June 26th, University of Copenhagen. Interactive Inference and the Potential Energy of Actions

Friday June 26th at 14:00, Professor Vertegaal will be addressing members of the new TRACTION Institute in Theoretical HCI at the University of Copenhagen on Interactive Inference. I will discuss how quantifying the amount of surprise in a task can produce elegant behavioural laws that appear to be governing user performance and error, predicting Fitts’ and Hick’s Law.

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June 15th: Interactive Inference: A Simplified Active Inference Account of Interaction

A presentation to the Theoretical Neurobiology (TNB) Group at UCL London at 15:30 CET. In this presentation, I explore simplifications to Active Inference that make its central intuitions more accessible to designers, HCI researchers, and other non-mathematical users. The core proposal is that many simple interactive behaviours can be approximated by treating variational free energy locally as a second-order Taylor approximation around equilibrium.

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