Huntsville AI

SMD Field Trip
2025-08-06 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Chicago) | Von Braun Center, 700 Monroe St SW, Huntsville, AL, 35801, United States
This week we are taking a field trip to the Space & Missile Defense Symposium! Some of us will walk the exhibit hall floor on Tuesday and early Wednesday to compile a list of companies that have AI related projects on display. Then we’ll do a group walkthrough starting at 3pm on Wednesday to visit their booths and ask them to talk to us about their offerings

Also new this year – based on the SMD Symposium website, the free admission to the exhibit space also includes the technical papers. These are worth your time if you can manage to take a few days off of work, or are already at the conference. Some of the presenters are part of our Huntsville AI community, so please show your support! You’ll find a link to the agenda below.

Links & Other Resources:

SMD Symposium Registration – https://smd.ud.net/register
Tech Track Agenda – https://smdsymposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2025-Tech-Track-Agenda-v02.pdf
Venue & Parking – https://smdsymposium.org/venue/

Details:

Date – 8/06/2025
Time – 3:00 – 5:00 pm
Location – Von Braun Center South Hall
Address – Monroe Street, Huntsville, AL 35801

Replit AI Agent
2025-07-23 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we’ll have Jack Francis as our guest speaker! He will be talking about Replit’s AI Agent for creating applications.
“This session demonstrates how to turn an idea into a functional application in minutes using Replit’s AI Agent. We’ll demystify the mechanics behind this powerful AI coding assistant, tour the Replit platform, and then build a complete application from scratch—all driven by simple prompts. You’ll learn how to leverage the Agent for rapid prototyping to get immediate feedback on your ideas. We will cover practical strategies for integrating this tool into your workflow, whether you’re a seasoned developer looking to accelerate your process or a complete beginner eager to bring your creations to life.”

Links & Other Resources:

Replit AI – https://replit.com/ai

Details:

Date – 7/23/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87872699213?pwd=[REDACTED]

Virtual Paper Review – Unifying Embeddings: From Words to Pixels
2025-07-16 18:00 - 19:30 | AL
Join us virtually this Wednesday as we crack open the magic behind modern multimodal embeddings and why they’re not just “text embeddings with pictures pasted on.”
Part I – Foundations

Modality alignment 101 – How contrastive pre-training pulls text, images, and video frames into one joint space.

Vector anatomy – Why pixel patches, temporal frame sequences, and word tokens all reduce to the same dot-product math.

Evaluation metrics – What “recall,” “precision,” and “rankability” really mean once your queries aren’t just strings.

Part II – Deep Dive
We’ll explore two recent papers as our testbed for these concepts:

JinaEmbed V4 – A single-path backbone unifying images, video, text, and code.
On the Rankability of Visual Embeddings – Recovering numeric “more vs. less” axes with only two labeled examples.

We’ll finish by surveying how to turn these insights into a two-stage reranking pipeline from dense k-NN recall to lightweight LoRA heads or simple linear probes for precision uplift.

Links:

JinaEmbed V4 (PDF): https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18902
Rankability: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03683

Details:

Date – 7/16/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85067618698?pwd=[REDACTED]

Social Night!
2025-07-07 17:30 - 19:30 | Yellowhammer Brewing, 2600 Clinton Ave W, Huntsville, AL, 35805, United States
Join us for our summer social! This time we’ll be inside at the private room in Yellowhammer Brewing. There is good pizza available from Earth and Stone Pizza. We’ll also have part of the patio to ourselves if you miss the Alabama heat. The private room was only available for Monday, so hopefully that doesn’t throw anyone off. We’ll be back on our normal Wednesday schedule after this.
If you have been looking for an easy time to get involved and meet others in the group – THIS IS IT! – I always have trouble keeping up with all of the conversations and connections that happen, so please be sure to say hi to someone you don’t know.
This officially starts at 5:30pm, but I’ll be there as soon as I can get out of the office – which is hopefully 5pm7

