Huntsville AI

Vector Storage with Weaviate
2024-06-26 18:00 - 19:00 (America/Chicago) | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
We’re going to add in a new topic to the NASA RAG series this week, so check below for some rearranging of the schedule. As always, if there is something that you would like to talk about (or have someone cover) – please let me know!
After a few rounds of iteration using ChromaDB for vector storage, it has become apparent that there are better options. While it is possible to run ChromaDB locally, it has too large of a footprint to run alongside the other components to develop a RAG prototype. I’ve spent a few hours replacing the ChromaDB integration with Weaviate, and I’m quite happy with the results.
In this session, we’ll cover everything you need to know to get started with Weaviate. There are several options that I’m not using for the NASA RAG, but may be relevant for other types of products that you may want to build.

Series:
Over the next several sessions, we will be diving deeper into separate components needed for RAG – hopefully resulting in a chat-based Q&A service for the NASA Technical Report Server. We were introduced to this data during our submission for the 2022 NASA SpaceApps Challenge – where we placed 2nd. Our submission was a semantic search based on the abstracts for the NSTR dataset of 10,000 papers.
Links:

Huntsville AI 2022 SpaceApps Submission – https://github.com/HSV-AI/spaceapps2022
https://weaviate.io/platform
https://github.com/weaviate/weaviate

Details:

Date – 06/26/2024
Time – 6-7pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89078627184?pwd=[REDACTED]

RAG Prompt Engineering
2024-07-10 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
If you have ever tried to prompt an LLM to give you what you want, you have probably run into some frustrating challenges. This frustration can range from trying to write what you want in pseudo-code to arguing with a child about putting their toys away.
This week we will focus on some guidelines for building successful prompts for a RAG system. There is a lot of art and craft associated, and the answer to most questions is “it depends”. To help understand this better, we will pull back the curtain and talk about WHY certain prompts are effective and what types of situations they may apply to.
I am learning more about this subject every day, so if you have prior experience or tips that I should include – please reply and I’ll add them to the talk.

Series:
Over the next several sessions, we will be diving deeper into separate components needed for RAG – hopefully resulting in a chat-based Q&A service for the NASA Technical Report Server. We were introduced to this data during our submission for the 2022 NASA SpaceApps Challenge – where we placed 2nd. Our submission was a semantic search based on the abstracts for the NSTR dataset of 10,000 papers.
Links:

Huntsville AI 2022 SpaceApps Submission – https://github.com/HSV-AI/spaceapps2022
OpenAI Discussion – https://community.openai.com/t/prompt-engineering-for-rag
Prompt Engineering Guide – https://www.promptingguide.ai/
OpenAI Cookbook – https://cookbook.openai.com/

Details:

Date – 07/10/2024
Time – 6-7pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82515370839?pwd=[REDACTED]

Private RAG Deployment & Cost
2024-07-24 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
We have been covering a series this year based on how a RAG works, and how to build one. Now it’s time to look at what it will cost to deploy it!
BLUF: If you have constraints that require you to host your own LLM instead of using services such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google – this is going to get expensive.
The baseline that we will be using to derive requirements and prices will be the a subset documents that we have been using along the way from NASA. To start, I have pulled 500 of these documents which total 109,516 paragraphs and 4,254,032 words.
We will start with a basic use case with using OpenAI GPT4o and a Weaviate hosted vector store. We will move from there to a self hosted solution for all of the components and add up the month cost associated.

Series:
Over the next several sessions, we will be diving deeper into separate components needed for RAG – hopefully resulting in a chat-based Q&A service for the NASA Technical Report Server. We were introduced to this data during our submission for the 2022 NASA SpaceApps Challenge – where we placed 2nd. Our submission was a semantic search based on the abstracts for the NSTR dataset of 10,000 papers.
Links:

Huntsville AI 2022 SpaceApps Submission – https://github.com/HSV-AI/spaceapps2022

Details:

Date – 07/24/2024
Time – 6-7pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84452278503?pwd=[REDACTED]

SMD Symposium Roundup
2024-08-07 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806

2024 SBIR Topics Round 3
2024-08-21 18:00 - 19:00 | AL
This week we will cover the last round of DoD SBIR Topics that are scheduled to be released on Wednesday. This is always a good checkpoint to see what areas of AI that DoD organizations are interested in.
The last time we covered SBIR topics, there were several on the call that were new to this approach of funding research. If you are also in this boat – here’s a good resource from SBIR.gov that covers the basics: https://www.sbir.gov/about
You can think of it as seed funding, with the initial round being somewhere around $100k for a 6 month effort, followed by a potential $2M project for 2 years. Each agency and topic may have a different funding allotment, so be sure and check the details of any topic that you are interested in.
Our normal approach is to use the topic search provided here – https://www.dodsbirsttr.mil/topics-app/ but this time we will also see what happens if we ask a LLM to analyze the topics for us.

