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Active Inference Institute

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Quarterly Roundtable #4 in 2022

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Dec. 14, 2022

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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, raise hand, respectful speech behavior, etc.

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AII 2022 Quarterly #4

  1. Institute updates
  2. Education & Research
  3. AII in 2023

Whenever you see this:

Let us know at ActiveInference@gmail.com or activeinference.institute

If you would like to participate or collaborate

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Active Inference Lab�AIL

Active Inference Institute�AII

Born

Late 2020

Middle of 2022

Livestreams

133 in 2020 + 2021

84 more in 2022

ActInf Ontology

Terms List

Definitions, Translations, Example, etc

ActInf Textbook

Doesn’t exist yet

Continuous delivery of interactive learning groups & epistemic niche

ActInf Journal

Exists only for Friston Symposium

Rapidly transcribing, translating, augmenting, versioning

Active Blockference

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….

Dream within a Dream

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…..

Implementing ActInf in cadCAD

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…..

2021

2022

2023 ...

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Active Inference Institute

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Updates at Organizational scale

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Active Inference Institute

  • Inaugural cohort of Board of Directors, November 2022!
    • John H Clippinger
    • Rafael Kaufmann
    • Daniel Friedman
    • Dean Tickles
    • Bleu Knight
    • Mike Smith
  • Next ~month: Board of Directors will select Officers
    • December 2022: First BoD meeting on 12/9
    • For 2023: Actively seeking self-nomination and suggestions for Officer Positions (President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer): Especially with experience in governance, Financial, Non-Profit, Education, etc.
  • Towards: tax-exempt 501c3 status, Partnerships, Grants, …

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Scientific Advisory Board 2022

#001

Thank you for the insights, SAB 2022!

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We are soliciting (self-)nominations for SAB 2023 and future years

Contact via email to ActiveInference@gmail.com

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Board of Directors

  • Institute-scale formal Strategy & Governance
  • Specification and oversight of Officers
  • Apply Active Inference at the organizational scale

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Scientific Advisory Board

  • Stewardship of Organizational Units (Education & Research)
  • Assisting with Project development at different stages
  • Periodic meetings as SAB (quarterly) or subsets with special interest
  • Other areas of insight and engagement

Formal

Informal

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Institute

Org Units

  • EduActive
  • Research

Project-specific System of Interest

Projects

Chains of creation,

Not part-whole

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Engagement & Outreach ~ Institute Branding

Logo and Brand Redesign:

In revisions as of 11/30/2022

Currently leveraging external expertise for logo and brand redesign for Institute

???

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Volunteer Program

activeinference.org/education/volunteer

  • All interested individuals are encourage to engage with asynchronous AII materials, and join all synchronous drop-in meetings in Discord.
  • The Volunteer Program keeps you in the loop about specific affordances for contribution, and facilitates your participation across projects and learning groups.

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Internship Program

After initializing an official internship program in Oct. 2020, we have 12 registered interns who are currently active, several more will begin in early 2023

Components of the Internship:

  • Active Education: Textbook Group, Systems Thinking, Guided Readings/Listening
  • Project-based Learning: Contribute to an Institute Project
  • Mentorship & Facilitation

activeinference.org/education/internship

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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

531

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🅰️👀

EDUACTIVE

Project updates

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Education ~ Active Inference Textbook Group, 3 cohorts

  • Active Inference Textbook Group began in May 2022, reading through the new textbook: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/active-inference
    • 1st cohort has completed study of the text and is invited to serve in a learning assistant role for future cohorts
    • In Jan 2023, 2nd cohort will start second half & 3rd cohort will begin
  • We are working as a group with shared epistemic niche to provide many “value-added-services” for learning:

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  • ~50 participants with at least some activity, many also getting involved in AII activities

Continual delivery of

Questions, Enrichment, Discourse

ActInf Ontology

Math Learning

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Education ~ Livestream curriculum

Past and future Livestreams: https://coda.io/@active-inference-institute/livestreams

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In the 4th quarter of 2022 we had….

  • MathStream #004 (David Spivak, Category Theory)
  • OrgStream #003 (Bijan Khezri, Governing Continuous Transformation)
  • ModelStreams #006 (Théophile Champion, Branching Time ActInf), #007 (Conor Heins and Daphne Demekas, pymdp)
  • GuestStreams #028 (Giovanni Rolla, radical enactivism), #029 (Shanna Dobson, MathArt), #030 (Kyrtin Atreides, artificial intelligence), #031 (Brett Kagan, Adeel Razi, biological intelligence)
  • Paper Livestreams
  • #049 ~ “A Worked Example of the Bayesian Mechanics of Classical Objects”, Dalton Sakthivadivel
  • #050 ~ “Interoception as modeling, allostasis as control”, Eli Sennesh, Jordan Theriault et al.
  • #051 ~ “Canonical neural networks perform active inference”, Takuya Isomura

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2022 search

Please help us co-create special and engaging Livestreams in 2023!

  • Participate in preparing and enacting livestreams!
  • Self-nominate or suggest/introduce someone for a stream
  • Collaborate on a .0 background & context video
  • Join Livestream regular meetings to learn more

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Education ~ Governing Continuous Transformation BookStreams

  • Governing Continuous Transformation, book by Bijan Khezri reframes governance in terms of Free Energy Principle Active Inference https://rd.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-95473-4

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  • BookStreams will cover material and relevant background, started in December 2022

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  • Discussions will cover each part of the book

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  • Get in touch if you want to participate in this BookStream #001, or create similar series for another book.