NVIDIA AI Certification Exams
2025-06-25 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we’ll have Tom Plunkett as our guest speaker! His talk will describe how to study for NVIDIA’s AI certification exams. Specifically, the NVIDIA-Certified Associate: Generative AI and LLMs, Multimodal Generative AI, and AI Infrastructure and Operations. You’ll find a link to these below.
From NVIDIA: “Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting your journey in the industry, certification is a valuable way to advance your career. Certifications serve as tangible evidence of your expertise, proficiency, and commitment to continuous learning.”
Bio: Thomas Plunkett recently passed seven AI certification exams: 3 NVIDIA exams, 3 Oracle exams, and 1 vendor-neutral exam. He is a consultant for Oracle, where he focuses on AI and other emerging technologies. He is a published author on AI, Big Data, Blockchain, and other technologies. He has taught graduate-level computer science courses for Virginia Tech and Harrisburg University. He is a member of the patent bar and has filed patents on AI inventions for Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, Oracle, and other organizations.

Links & Other Resources:

Generative AI LLMs –
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/learn/certification/generative-ai-llm-associate/
Multimodal Generative AI – https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/learn/certification/generative-ai-multimodal-associate/
AI Infrastructure and Operations – https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/learn/certification/ai-infrastructure-operations-associate/

Details:

Date – 6/25/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85498016523?pwd=[REDACTED]

Virtual Paper Review – Zero Trust for AI Agents
2025-06-18 18:00 - 19:30 | AL
Join us virtually this Wednesday at 6pm to continue our monthly Paper Review series! This month, we’re diving into the critical topic of identity management for autonomous AI systems by reviewing the recent paper, “A Novel Zero-Trust Identity Framework for Agentic AI: Decentralized Authentication and Fine-Grained Access Control.”
As AI agents become more autonomous, traditional IAM solutions are proving insufficient. This session will explore a new architectural paradigm that fuses two powerful identity models, workload identity and decentralized identity, to create a robust, verifiable, and secure foundation for agent operations.
Our discussion will follow a two-part format. In the first half, we will cover the foundational concepts necessary to understand the paper’s contributions:

Workload Identity: The core principles of identifying software services using SPIFFE/SPIRE.
Decentralized Identity: An introduction to Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) for portable, logical identity.
Bridging Technologies: The role of OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange (RFC 8693) for delegation and Open Policy Agent (OPA) for fine-grained authorization.

The second half will be a deep dive into the paper itself, analyzing its proposed framework and innovations:

The layered architecture for unifying workload and logical agent identities.
Detailed review of the authentication and authorization flows, particularly for human-to-agent delegation.
Strategies for managing short-lived credentials and keys in dynamic environments.
Implications for securing agents in complex, non-Kubernetes deployments (e.g., Docker Compose, systemd).

This session is ideal for security architects, AI/ML engineers, and practitioners interested in the next generation of secure infrastructure for artificial intelligence.

Links:

Main Paper: A Novel Zero-Trust Identity Framework for Agentic AI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19301
SPIFFE: https://spiffe.io/
W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs): https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/
W3C Verifiable Credentials (VCs): https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/
OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8693

Details:

Date – 6/18/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86865023053?pwd=[REDACTED]

Vibe Coding Live!
2025-06-11 18:00 - 19:30 | AL
This week we’ll have several people in the room with various tools attempting to “Vibe Code” our transcription service. We’ll pass screen share around to see each person’s approach and do some evaluation of the output. This should be interesting to compare with our existing transcription service that was written entirely by hand.
Here are some constraints to make sure it matches as much as possible to the tech stack:

AWS for all hosting
Docker Containers for everything
Faster-Whisper for the speech to text model
Flask back end
React front end
Stripe for payment processing
Languages are Python and Typescript
Bonus for CI/CD workflow in Github and Terraform deployment

Basic requirements

User can upload a video or audio file, and set their email address
User can pay, which starts the transcription process
App updates the transcription live as it is being processed
User receives an email with the transcription when complete
App removes all containers used for processing as well as the file that was uploaded (a.k.a don’t keep any data)
User does not have to create an account or log in

We’ll see how that goes in a live setting. If anything, it will be interesting to see how far some of these models have come.

