On October 1^st, 2025 at 1.30 pm the seminar on "From Artificial Intelligence to Active Inference: The Key to True AI" will take place at DEIB Conference Room "Emilio Gatti" (Building 20).

Some liken the role of optical fiber networks in today’s high-speed networks to that of engines in high-speed cars. A car without a powerful engine will go nowhere. In fact, there is a wide consensus that 5G let alone 6G will go nowhere without suitable fiber backhaul infrastructures in place. The flip side of this analogy, however, is that optical network research might have reached its limits, similar to today’s combustion engine whose efficiency has reached almost 100%, leaving space for only incremental progress, unless new research lines are opened up, e.g., electrification of vehicles or, in the case of 6G, intelligentization of networks – that is, the ubiquitous deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) to increasingly replace communication with computation. To see this, take the prime example of edge computing, which has been widely deployed for reducing network latency and/or predicting network traffic (in lieu of transmitting it). This seminar elaborates on how the anticipated human-AI co-evolution of Homo Technicus – a human species that may, in the new Age of AI, live in symbiosis with machine technology – may unfold. It is structured into the following three main parts: (i) The Rise of the AI Center, (ii) The Rise of the Robots, and (iii) The Key to True AI. More specifically, we will first elaborate on passive optical network (PON) supported networking and the transition from past “Post NG-PON2” research to today’s AI centers premised on multi-rooted fiber tree topologies referred to as network lanes. We will pay particular attention to the technique of packet spraying that is widely deployed in AI centers to solve the so-called low-entropy problem of the AI/ML training workloads by driving up parallelism across network lanes. Next, we will elaborate on the transition toward embodied communication, widely studied in the 5G/6G use case of the Tactile Internet based on haptic communication, which enables humans to steer robots in remote task environments in real time, commonly referred to as the “1-ms challenge.” Importantly, we will highlight that lifelong (i.e., continual) learning – a capability that is completely lacking in today’s disembodied AIs such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold – has been successfully deployed in embodied robots by perceiving and acting on their surrounding environment (see, e.g., Waymo Driver’s embodiment of autonomous ride-hailing cab service). The remainder of the seminar will demonstrate the importance of entropy and embodied as well as enactive AI by leveraging active inference, which is premised on the action-perception loop of living intelligent systems and first principles of statistical physics found in self-organizing/evolving complex adaptive systems, whether natural, artificial, or hybrid cyborganic ones. As some argue, in the end, the acronym AI might actually not stand for artificial intelligence, but active inference – the key to true AI. It enables more advanced AI systems, while overcoming the limitations of today’s AI.

Martin Maier is a full professor with the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), Montréal, 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. He was a co-recipient of the 2009 IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award. Further, he was a Marie Curie IIF Fellow of the European Commission from 2014 through 2015. 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 Skłodowska-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). Based on Stanford University’s list of “World’s Top 2%” most cited scientists he ranks among the top 2% of all scientists worldwide and has been recently awarded 2024 Highly Ranked Scholar Lifetime status by ScholarGPS as #2 worldwide in the area of access network (top 0.05%). 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). 
Email: martin.maier@inrs.ca