Links:

SBIR Topics and Topic Search – https://www.dodsbirsttr.mil/topics-app/
Previous SBIR Awards – https://www.sbir.gov/awards

Details:

Date – 08/21/2024
Time – 6-7pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86939079628?pwd=[REDACTED]

PRE-RELEASE: August 21, 2024
OPEN: September 18, 2024
CLOSE: October 16, 2024

Faster Whisper for Audio Transcription
2024-09-11 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we will cover the Faster Whisper library. It is similar to the approach used by llama.cpp and provides a much smaller footprint and faster execution times than the OpenAI Whisper library.
We will also walk through the approach for using this library within an AWS Lambda function, along with tips and tricks for deploying in a docker container.
Also – I’ll be joining the Hsv.py meetup on September 19 to talk about Llama-cpp-python if you would like to join us next week as well. More information in the links below.

Links:

Faster Whisper – https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper
AWS Lambda Limitations – https://blog.awsfundamentals.com/lambda-limitations
HSV.py meetup – https://www.meetup.com/hsv-py/events/302429808/

Details:

Date – 09/11/2024
Time – 6-7pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86564069248?pwd=[REDACTED]

Pixtral Model by Mistral AI
2024-09-25 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
We will cover the Pixtral multimodal model released by Mistral AI last week. Hopefully we can get it loaded up in Le Chat (French ChatGPT?) and kick the tires on it a bit. From what I am hearing from some of our group, it’s definitely something to look into.
From the Mistral announcement:

Natively multimodal, trained with interleaved image and text data
Strong performance on multimodal tasks, excels in instruction following
Maintains state-of-the-art performance on text-only benchmarks
Architecture:

New 400M parameter vision encoder trained from scratch
12B parameter multimodal decoder based on Mistral Nemo
Supports variable image sizes and aspect ratios
Supports multiple images in the long context window of 128k tokens

Use:

License: Apache 2.0
Try it on La Plateforme or on Le Chat

Links:

Pixtral – https://mistral.ai/news/pixtral-12b/
Le Chat – https://mistral.ai/news/le-chat-mistral/
HuggingFace – https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Pixtral-12B-2409

Details:

Date – 09/25/2024
Time – 6-7pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81091066071?pwd=[REDACTED]

vLLM, New SBIR Topics, Helene Response
2024-10-09 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
We have a few topics that we will cover this week, led by Josh Phillips (vLLM) and Gary Turner (Helene Response). We will also cover the list of AI related SBIR topics that were released last week.
vLLM
In this session, we will demonstrate how easy it is to deploy vLLM on RunPod using an A40 GPU instance (approximately $0.40 per hour for 48GB of VRAM). We will be deploying the new LLama 3.2 11B vision model to showcase vLLM’s deployment simplicity and performance capabilities in a cost-effective environment. This hands-on example will provide practical insights into getting started with vLLM and show the real-world benefits of using a platform like RunPod for efficient model serving.
Hurricane Helene Response
Gary and I have been having a running conversation about the chaotic response in the Eastern TN and Western NC mountains. This will be a short brainstorming session to see if there’s anything we can do to assist.
SBIR/STTR
According to the announcement on the DoD SBIR/STTR website: “New DoD SBIR & STTR topics will be released on the first Wednesday of every month.” To align with this schedule, we will stop planning our normal sessions specific to SBIR and cover new topics as they come in. From the list of topics that dropped last week, the AI related topics are:

AF244-0001: Interactive Knowledge Graphs for Situational Awareness
AF244-0004: Securing Legacies: Developing an AI-Enhanced Privacy Architecture for Military Family Knowledge Systems
AF244-D002: Automated Correction of Optical Distortions in Canopy Transparencies
AF244-D006: Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Design Rule Checker
AF244-D016: Develop next-generation autonomous tracking
OSD254-P001: Generative AI BAA Open Topic

Links:

vLLM – https://docs.vllm.ai/en/latest/
RunPod – https://www.runpod.io/

Details:

Date – 10/09/2024
Time – 6-7pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89843812772?pwd=[REDACTED]