Links & Other Resources:

Transcription Service – https://transcribe.hsv.ai/

Details:

Date – 6/11/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86524869531?pwd=[REDACTED]

Cline - The Collaborative Coding Agent
2025-05-28 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we’ll walk through an example of using the Cline plugin for Visual Studio Code connected through OpenRouter. It’s an agent that can help you as you work, directly from Visual Studio Code – doing much more than just generating code.
After working directly with the agent for development, we’ll take a look at setting up Cline Rules and Workflows. Then we will cover Task Management and Context Management.
The session will also include an overview of OpenRouter, which can be used to select from most of the popular models without having to manage accounts with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, etc.

Links & Other Resources:

Cline Website – https://cline.bot/
Cline Docs: https://docs.cline.bot/getting-started/for-new-coders
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/cline/cline

Details:

Date – 5/28/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89834209692?pwd=[REDACTED]

AI 101 hosted by AI Huntsville
2025-05-15 15:30 - 16:30 | Huntsville/Madison County Chamber, 225 Church St NW, Huntsville, AL, 35801, United States
This “Introduction to AI” workshop by Deloitte provides a clear and basic overview of artificial intelligence for professionals. This session explains key AI concepts like machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, using real-world examples from industries such as healthcare, finance, and transportation.
Participants will learn about the ethical issues and challenges of AI, and how Deloitte uses AI to help businesses. Through discussions and practical demos, attendees will gain a basic understanding of AI and how it can be relevant to their work, helping them to explore AI opportunities in their organizations.
Register Here – https://forms.gle/pcWMmJBQR1J8NTtu9

Virtual Paper Review - Google Prompt Engineering Guide (v7)
2025-05-14 18:00 - 19:30 | AL
This month we are looking at Google’s recent iteration on their Prompt Engineering guide as a vehicle to discuss the latest advancements in the field of prompting models. We will cover the core material of the paper and discuss the sort of the things that are left out of the current guidance, and potential resources to deepen understanding of different prompt engineering components.
The focus of the discussion will prioritize programmatic control first, however many concepts will also be useful for general users a well.
Topics for the session will primarily focus on:

Core components of a prompt
Key Prompting Parameters (Temperature, Top-p, Top-k, etc.)
Prompting Techniques (Few-Shot, Chain of Thought, Self-Consistency, Tree of Thoughts, ReAct, etc.)
Prompting Modes (Structured Outputs, Vision, Tool Use, Reasoning )
Prompt Evaluation & Automating Prompt Engineering (DSPy, etc)

Details:

Date – 5/14/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89604082647?pwd=[REDACTED]

OpenHands Agents for Developing Code
2025-05-07 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we’ll dive into our latest presentation, OpenHands Agents for Developing Code, where we’ll explore the full CodeAgent lifecycle—from architecture and history to hands-on workflows and GitHub Actions integration.
The frameworks and tools covered include:

CodeAgent Architecture & Microservices
Code Generation Agent
Test Generation Agent
Code Review Agent
Custom Workflows via .openhands.yaml
GitHub Actions Integration for automatic fixes

Links & Other Resources:

OpenHands Docs: https://docs.all-hands.dev/
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/All-Hands-AI/OpenHands
Presentation Markdown: https://github.com/HSV-AI/presentations/blob/master/2025/250507_OpenHands.md
GitHub Actions Example: https://github.com/HSV-AI/presentations/blob/master/.github/workflows/openhands-fix.yml

Details:

Date – 5/7/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89917715591?pwd=[REDACTED]

Supporting American Planning Association Lunch & Learn
2025-04-25 10:00 - 12:00 | AL
The State of AI: Innovations, Applications and Impacts in Planning
For the last 2 years, AI has been one of the trends recommended in APA’s Trend Report for planners to act and prepare for. The report notes that while the advancements in Gen AI have the potential to greatly enhance public services, there are concerns about cybersecurity and privacy, as well as the environmental impact of the computing power required to support supercomputers. In this event, the status and extent of AI technology especially in North Alabama will be explored. The impact of AI on our local economy and communities will also be discussed.
Date & Time: April 25, 2025, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Speakers:

Langley

Founder of Huntsville AI and Chief Technical Officer of CohesionForce, Inc.
Dr. Vineetha Menon
Director of the Big Data Analytics lab in the University of Alabama in Huntsville

