit more about what those applications could be but i agree and the systems engineering approach of the enabling system at least for me opened up to being focused on what we want to see happen while also being open-minded to different things that could be outcomes and along the way of those outcomes any enabling system that needs to come into play is going to be the right one so if we have to set up a new tool or a new communication mechanism or do some other application it's all part of the enabling architecture of the lab all right any comments on the website activeinference.org overall or we can just head right into the updates cool because this is hopefully an informative roundtable lab meeting presentation so here we come to the updates first there's going to be a general admin or organizer update and then we're going to go into the organizational units so first there's a special announcement which is that actinflab has a new steady state as a non-profit organization registered in california united states of america and the registration as a non-profit organization has been consistent with our lab strategy to be a center of gravity for education and open science research related to active inference and also increasingly incorporate governance and informational activities that are related to our values registering as a nonprofit will allow us to enact the kinds of policies that we expect to see as consistent with ourself while we also…