Fall Social
2024-10-23 18:00 - 19:30 | Stovehouse, 3414 Governors Dr SW, Huntsville, AL, 35805
Our next meetup with be a social at Stovehouse, where we can get to know each other a bit better. We had a large group last week and it’s difficult to catch up and learn what everyone is doing with AI in such a short period of time.
If you’re new to the group, or haven’t been to a meetup, this is a great way to get involved and see who is doing fun things with AI.
From last week – the video is posted along with a transcript – see the Links below. It’s always interesting to see what the transcription engine does with terms in a southern accent. This time it’s “BLLM” instead of “vLLM”.
In other news – there is a “Huntsville AI and Machine Learning Technology Exchange and Expo” coming up on November 13 at the Westin Hotel. While it’s not affiliated with this group, it is a really good conference with good speakers. It’s free to go, and if you would like to register as part of Huntsville AI, let me know and I can get you the name & address to use. You should be able to register personally for free as well.
Links:

vLLM, SBIR Topics, Helene Response – https://hsv.ai/2024/10/09/vllm-sbir-topics-helene-response/
Huntsville AI and Machine Learning Technology Exchange and Expo – https://meetingsevents.reg.ext.hpe.com/event/0144e3b2-0951-4eea-b9a9-21be49da3441/summary

Structured Outputs with Finite State Machines & Open Source Speech to Speech
2024-11-06 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
We have two guest speakers this week, Josh Phillips & Charlie Rogers! Josh has covered a few topics for us in the past, but this will be Charlie’s first time presenting for us, so please come and engage.
Topic 1 (Josh Phillips) : Structured Outputs with Finite State Machines
Discover how the integration of finite state machines with guided decoding can significantly enhance the stability and reliability of Large Language Models’ inference processes. In this session, you will delve into the intricacies of structured generation, learning how it not only ensures strict adherence to desired formats but also accelerates processing speeds by up to five times.
Experience firsthand demonstrations of various pipelines transitioning from unstructured to structured outputs, illustrating the ease and effectiveness of implementation. Join us to unlock advanced techniques that optimize both the performance and consistency of your language models.
Topic 2 (Charlie Rogers) : Let’s Talk It Out : Open Source Speech to Speech (S2S)
Dive into the world of open-source speech-to-speech systems and discover how to build efficient pipelines from scratch. Learn about the modular approach, explore user-friendly tools, and learn from Charlie’s experience with automating client-server architectures using RunPod. Ideal for developers and researchers looking to advance their speech processing projects.
2025 AI Symposium:
We should also have representatives from the Space & Rocket Center AI Symposium stop by to give an introduction to the symposium for next year. Last year was a lot of fun, and this year appears to be even bigger. I’ll drop a link to last years sessions below.

Links & Other Events:

2024 AI Symposium Recorded Sessions – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvvHQqQynqmtkQuLsvfFtmy0OohBcA5H4
2025 AI Symposium – https://www.rocketcenter.com/institute
Huntsville AI and Machine Learning Technology Exchange and Expo – https://meetingsevents.reg.ext.hpe.com/event/0144e3b2-0951-4eea-b9a9-21be49da3441/summary
AI Innovators of Huntsville (Andrey’s group) at GigaParts –https://events.gigaparts.com/events/gigapartshuntsville/1422131

Details:

Date – 11/06/2024
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85119272393?pwd=[REDACTED]

We had a fantastic turnout for the social, and it was great to meet a lot of new people coming from different backgrounds. Thanks to Phillip Lee with ISSA for boosting our exposure with the local cyber community!
As always, I really appreciate the support and replies to these emails. You can also help by following, sharing, liking, and dropping comments on my posts on LinkedIn and Facebook – especially the ones directly for the Huntsville AI page on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/huntsville-ai
Hope to see you soon!
-J.

Overview of Text to Speech Approaches
2024-11-20 18:00 - 19:00 | AL
Thanks to Josh Phillips for hosting last week while I was out! I should have the recording up soon at https://hsv.ai/videos/
This week we will take a look at Speech to Text models in three different categories:

Products that create audio from text in an offline mode
APIs that can be integrated into a product
Open source models that you can host

Each of these presents different challenges that we’ll cover such as latency, realism, and hallucination. Here’s the list of products and models so far, so if you don’t see your favorite in the list, let me know and we’ll check it out as well:

Parler
Coqui
Bark
OpenAI (6 models)
BASE TTS (Amazon)
MetaVoice
MeloTTS
ElevenLabs
Facebook MMS

Also – a few of us went to the Huntsville AI and Machine Learning Technology Exchange and Expo last week, so we might do an overview of those topics if time permits.

Links & Other Events:

2024 AI Symposium Recorded Sessions – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvvHQqQynqmtkQuLsvfFtmy0OohBcA5H4
2025 AI Symposium – https://www.rocketcenter.com/institute
Hugging Face Text to Speech – https://huggingface.co/tasks/text-to-speech

Details:

Date – 11/20/2024
Time – 6-7:30pm
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89971705398?pwd=[REDACTED]

As always, I really appreciate the support and replies to these emails. You can also help by following, sharing, liking, and dropping comments on my posts on LinkedIn and Facebook – especially the ones directly for the Huntsville AI page on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/huntsville-ai

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]

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]

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

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

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]

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]

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]

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

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]

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]

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

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]

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]

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]

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