Virtual Paper Review - Diffusion Transformers & Flow Matching (Wan 2.1 Technical Report)
2025-04-23 18:00 - 19:30 | AL
Join us virtually this Wednesday at 6pm to continue our monthly Paper Review series! This month we are looking at the concepts behind recent advancements in video generation. We will focus on Diffusion Transformers and Flow Matching techniques, culminating in a review of the recent Wan 2.1 technical report.
This virtual session will follow our usual format. In the first half, we will cover foundational concepts essential for understanding the paper and related techniques:

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs)
What is a latent space?
Core principles of Diffusion Models
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) architecture
Rectified Flow / Flow Matching concepts

The second half will then review the Wan paper, analyzing its components and contributions in the context of the concepts discussed:

The overall model architecture and innovations
Implementation and role of the Spatio-Temporal VAE
Dataset construction and usage
Details of the Captioning Pipeline for text-to-video/image
Video Editing with Wan (VACE)
Experiments in Video to Audio generation

Links:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20314 : Wan Technical Report
https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09748 : Diffusion Transformers
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.02747 : Flow Matching for Generative Models
https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6114 : Variational Autoencoders

Details:

Date – 4/23/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87940486028?pwd=[REDACTED]

Agent Frameworks
2025-04-16 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we will continue our series on AI Agents, based on the HuggingFace tutorials. We will also jump into some of the protocols such as MCP and A2A.
The frameworks covered include:

smolagents
LlamaIndex
LangGraph

AI Huntsville Taskforce
The date for the Introduction to AI session has changed to May 15. The intent is to raise awareness of AI in Huntsville, so it aligns closely with our mission here. I’ll forward more info to this distro next week.
American Planning Association
I’m presenting an overview of AI and its application to city planning, with some help from Josh. I believe there is room for additional seats if you are interested in attending. Just reply and let me know.
Mailing List Progress
Good news and bad news. This list is now large enough to surpass the free tier of MailChimp! You can guess the bad news 🙂

Links & Other Events:

HuggingFace Tutorial – https://huggingface.co/learn/agents-course/en/unit2/introduction
MCP – https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol
A2A – https://github.com/google/A2A

Details:

Date – 4/16/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82537267316?pwd=[REDACTED]

AI for Video Generation
2025-04-02 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
It’s been a while since we covered Video Generation models, actually February of last year. I dropped a link below from the email for last year that covers the list of models that we covered. I believe that Sora is the only one currently still in use.
This week we will focus on the Wan2.1 model that is getting a lot of warranted publicity. The following paper review next week will dive deeper into the Wan paper (linked below). We’ll also do a survey of publicly available tools for generating video. There’s a list of these tools below in the links.
We’ll end with a live demo of the Wan2.1 model running in hosted Rupod instance. It’s been a lot of fun this weekend getting this all set up and working. My definition of “fun” is different than most though 🙂 There are a few topics for later that I’ve run across in the process:

Runpod for hosting AI workflows
ComfyUI

AI Huntsville Taskforce
The taskforce is hosting a session on April 10 to cover an Introduction to AI, presented by Deloitte. The intent is to raise awareness of AI in Huntsville, so it aligns closely with our mission here. I’ll forward more info to this distro next week.
American Planning Association
I’m presenting an overview of AI and its application to city planning, with some help from Josh. I believe there is room for additional seats if you are interested in attending. Just reply and let me know.

Links & Other Events:

2024 Video Breakthroughs – https://mailchi.mp/842e92b8296d/240221-ai-video-breakthrough
Wan Paper – https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20314
https://hailuoai.video/
https://app.klingai.com/
https://app.runwayml.com/
https://www.genmo.ai/play
https://wan.video/wanxiang/videoCreation

Details:

Date – 4/02/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88543069893?pwd=[REDACTED]

Huntsville AI Social
2025-03-19 18:00 - 19:30 | Stovehouse, 3414 Governors Dr SW, Huntsville, AL, 35805

