We are delighted to announce the *2nd International Workshop on Active Inference IWAI2021*, in conjunction with the European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML/PKDD 2021) that will be held *VIRTUALLY* in September 2021 in Bilbao, Spain.

*CALL FOR PAPERS* The 2nd International Workshop on Active Inference wants to bring together researchers on active inference as well as related research fields in order to discuss current trends, novel results, (real-world) applications, to what extent active inference can be used in modern machine learning settings, such as deep learning, and how it can be unified with the latest psychological and neurological insights. Website: https://iwaiworkshop.github.io/ Twitter: @iwai_ws

*Important dates* Workshop Date: September 13th or 17th, 2021 to be decided with the ECML conference Abstract Submission Deadline: June 9th, 2021 Paper Submission Deadline: June 23rd, 2021 Acceptance Notification: July 28th, 2021

*Topics of interest* Papers on all subjects and applications of active inference and related research areas are welcome. - Active inference - (Bayesian) surprise - Cognitive robotics - Control as inference - Variational inference - Computational neuroscience - (Deep) generative models - State-space models - Representation learning - Intrinsic motivation - Intelligent systems - Decision making in economics - etc

*Paper submissions* We welcome submissions of papers with up to 8 printed pages (excluding references) in LNCS format: https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-gui... Submissions will be evaluated according to their originality and relevance to the workshop, and should have an abstract of 60-100 words. Contributions should be in PDF format and submitted via Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iwai2021 In accordance with the main conference, will apply a double-blind review process (see also the double-blind reviewing process section below for further details). All papers need to be anonymized in the best of efforts. It is allowed to have a (non-anonymous) online pre-print. Reviewers will be asked not to search for them.

Previous edition: https://iwaiworkshop.github.io/2020.html Previous proceedings: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030649180

On behalf of the organizers, Tim Verbelen, Daniela Cialfi, Maxwell Ramstead, Christopher Buckley and Pablo Lanillos

--- Dr. Pablo Lanillos www.therobotdecision.com Assistant professor in Cognitive Artificial Intelligence | AI Robotics Lab ELLIS Nijmegen Unit Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, the Netherlands p.lanillos @ donders.ru.nl