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Active Inference Institute

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Quarterly Roundtable #2 in 2024

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June 28, 2024

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Active Inference Institute

  • We are a participatory online institute that is communicating, learning, and practicing applied Active Inference.
  • This is a recorded & archived livestream – Please provide feedback so we can improve our work!
  • All backgrounds and perspectives welcome.
  • Video etiquette for Livestreams:
    • Mute while not speaking, raise hand, respectful speech behavior, etc.

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AII 2024 Quarterly #2

  1. Institute updates
  2. Projects (EduActive & ReInference)
  3. Second half of 2024

Whenever you see this:

Let us know at blanket@activeinference.institute or

activeinference.institute if you would like to participate or collaborate

Intro’s

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Active Inference Institute

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Updates at Institute scale

Heading into the second half of 2024

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How to participate?

There are many ways of learning, applying, and supporting Active Inference at the Institute.

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ecosystem.activeinference.institute/

We will be doing Institute/Ecosystem v2 process in 2nd half of 2024!

Email Blanket@ai.i if you want to help facilitate/seed this group, otherwise more information will be coming soon.

We will be doing collective visioning, multimedia artifacting, and more

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Organizational Rhythms:

Monthly Meetings: Scientific Advisory Board

Quarterly Meeting: Board of Directors

Weekly Meetings: Officers

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Rafael Kaufmann

John Clippinger

Daniel Friedman

Dean Tickles

Bleu Knight

Mike Smith

Mahault Albarracin

Bradly Alicea

Sebastian Alvarado

John Boik

Matt Brown

John Cook

Scott David

Renée Davis

Shanna Dobson

Prince Edike

Shady El Damaty

Jeff Emmett

Chris Fields

Karl Friston

Holly Grimm

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Bleu Knight

Alex Vyatkin

Daniel Friedman

Avel GUÉNIN—CARLUT

Sarah Hamburg

Susan Hasty

Conor Heins

Susan Keen

Thomas Kehler

Héctor Manrique

Alexandra Mikhailova

Haris Neophytou

Alexander Ororbia

Sandeep Ramesh

Maxwell J. D. Ramstead

Adeel Razi

Manuel Razo-Mejia

Jakub Smekal

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Ian Tennant

Mick Thacker

Shingai Thornton

Mark Wilcox

Michael Zargham

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Continuous distributed activity from our volunteer community….

Applications for these volunteer positions for 2025, are available on website.

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Research Fellows

If you are interested in these programs (as supporter, advocate, applicant), or in being in touch with Fellows, please get in touch with blanket@activeinference.institute

Research Fellows are individuals affiliated with the Institute, in alignment with their Research and our open science approach. �

  • Welcome to our first three Fellows! →
  • We aim to enable and catalyze innovative work in Active Inference by providing Fellows with various kinds of support.
  • Future Fellows programs will include Education Fellows, etc.

fellows.activeinference.institute

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Institute Partnerships

Partnerships are structured relationships between the Institute and other Organizations who are looking to…

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  • Make meaningful, impactful contributions to the Active Inference open source ecosystem.
  • Upskill and accelerate their ActInf learning and application.
  • Form regional and sector-level collaborations
  • Provide input to Institute
  • Access community & talent
  • One accepted Partner application, several in progress

More information will be provided as we develop in the coming weeks. �

If you are interested in these programs (as supporter, advocate, applicant), please get in touch with blanket@activeinference.institute

partnerships.activeinference.institute/

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Philanthropy & 501(c)(3)

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If you are interested in these programs (as supporter, advocate, applicant), or in being in the first cohorts of each, please get in touch with blanket@activeinference.institute

Small and Large donations support the sustainability of the Institute’s mission and vision.

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  • We recently achieved 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in the USA and are now eligible for tax-exempt donations.
  • We are looking to flesh out our philanthropy program in the coming months
    • Cover the Institute financial costs in from 2024 and plan for 2025
    • Building towards long term
  • If you would like to support the institute go to donate.activeinference.institute or get in touch.

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Institute Engagement & Outreach

Growing on YouTube, Discord, Twitter, Podcasts….

https://activeinference.podbean.com

https://twitter.com/InferenceActive

Discord

https://www.youtube.com/c/ActiveInference/playlists

https://discord.gg/Hv4UbW48Kt

+380

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PREPARE

MEASURE

  • Describes how the project team is setting up to operate.
  • Outlines expected contributions to the accessibility, rigor, applicability of Active Inference
  • Suggests minimal and high support that the Institute could provide
  • Describes how the project team did operate – what they saw, did, changed, and learned.
  • Provides reports from within the Institute as well as elsewhere in the Ecosystem.
  • Enables visibility, communication, and support to projects.