Paper Review - Claude 3.7 Sonnet
2025-03-12 18:00 - 19:30 | AL
Join us virtually this Wednesday at 6pm to continue our monthly Paper Review series! This week will be a detailed review of the system card paper for Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Claude 3.7 is a new hybrid reasoning model designed to enhance transparency in AI decision-making processes.
This virtual session will examine the technical aspects of Claude 3.7, including its Extended Thinking Mode, training methodologies using publicly available datasets, human feedback, and Constitutional AI principles. The discussion will explore the model’s performance across various tasks, such as software engineering, cybersecurity, and autonomous agents, highlighting strengths and addressing limitations. We will also look at the coding agent “Claude Code” released alongside 3.7 sonnet. Researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts interested in recent advancements in AI reasoning, code agents, and transparency will benefit from the insights provided.
This event aims to offer a clear overview of Claude 3.7’s contributions, implications for responsible AI development, and directions for future research and experimentation.

Links:

Claude 3.7 System Card : https://assets.anthropic.com/m/785e231869ea8b3b/original/claude-3-7-sonnet-system-card.pdf
Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy : https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropics-responsible-scaling-policy
Claude Code : https://ai-claude.net/code/
Constitutional Classifiers : https://www.anthropic.com/research/constitutional-classifiers
Cybench (Cyber Benchmark) : https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08926
MCP Servers : https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction

Details:

Date – 3/12/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83232316418?pwd=[REDACTED]

Agentic AI
2025-03-05 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we will go through the AI Agents course offered by HuggingFace. The course consists of 4 units, and the first two have been released so far. This is a self-paced course with a lot of good material and hands-on examples. There’s also a certificate when you finish if you are interested in that.
Several of us have made it through portions of the course so far, so the intent is to compare notes and give everyone an overview and tips on what parts to jump into.
HudsonAlpha Tech Challenge
We’ll also review our experience with the HudsonAlpha Tech Challenge from this weekend. It was a lot of fun, even though we didn’t place. I’m looking forward to see how this challenge progresses next year. There’s a link to our submission below.
Paper Review Series
The next installment of the paper review series is planned for 3/12 to cover the Claude 3.7 and GPT 4.5 drops and dive into the system card papers for both of them. Lots of interesting topics around mechanistic interpretability (mainly related to Sparse Autoencoders) in the anthropic card.

Links & Other Events:

2025 HATCH Submission – https://devpost.com/software/deep-learning-microscopy-for-dummies
2025 HATCH GitHub Repo – https://github.com/HSV-AI/hatch-2025
HuggingFace AI Agents Course – https://huggingface.co/agents-course

Details:

Date – 3/05/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85363006279?pwd=[REDACTED]

HudsonAlpha Tech Challenge
2025-03-01 00:00 - 23:59 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806

VIRTUAL ONLY - Deep Research Overview
2025-02-19 18:00 - 19:00 | AL
This week we will have Jack Francis provide an overview of Deep Research:
We will explore Google’s Gemini Deep Research, OpenAI’s Deep Research, and Open-Source Deep Research implementations. Deep Research is an LLM agent that uses reasoning to synthesize large amounts of online information and complete multi-step research tasks for you. We’ll dive into the mechanics of Deep Research, discussing how these agents function and some of the benchmarks used to evaluate the models.
We will discuss the strengths and limitations of each approach, provide examples for comparison, and talk through Deep Research use cases, such as market research! Deep Research is useful tool to add to your toolbox for market research, decision analysis, or any other task that requires significant amounts of “Googling” today. The goal of the presentation is to introduce Deep Research and provide an overview of current tools, so that you can use it effectively for your own research tasks.
Paper Review Series
Thanks to Josh for the great kickoff to the paper review series last week! You can find the recording, links to papers, and transcript here:
https://hsv.ai/2025/02/12/ai-reasoning-reinforcement-learning-fundamental-papers-history/
If you have a paper that you would like to see us review, please let me know. We’ll post the date for March as soon as it’s finalized.

