Huntsville AI

Virtual Paper Review
2025-11-12 18:00 - 19:00 (America/Chicago) | AL
Join us virtually this Wednesday at 6 pm to continue our monthly Paper Review series!
This week I’m teaming up with David Showalter to cover three papers in two different domains. The first will be David covering “Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models” to talk about whether or not LLMs can actually detect what they are “thinking”. If you’ve been in some of our sessions before, you may have participated in discussions about LLM output describing what it’s thinking. The question is whether this is based on anything realistic – or just another place where a model was trained to give us output that we find acceptable.
The second set of papers we’ll cover are focused on the occupational and economic impact of AI. I have been getting more and more questions about whether “AI is going to take our jobs”. Instead of answering the question directly, we’ll look at the best studies we can find that provide real data about what types of tasks can be automated by AI and what jobs may be at risk.
NOTE – The previous paper review using Google Meet went really well, so we’re going to continue that approach. I’ll be monitoring this email as we get started up, so please let me know if you have issues joining. You do not need a Google account to join, but I’m sure it will ask to use one if you have it.

Links:

Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models – https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introspection/index.html
Measuring the performance of our models on real-world tasks – https://openai.com/index/gdpval/
Anthropic Economic Index, Understanding AI’s effects on the economy – https://www.anthropic.com/economic-index

Details:

Date – 11/12/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/pqo-obmo-rkh
Dial in:‪(US) +1 573-343-8318‬ PIN: ‪687 416 010‬#

AI in Healthcare
2025-11-19 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we have another guest speaker – Jacquelyn Neal! She has helped me a lot this year with background information and insights for the UAH Doctoral Intensive that we supported in September, so it will be great for the group to hear from her directly.
“Let’s talk about AI in Healthcare – the opportunities, the challenges, and the ethics. We’ll look at a broad scope of where AI is being implemented in the healthcare system and biomedical research. We’ll also discuss the many challenges, including data collection, standardization, and privacy at scale.”

Details:

Date – 11/19/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87461791616?pwd=[REDACTED]

AI in Astrophotography
2025-12-03 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we have another guest speaker – Lorin Bales! She will be presenting “Astrophotography: Bringing nebula to light with AI” where we will learn about both astrophotography as well as how AI is used in the creation and processing of these images.
Links:

Atmospheric – https://astrospheric.com/
AstroBackyard – https://astrobackyard.com/

Details:

Date – 12/03/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88983675384?pwd=[REDACTED]

Virtual Paper Review - AI World Models
2025-12-10 18:00 - 19:30 | AL
Join us for our monthly virtual Paper Review as we explore the multifaceted world of World Models (WMs)! This session will utilize a recent survey paper to help explore a spectrum of uses for these models and connect them to some of the other topics we have covered in this series such as reasoning, multimodal embeddings, and diffusion transformers.
We will analyze the current state of world models, who are the big players, what are they doing? And where might they be taking us in 2026?
High Level Topics :

Conceptual Links: Connecting modern WMs to the psychological concept of Mental Models and engineering concepts like Digital Twins.
Representation & Recovery: Discussing Implicit Representation and World Model Recovery.
Future Predictions: An overview of prediction methodologies.
Decision-Making: Advances in Model-based Reinforcement Learning (state transition dynamics) and the integration of LLMs/MLLMs for planning and action generation.
World Knowledge: Categorizing the knowledge implicitly held within WMs: Global Physical World, Local Physical World (cognitive maps), and Human Society (Theory of Mind).
Generative Progress: The evolution from video generation (Sora) to fully Embodied Environments (Genie3 / Marble).
Critical Applications: Reviewing the requirements for WMs in areas such as Game, Embodied, Urban, and Societal Intelligence.
Open Research Lanes: Identifying key unsolved research challenges.

Links:

V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09985
LeJEPA: Provable and Scalable Self-Supervised Learning Without the Heuristics – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08544v3

Details:

Date – 12/10/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/bry-ruop-vpq
Dial in:‪ (US) +1 650-667-3474‬ PIN: ‪989 475 586‬#

2025 Year in Review
2025-12-17 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
It’s that time again!
We’ll get together this week to do a round-up of the topics that we covered this year and look at what’s coming up for 2026.

Details:

Date – 12/17/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/rny-scve-cic
