Join Dr. Anthony D. (Tony) McDonald, Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Director of the Human Factors and Machine Learning Lab, for a seminar introducing active inference theory and its applications in transportation safety and human–automation interaction. Dr. McDonald will discuss how active inference—a computational framework for understanding human cognition and behavior—can model, predict, and interpret human decision-making in complex environments. Through four modeling applications, he will demonstrate how active inference compares to deep reinforcement learning, connects driving behaviors to underlying cognitive values, and provides a principled way to estimate constructs such as trust and situation awareness. Together, these insights illustrate the potential of active inference to bridge human factors and machine learning, guiding future research and practice in human-centered autonomy.