Links & Other Events:

2025 HATCH – https://hudsonalpha.org/techchallenge/
2025 BSides – https://nac-issa.org/events/bsides/

Details:

Date – 2/19/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84476860693?pwd=[REDACTED]

Virtual Paper Review - Reasoning
2025-02-12 18:00 - 19:30 | AL
Join us virtually this Wednesday at 6pm to kick off our monthly Paper Review series! We will be holding these sessions every 4 weeks on Zoom. The first one will be led by Josh Phillips:
This month we will be exploring the current evolution in AI reasoning models. We will start with a short review of the history of combining reinforcement learning with tree search for reasoning (AlphaGo/MuZero). Then we will cover the real start of the reasoning race with the chain-of-thought innovations highlighted by “Let’s Verify Step by Step.” And finally of course, we’ll cover the most important insights from DeepSeek’s three recent papers that build on all of this prior foundation:

DeepSeek-V3 – a highly efficient MoE-based approach (671B parameters, only 37B active per token) powered by advanced CUDA/NCCL optimizations and low-precision (FP8) training, making huge models tractable on constrained hardware.
DeepSeek-R1 – the first open demonstration that an LLM can learn complex reasoning purely through RL rewards, without any annotated examples (r1-zero)
DeepSeekMath– which introduces GRPO (an alternative to PPO that simplifies training and removes the need for a separate value network).

Links:

Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model (2019) : https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.08265
Lets Verify Step by Step (2023) : https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.20050
Deepseek V3 Technical Report (2024): https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3/blob/main/DeepSeek_V3.pdf
DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025) https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1/blob/main/DeepSeek_R1.pdf
DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models (2025): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03300
(Bonus) “We’ve got R1 at home” : https://unsloth.ai/blog/r1-reasoning

Details:

Date – 2/12/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86964741971?pwd=[REDACTED]

DeepSeek-R1 and Other Topics
2025-02-05 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we will be back at HudsonAlpha in their classroom. This is a new room for us, which I believe is on the opposite side from the large conference room we have been using.
HudsonAlpha Tech Challenge
We should have Tyler Clark stop by for a few minutes to discuss some changes to HATCH and how we can get involved. Otherwise, I can cover based on what I know. The main change from the past challenges is that this will be a one day challenge occurring on Saturday, March 1st.
DeepSeek-R1
We’ll be discussing DeepSeek-R1, which has been unavoidable in most conversations over the last week – and rightly so. We will cover the architecture, the approach used for training, as well as the distilled models based on the Llama and Qwen architectures. We have several folks in the group that already have DeepSeek-R1 running locally, so if you need help getting it running or would like to connect directly please let me know.
For part of the discussion, you may want to refer back to the Mixture of Experts talk that Josh Phillips led during one of our meetups in October 2023. You can find the link below.
Paper Review Series
This year we are going to start a review series to look at published papers in-depth. These will be a monthly, virtual-only meetup to start with but may shift based on interest. The first paper review will be on Wednesday, February 12, led by Josh Phillips to cover the DeepSeek-R1 paper (also linked below).
SBIR/STTR Topics?
The next round of SBIR/STTR Topics are supposed to drop on Wednesday. Given the issues with funding being stopped for NSF grants and other changes driven by the new administration, I don’t know if we will see new topics drop or not.
AI Symposium
We’ll take a few minutes to talk about how the AI Symposium sessions went. The organizers are interested in feedback for the quality of the sessions and any suggested changes for next year.

Links & Other Events:

DeepSeek-R1 on GitHub – https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1?tab=readme-ov-file
DeepSeek-R1 Paper – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12948
Mixture of Experts Discussion – https://hsv.ai/2023/10/25/mixture-of-experts-harnessing-the-hidden-architecture-of-gpt4/
Introduction to AI Slides – https://github.com/HSV-AI/presentations/blob/master/2025/250116_Introduction_to_AI_LearningQuest.pdf
Uses of AI Slides – https://github.com/HSV-AI/presentations/blob/master/2025/250123_Uses_of_AI_LearningQuest.pdf?raw=true
2025 HATCH – https://hudsonalpha.org/techchallenge/
2025 BSides – https://nac-issa.org/events/bsides/

Details:

Date – 2/05/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82283427713?pwd=[REDACTED]

Intro to AI @ LearningQuest
2025-01-30 13:00 - 14:30, 2025-01-23 13:00 - 14:30, 2025-01-16 13:00 - 14:30 | Huntsville Madison County Library, 915 Monroe St, Huntsville, AL, 35801, United States

2025 AI Symposium: Automation Vs HITL
2025-01-28 00:00 - 2025-01-30 23:59 | Space & Rocket Center, 1 Tranquility Base, Huntsville, AL, 35805, United States