Alice & Bob communicating with quantum Active Inference, across the holographic screen (ActInf Livestream #017, #040, Chris Fields physics course 2023).

measure.activeinference.org/

Projects at the Institute in 2024

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EduActive

updates

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EduActive

June 2024 snapshot

eduactive.activeinference.institute/

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Active Inference Textbook Group

  • Active Inference Textbook Group first cohort began in May 2022, reading through the Parr, Pezzulo, Friston 2022 textbook.
    • We work as a group in our shared epistemic niche
    • It is a fun, educational, and collaborative activity.
  • Cohort 6 continues & Cohort 7 begin July 15!
  • textbook-group.activeinference.institute/

ActInf Ontology

Math Learning

Generative AI

All backgrounds and levels of familiarity with Active Inference, math, biology, statistics, etc. are welcome – this is a great place to jump in & go from there

Hundreds of Questions….

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Production

Past and future Livestreams:

https://videos.activeinference.org/

503 videos overall!

We continue to produce open source audio-visual materials and release them into the Active Inference Ecosystem.

  • If you have production, education, communication skills and/or interest, please consider getting involved in this project!

In April, May, June 2024……

  • There are many available ways to help such as suggest and invite guests, facilitate streams in English and other languages, improve communications before/during/after videos, etc.

video.activeinference.institute/

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More EduActive updates….

  • The Fundamentals of Active Inference project reports: Working with Sanjeev Namjoshi and a group of committed learners, we completed working through the draft of his upcoming textbook. We eagerly await publication of Sanjeev’s work, which will provide a transformative improvement to the landscape of learning and applying Active Inference. This project will eventually reactivate at the Institute, for now we acknowledge and applaud the work of Sanjeev, and the participants who co-created this unique experience going back to the beginning of 2023.
  • From the Unifysica project, Ana Magdalena Hurtado reports: their group had weekly meetings (with Dean Tickles, Jeff Schulman, Hector Manrique) November 2023-May 2024. They wrote two commentaries, for Current Anthropology and the Physics of Life Reviews, and a National Institutes of Health Grant to fund NIH-led fellowship to work on social sciences ontologies for health and disease.
  • From the Action Research on Collective Foraging (Negotiation Affordances) project, Susan Hasty reports: Engaging and learning from our community has been both informative and fun. Meeting the wonderful members of our community, I've been truly amazed by the depth and breadth of insights and intelligence each and everyone has brought "to the table". It's been an honor to hear about the progress they’re making on their goals. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next on our journey together as new opportunities and challenges arise. Thank you again for affording me this space to apply Active Inference to everyday negotiations. Also Susan has been accepted to an upcoming FA Summer Program on AI in Negotiation. She hopes to leverage the capabilities of our network in exploring how new A.I tools are being designed and built to support Humanitarian Negotiations (Crisis Management, Mitigation, Population Displacement, Mass Violence, and Social Unrest). If you have an interest in crafting AI-assisted negotiation tools comparing Reinforcement Learning with Active Inference, please reach out to her.
  • PabloFM reports from the Numinia project development along several lines releated to designing games that use Active Inference and also help learn it. The Numinia project by Numen Games develops games for community engagement that can help to work better. Some of the updates can be seen in the escape room and v0.1.0 brand and culture document.
  • From the MathArt project, Bert Berkers reports: We saw some applications of cognitive accounting in MathArt and look forward to exploring the imaginal expeditions of many others.
  • From the Active Inference Journal project, Alex Vyatkin reports: with Holly and Dave, we built a set of utilities in Python and Rust to transcribe YouTube videos using a local Whisper model. Used the WhisperX repository for segmentation and diarization, with models provided by Hugging Face. Tracked WAV conversion and transcription in SurrealDB.

These updates are all included in the June 2024 Newsletter!

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ReInference

updates

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ReInference

June 2024 snapshot

reinference.activeinference.institute/

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ActInf ModelStream #004.1 ~ "Implementing Active Inference by Message Passing in a Factor Graph" (August 2021)

RxInfer.jl

2024�rxinfer.ml/

https://learnableloop.com/

rxinfer.activeinference.institute/

#engineering in Discord

Hackathons

Memes

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Ontology

Dave Douglass has led the production of two open access ontological works: “Aligning Active Inference Ontology to SUMO” and “Aligning Spatial Web Terms to SUMO”.

These far-sighted works are building connections among several different ontology systems, including the core Active Inference ontology.

As a group, several participants are exploring ontologies of and for mathematics and several Interns have made excellent contributions to definitions and translations of the Ontology.

See here to learn more about the Ontology project.�ontology.activeinference.institute

https://zenodo.org/records/11463326

https://zenodo.org/records/11062810

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More ReInference updates….

These updates are all included in the June 2024 Newsletter!

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Closing Comments

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“Red Queen” �Non-Equilibrium Stationary Bicycling State

exhibits.stanford.edu/bucky

Len Troncale

From last quarter (year, decade, century)…..

  • Where have we been?
  • Where are we at?
  • Where are we heading?
  • Where-When is Active Inference in this journey?

From Q1 Roundtable�How do we see this now?

How can we make it happen in Q3-4 2024?

….and back out we go again…

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What might a good understanding enable?

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What are the unique predictions & implications?

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What are the next steps for FEP & Active Inference?

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What are the preferences of this work?

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What are you still curious about?

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