We are pleased to announce an upcoming talk by PhD student Quanyang Chen at the University of Sydney, who will be presenting via Zoom on October 29th, at 10 am. For details of his talk, please see the following abstract:
Abstract:
Self-organising collective systems, such as flocks of birds, shoals of fish and the brain, often operate near the "critical regime" between order and disorder. To understand why this occurs, we study four intrinsic utilities: predictive information, empowerment, variational free energy (active inference) and thermodynamic efficiency. These measures evaluate the usefulness of behaviour independent of external rewards. In this talk, I will briefly introduce each measure and compare them using the same example (the Ising Model). We use numerical simulations to identify the optimal parameter values under each intrinsic utility framework, and I will discuss what the results reveal about the utilities of operating at the critical regime.
Zoom Link