AI for Code Development
2025-01-22 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
It has certainly been a busy few weeks! The first session for LearningQuest (slides linked below) had about 150 people in attendance and went very well. I had several great questions come up that I will have to research before the next session on Thursday.
We don’t know exactly what the weather will do this week as far as closures. We have the big conference room at HudsonAlpha reserved, but please check for further updates before coming in person in case we switch to a virtual only meetup for this week.
The main subject of the night will be AI for code development. We looked at this some time in the past with the StarCoder model, but there are many options available now. Some are free (and limited), while others are inexpensive. We will try to cover Copilot, Cursor, and a self hosted option. Please let me know if you have experience/opinions on these and we can get that in the discussion as well!
There is also an NVIDIA meetup at Torch earlier on Wednesday. I believe that several of us might be able to make it, so we should be able to share any info we pick up. I’ll drop a link to their signup in case you want to go.
Links & Other Events:

Introduction to AI Slides – https://github.com/HSV-AI/presentations/blob/master/2025/250116_Introduction_to_AI_LearningQuest.pdf
NVIDIA Meetup at Torch – https://torchtechnologies.surveymonkey.com/r/CSHQHBQ
2025 AI Symposium – https://www.rocketcenter.com/institute
2025 HATCH – https://hudsonalpha.org/techchallenge/
2025 BSides – https://nac-issa.org/events/bsides/

Details:

Date – 1/22/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89635091670?pwd=[REDACTED]

2025 Kickoff
2025-01-08 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806

2024 Year in Review
2024-12-18 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
We made it through 2024! Well, close enough for this group anyway 🙂 This week we will get together and go through the list of topics and other items that we covered over the year. There are 3 questions that I want to ask for each topic:

Did it stick, or was it overcome by other technology or approaches?
What is the “shelf life” of the topic?
What direction is the topic headed? Advancing, decay, community interest?

In addition to the review of 2024, we also have Paul Bay coming to talk about what he has been doing with AI Agents. Based on what I am reading, Agentic AI could be the next popular movement in the field.
We’ll end the session by talking about plans for 2025. The kickoff is scheduled for January 8th. I have placeholders for other meetups & associated events on the calendar through February if you want to take a look here: https://hsv.ai/calendar/

Links & Other Events:

2024 AI Symposium Recorded Sessions – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvvHQqQynqmtkQuLsvfFtmy0OohBcA5H4
2025 AI Symposium – https://www.rocketcenter.com/institute
2025 HATCH – https://hudsonalpha.org/techchallenge/

Details:

Date – 12/18/2024
Time – 6-7:30pm
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83751396321?pwd=[REDACTED]

AI Application Scaffolding
2024-12-04 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we will walk through the components used in the transcription service along with how they are integrated and deployed. This has been updated over the year to incorporate new features and infrastructure as it became available.
This session will be a little light on AI, but should give you an idea of what is involved in making a product that is consumable by the general public. There is likely too much to cover in an hour, so we’ll start with the basic framework and dive in wherever folks want. Also – if you join us for the meetup, I’ll share the code behind all of this.
Basic Technologies:

Docker – separate containers for UI and transcription service
Faster Whisper – does the transcription
Paragraph Detection – finds the best breaks
Summarization – does it hallucinate, you bet!
Flask – web server behind the UI
React – Typescript based UI
SocketIO – live updates between web server and UI
Pytest – making sure stuff works
Terraform – couldn’t do AWS without this
Stripe – how to get paid

Amazon Web Service Components:

AWS Container Registry
AWS CloudWatch
AWS Lambda
AWS S3
AWS Fargate
AWS SQS
AWS SES
AWS DynamoDB
AWS AIM

Also – the recordings for the last two sessions are now posted at https://hsv.ai/videos/

Links & Other Events:

2024 AI Symposium Recorded Sessions – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvvHQqQynqmtkQuLsvfFtmy0OohBcA5H4
2025 AI Symposium – https://www.rocketcenter.com/institute

Details:

Date – 12/04/2024
Time – 6-7:30pm
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81815701970?pwd=[REDACTED]
