February 2025 Newsletter ⌚️🌷👂 Active Inference Institute

Here is the entry point for 2025, giving ways to get involved with ongoing activities at the Institute and Ecosystem this year.

Institute scale updates

• With a new official partnership between Lazy Dynamics and the Active Inference Institute, we seek to strengthen interfaces and collaborations related to the development, awareness, and applicability of RxInfer and generative modeling more generally (see project document for more information).
• The Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) for 2025 has had their first meeting in February.
• We are continuing development on a possible Active Inference Summer School, to be held later in 2025. Please reach out if you are interested in being a physical host, facilitator, sponsor, or other partner for this effort.

Updates from Institute Projects

• The Theoretical Neurobiology (TNB) Group meetings continue. Information on how to join these weekly meetings can be found at the project page.
• The Textbook Group reports: Activity has begun for Cohort 8, and continues in Cohort 7. Registration is open for learners of all backgrounds and familiarity with Active Inference.
• The Audio-Visual Production project reports: We had some great streams in February, including:
• GuestStream #097.1 on “Slime Mould and Philosophy”
• GuestStream #098.1 on “Active Inference and Human-Computer Interaction”
• Active InferAnt Stream #010.1 and #010.2 on using plain text and generative AI for learning and applying Active Inference. There is an interactive website for the knowledge graph, and an underlying open source repo.
• We are currently open to interest for people who are interested to contribute to recorded & livestreamed materials in 2025 (watch this short video with more information).

Updates from Ecosystem Projects

• Denise Holt reports: On January 15, 2025, I deployed a soft-launch of my new EdTech community platform, Learning Lab Central, along with a seven-course executive program offering advanced certification as a “Certified Specialist: Active Inference AI and Spatial Web Technologies.” Over this past month, the first five students have successfully completed and passed all seven courses, earning this achievement.
• In the “An Active Inference Approach to Autonomous Navigation” project, Satyaki Maitra, Harshil Shah, and Rohit Shenoy report: We have completed a preliminary version of our project to submit to our local science fair: a simple robot-like object that is able to navigate our designated simulation with randomized obstacles and a randomized goal location driven by active inference. We have also translated actions into a simple Arduino car. We also created a small RL agent to navigate our environment as a comparison to active inference. The Github shows our current product which will continue to evolve after the fair.
• Have any other updates from your projects and research in the Active Inference Ecosystem? Complete a measurement form and we may include it in a future newsletter.

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