February 2024 Newsletter 🌼🐞🕯️ Active Inference Institute

Welcome to the February 2024 updates from the Active Inference Institute:

Institute scale

• All work at the Institute remains fully volunteer (from beginning in 2021, on through now). During 2024 we expect and prefer to engage much more fully in philanthropy (tax-exempt donation status still pending, contact us to provide financial support), and to start hiring employees and engaging with contractors.
• The Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) has met in both January and February. Multiple scales of contributions are ongoing. This year we look forwards to an increased relevance and role for the SAB in reviewing proposals, measurements, and programs at the Institute.
• Participation at the Institute is through projects of various types.See the contact information for each active project to get involved, and email [Contact the Institute](site-contact) with any questions.
• We have an open form for proposals for projects to be hosted at the Institute. If you would like to facilitate a new project please complete the Prepare form.
• Project Measurement forms are for individual, team, and organizational-scale project updates. These updates can be from a project active at the Institute, or your own works/learnings/experiences from elsewhere in the Ecosystem.
• There is a new short Measurement Form with just a few questions — please utilize this affordance if you have anything to report from your epistemic and pragmatic adventures.
• The Internship program reports: Interns are proceeding on the Milestones & applications for new Interns are open.
• Thank you to Bert Berkers and other interns for their progress updates.

EduActive unit

There are currently 7 active projects in the EduActive organizational unit.

Institute projects

• The Parr, Pezzulo, Friston 2022 Active Inference Textbook Group is active in Cohort 5 and Cohort 6 — please see here for more information and the Textbook Group registration form, or check out our group’s shared niche directly.
• The Active Inference Ontology project reports: Various adventures and explorations together.
• The Audio-Visual Production project reports: Working with PabloFM we made a short introduction video for our YouTube channel.
• Our conversational podcast series hosted by Darius Parvizi-Wayne, Active Inference Insights, continues. In February there were Insights episodes 009 with Chris Frith, 010 with Lance Da Costa, 011 with Julian Kiverstein, 012 with Ronald Sladky, and 013 with Ryan Smith. The audio-only podcast versions can be found here on Spotify.
• We had many great livestreams this month. Here are just a few highlights:
• ActInf GuestStream 066.2 ~ Adrian Bejan, "Freedom and Evolution"
• ActInf GuestStream 069.1 ~ Andrew McLuhan: "Marshall McLuhan and Project 69"
• ActInf GuestStream 070.1 ~ Jerry Michalski: "Practical Collective Sensemaking"
• ActInf GuestStream 071.1 ~ The empirical status of predictive coding and active inference
• ActInf MathStream 008.2 ~ R Servajean: Intro to Bayesian mechanics: paths-based formalism (part 2)

Ecosystem projects

• Joanne Philips from the Froebel's System project reports: I have invited others from the xAPI cohort to look into both the Active Inference Institute and Denise Holt about the Spatial Web for education.

ReInference unit

There are currently 8 active projects in the ReInference organizational unit.

Ecosystem projects

• Shagor Rahman from the Humanity’s Story of an Uncertain Self project reports: The formalization (first attempt) of the theory, i.e. writing down in notation consistent with Active Inference, in line with (Parr et al. 2022).
• Shingai Thornton reports: Submitted grant to Optimism: “Research on Modeling the OP Stack as a Complex Adaptive System”, along with collaborators from the Active Blockference project at the Institute

Institute projects

• The RxInfer.jl learning and development groupreports: We had 4 Meetings and good development related to curating resources, code, providing feedback. We are learning and applying RxInfer.jl, working to understand how Active Inference generative models are built and used in this Julia language package.

Feedback & Engagement

If you have any Active Inference-related updates (for possible inclusion in future newsletters), please send in a Measurement to share with the Institute.

See all participation onboarding information, and join the Institute Discord to get involved with our community.

Let us know via email to [Contact the Institute](site-contact) if you have any other ideas or questions.

Thank you & Have a unique Leap Year Day.

AII Officers