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Education ~ Active Inference Journal

  • Goal: Increase accessibility and indexability of the livestreams and audio-visual material
  • Publication of Mark Solms augmented transcript
  • Significant developments in journal methodology
    • Move to Git architecture for versioning documents and utilities
    • Improved sophistication and proficiency of processing (integration of multiple AI transcription with different strengths and pre-trainings, parcellation, manual editing, appendix generation).
    • Increase capacity for rapid transcription (initial version of captions & prose transcript uploaded) and for processing our backlog
    • Many opportunities for learners, developers, translators, teachers, analysts, researchers, communicators, and scholars!

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Education ~ Active Inference Journal

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Education ~ Internal Systems Thinking

  • “Systems Engineering Intensive” (SEI)

4 weeks starting January 2023

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Advantages

  • Project-based approach
  • Multiscale and scale free template
  • Team communication modeling
  • Enhancing labor outlook
  • Mastering systems thinking skills

RSVP via email, or see newsletter

Weekly on Monday, 2pm UTC

Starting on January, 9th

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Education ~ Partnering with EEM Institute

Institute for Augmented Intelligence in Entrepreneurship, Engineering, and Management�(EEM Institute)

http://eem.institute

&

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🅰️👀

RESEARCH

Project updates

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Research overview

  • What is it like to learn and apply Active Inference? What does it look like?
  • What are the similarities and differences between Active Inference and other cognitive modeling frameworks?
  • Different individually-led research projects that people want feedback/collaborators/accountability on

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Research ~ Active Blockference

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🅰️👀

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Next Steps

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Active Inference Institute in 2023

Institute Scale

EduActive

Research

Niche

P

R

O

J

E

C

T

S

  • Board of Directors
  • Scientific Advisory Board
  • Grants, Partnerships
  • BOLTS developments
  • Stewarded development
  • Increased participation
  • Improved Project modeling
  • Sustained participation from global Volunteers and Interns
  • Close the loop with the niche through continual action, inference, and service.

Niche

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Stable Diffusion 2

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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 goals of this research?

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What are you still curious about?

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Extra slides

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  • Let’s Introduce Ourselves

Please give a short intro or check-in, then pass to someone who has not spoken yet

� Warm-up questions.

  • How was your generative model updated this quarter?

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  • What is something that you are wondering about, or would like to have resolved by the end of today’s discussion?
  • What are you looking forward to doing in the rest of 2022?

Intros & Warm-up:

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Education ~ Knowledge Engineering/Corpus project

For Open Source Papers with “Free Energy Principle” or “Active Inference” as Keywords

  • catalogued in Coda, files uploaded, metadata checked
  • linked to keywords from Active Inference Ontology, and multiple manual annotation
  • Paper Publication (coming soon) along with Coda tool development will encourage FEP/ ActInf authors to submit additional papers to Knowledge Corpus for inclusion (using forms) and crowdsourced, expert, and automated annotation

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  • Developing the realtime scholarship analytics will continue as participatory project at ActInfLab

RJ Cordes, Bleu Knight, Daniel F.

And more

DELETE THIS SLIDE? NO UPDATE REQUIRED

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Research & Applications ~ An Active Inference Ontology for Decentralized Science: from Situated Sensemaking to the Epistemic Commons

  • Evaluated web3 / blockchain technology and its connection to decentralized science (DeSci)
  • Model science as a collective process using ActInf
  • We present the Active Entity Ontology for Science (AEOS) as a composable and versionable modeling system using the Active Inference entity partitioning
    • Active Entity Class
    • Informational Entity Class
  • Now working to extend the AEOS and implement it in Active Blockference

https://zenodo.org/record/6320575

DELETE THIS SLIDE? NO UPDATE REQUIRED

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Education ~ Next Active Inference Textbook Group cohorts

Register to participate in an upcoming cohort of the Textbook Group

https://coda.io/form/Textbook-Group-Commit-Form_d3U7dMaNV3y

  • After Cohort 1, part 1 (up through chapter 5), ends in July, we will:
    • Continue with Cohort 1, part 2 (finishing the Textbook in 2022)
    • Begin Cohort 2, part 1

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  • We are incorporating what we are learning from first cohort into how we will proceed with part 2, and with the second cohort of part 1

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  • We will continue to offer the Textbook Group as an accessible onramp into learning/applying Active Inference and getting involved with ActInf Lab!

DELETE THIS SLIDE? NO UPDATE REQUIRED

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Engagement & Outreach ~ ActInf Journal project scaling

  • Meta-model for arrange division of labor and scaling
  • Integration with Knowledge Corpus
  • Requirement formulation for multi-language support and other automations

Multi-role, language

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Participatory, project-based

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Support publishing into

Subtitle & Prose formats

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Connection with ActInf Ontology

DELETE THIS SLIDE? NO UPDATE REQUIRED

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Education ~ Introductory Active Inference online course development

Team formation

  • Currently learning from Textbook Group and other educational projects (e.g. Ontology, Livestreams)
  • Course will Learning Experience Platform (LXP) Aisystant from Systems Management School
  • Next steps are to focus on assembly of team of participants who will engage in course engineering