2023 Quarterly Roundtable #3

Hello everyone, it's September 29th, 2023. We're here in the Active Inference Institute's quarterly roundtable number three. So this is our third of the quarterly updates. We have guests. I'm Daniel, one of the officers of the Institute, and I'm Blue Knight, also another officer of the Institute. All right, we are a participatory online institute that is communicating, learning, and practicing applied active inference. You can find us at activeinference.institute or the .org address. We'll be moving things over more to the .institute address though. We're inference active on Twitter or X. And here's more information. This is recorded in an archived live stream. So please provide us with feedback so we can improve on all aspects of our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome, and we'll follow video etiquette for live streams. So today in this quarterly update, we will first cover some big developments and updates at the institute and ecosystem scale. Then go over some educational and research updates from our Eduactive and re-inference organizational units respectively. And then have some fun and entertaining musings on where we're going for the last months of 2023, where we can all go in 2024. And if you're watching live, please feel free to add any questions in the live chat. And then in the last section, we'll be able to scan over that and look at your questions. All right, first updates from the institute at the organizational scale. One of the big highlights of the last months and really of the year, and of really all of our work together was the accomplishment of this collaborative paper that we released in August of this year, the Active Inference Institute and Active Inference Ecosystem. We had a great team of co-authors. And to give a visual abstract and just a teaser for those who might want to learn more about this paper, we went through a great collaborative process to document and align on various aspects of what had been, was, and will be happening. And on the right side is figure one. This is an overview of the institute's structure itself in engagement with the ecosystem. On the left side are a representation of our open source products and some of the functions that they provide in the ecosystem. There's a lot more to say, but Blue, what do you want to comment on? Or what was it like for you? It was super intense. I think that we applied for a phase two grant, which I think we should talk about maybe. And in doing that phase two pose grant, this was the preparation that they kind of give you in the phase one. And it really is about becoming a big business or a big corporation or a big organization. Right. And like what it takes to really get organized and anchor and manage a large community of people, which I think that was really good for us. So like we are already kind of, I don't know how much managing we do. We're a very distributed system, but we do already oversee or engage with a large community of people. And like, what does that look like when maybe we have conflicting factions or things get dropped, like the ball gets dropped in one court or another? So, so I think that that really kind of brought to light a lot of the things we need to work on and also the things that we're doing a good job at. Awesome. Yeah. We'll come to the grant in a few slides, but just to verbally describe the image on the right, we have the circle, a golden ring that alludes to the cover of the Par, Pizzullo and Friston 2022 textbook. And that ring symbolizes the active inference ecosystem and also the boundary between the institute as an entity and the ecosystem as niche. In the institute itself, starting on the top of within the ring, we have several official bodies or organs. We have the board of directors who select officers, as well as scientific advisory board, which is an informal guidance and insight group, which we'll come to later. And the institute provides institute level functionality and support for…