From Artificial Intelligence to Active Inference in AI Center, Physical AI, and Digital Biology
Join us for the upcoming CTTC Seminar, “From Artificial Intelligence to Active Inference in AI Center, Physical AI, and Digital Biology”, featuring Prof. Martin Maier.
- Speaker: Prof. Martin Maier, INRS, Montreal, Canada
- Date & Time: Wednesday, October 7, 2026 | 10:00 AM CET
- Location: CTTC Auditorium (Building B4)
- Available online
- Duration: Approximately 45 minutes and Q&A
About the Seminar
Recently, two of the biggest names in AI – Yann LeCun, a worldwide renowned computer scientist and pioneer in Deep Learning, and Karl Friston, the world’s most frequently cited neuroscientist and father of active inference – agreed that today’s AI is profoundly lacking the key elements found in living intelligent systems and that emerging artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems will have to bridge the gap between artificial and natural intelligence found in living intelligent systems. Towards this end, this seminar focuses on Friston’s active inference, an ideal methodology for developing more advanced AGI systems by biomimicking the way living intelligent systems work while overcoming the limitations of today’s AI related to training, learning, and explainability. The seminar aims at bridging the gap between AI and active inference via AI embodiment and agentic AI while extending the limits of the biomimetic mathematical framework of active inference via AI model optimization, including but not limited to quantization and pruning which represent the two most powerful near-term levers to reduce cost per token by 85 to 95 percent without requiring hardware upgrades of current AI centers. For illustration, the seminar presents the following three potential use cases of active inference for future research: 1) AI center, 2) physical AI, and 3) digital biology.
Martin Maier is a full professor with INRS, Montreal, Canada. He was educated at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, and received MSc and PhD degrees both with distinctions (summa cum laude) in 1998 and 2003, respectively. In 2003, he was a postdoc fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 2006 through 2007. In 2017, he received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Foundation in recognition of his accomplishments in research on FiWi-enhanced mobile networks. In 2017, he was named one of the three most promising scientists in the category “Contribution to a better society” of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) 2017 Prize Award of the European Commission. In 2019/2020, he held a UC3M-Banco de Santander Excellence Chair at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Madrid, Spain. Recently, in December 2023, he was awarded with the 2023 Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Tactile Internet Technical Committee for his contribution on 6G/Next G and the design of Metaverse concepts and architectures as well as the 2023 Outstanding Paper Award of the IEEE Computer Society Bio-Inspired Computing STC for his contribution on the symbiosis between INTERnet and Human BEING (INTERBEING). He is co-author of the book “Toward 6G: A New Era of Convergence” (Wiley-IEEE Press, January 2021) and author of the sequel “6G and Onward to Next G: The Road to the Multiverse” (Wiley-IEEE Press, February 2023).