- 1959-. British neuroscientist and physicist.
- Originated the free energy principle: biological systems minimize variational free energy to persist.
- Developed active inference, a unified framework where perception, action, and learning are aspects of the same optimization process.
- Pioneered statistical parametric mapping (SPM) for brain imaging, the standard tool in neuroimaging.
- His predictive processing framework models the brain as a hierarchical inference engine, minimizing prediction error.
- The free energy principle connects thermodynamics, information theory, and biology under a single variational bound.
- Active inference provides a computational model for autonomous agents, directly relevant to cyber protocol agents and machine learning.