Huntsville AI

Agent Workshops Preview
2026-01-07 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Chicago) | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
We made it to 2026! Believe it or not, this begins the 9th year of Huntsville AI.
Here’s a quick recap of 2025 for Huntsville AI, with a full report linked below:

LinkedIn – Follower count doubled during 2025. Thanks for sharing, commenting, liking our posts and events!
Newsletter – subscribers increased 40% over 2025. Usually see a ~40% to ~50% open rate.
Meetups – 25 meetups with 8 speakers.
Paper Reviews – 11 sessions with in-depth paper reviews
Community Support – 12 sessions supporting various other organizations in the Huntsville area.

This Week:
We will preview some of the material that will be presented for workshops at the Space & Rocket AI Symposium later this month. For those that can’t make it to the symposium, this will be an opportunity to get an advance look, and also help presenters clarify or expand on any unclear information. I believe that 6 speakers are regular attenders of our meetups, with another 3 or 4 also on this mailing list – so we will be well represented at the Symposium.
We’ll start with my workshop – “Workshop: Building Your First AI Agents”. This will be based around the “Agent Playground” repository linked below. It’s a mix of python source code and Jupyter Notebooks intended to be run in Google Colab to provide a hands-on developer experience.
Josh will expand on his presentation with Git Worktrees and Agent Skills : Two topic additions to the content we covered in our Structured Agentic Software Engineering session. We will be covering how to utilize Git Worktrees to effectively partition parallel agent workloads and the new “Skills” open standard introduced by Anthropic for packaging compartmentalized capabilities that go beyond basic prompting.

Links:

2025 Year End Report – https://github.com/HSV-AI/presentations/blob/master/2025/251217-Year-in-Review.md
Agent Playground Repository – https://github.com/HSV-AI/agent-playground
Structured Agentic Software Engineering – Paper Review video – https://hsv.ai/2025/10/08/structured-agentic-software-engineering/
Structured Agentic Software Engineering – Meetup video – https://hsv.ai/2025/11/05/structured-agentic-software-engineering-round-2/

Details:

Date – 01/07/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/dmn-xmrt-bjs

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

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#

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]

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]

Virtual Paper Review
2025-11-12 18:00 - 19:00 | 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#

SW Engineering with AI Agents
2025-11-05 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
Join us as Josh Phillips leads the discussion and demonstration of SW Engineering with AI Agents. Prompting LLMs is one thing. Building reliable AI-assisted engineering workflows is another. This session covers a practical demonstration of several recent papers we’ve covered in our virtual paper review series to demonstrate a complete agentic engineering workbench.
Live demonstration featuring:

Arize Phoenix for observability,
Pydantic-AI for agent framework,
Playwright MCP for tool integration,
Claude Code and Codex for IDE integration,
A2A agent implementation

Interactive session with Q&A throughout. We’ll discuss implementation decisions and explore how these systems integrate in practice. GitHub repository with quickstart instructions provided – clone and adapt it to build your own workbench.

Details:

Date – 11/05/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88200172772?pwd=[REDACTED]

Congressional Office of International Leadership
2025-11-04 09:00 - 12:00 | AL
AI Discussion supporting the Congressional Office of International Leadership. There is a group of 6 from Latvia here as part of this program. The normal agenda has been greatly affected by the government shutdown (no NASA, etc), so they asked if I can talk about AI. The plan is to talk about AI, innovation, community, entrepreneurship, etc.

Fall Social
2025-10-15 17:30 - 20:00 | Stovehouse, 3414 Governors Dr SW, Huntsville, AL, 35805
It’s time (and finally cool enough) for our Fall Social! Come join us at Stovehouse after work on Wednesday and get to know the group. This is always a great way to get introduced to others in the group. I’ll try go grab a few tables by Pourhouse – probably as close to 5pm as I can leave work 🙂
Also – for those of you affected by the shutdown – We hope you’re doing well. If you are looking for some resources to pick up some new skills or techniques, let me know. Here’s a quick post from Anthropic on Context Engineering:
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/effective-context-engineering-for-ai-agents
There’s also a free virtual event all day tomorrow – International Day of Women in Statistics and Data Science – that has a very wide selection of topics. It’s also a global conference covering a full 24 hour period. https://www.idwsds.org/

Details:

Date – 10/15/2025
Time – 5:30 – 8:00 pm
Location – Stovehouse
Address – 3414 Governors Dr SW, Huntsville 35805

Virtual Paper Review - Structured Agentic Software Engineering
2025-10-08 18:00 - 19:30 | AL
Join us virtually this Wednesday at 6 pm to continue our monthly Paper Review series!
We’ll unpack how “SE 3.0” organizes human–AI teamwork so outcomes are traceable and reviewable. The paper proposes two coordinated workspaces and a set of lightweight scripts that turn vague tasks into auditable, versioned work.
Part I – Foundations

Why SE 3.0: from code suggestions to goal-driven engineering
Two workbenches explained: ACE (people) and AEE (agents)
Core scripts summarized: BriefingScript, LoopScript, MentorScript
What “merge-readiness” means as evidence, not opinion

Part II – Deep Dive

End-to-end flow: ticket → scripts → agent runs → evidence → decision
Consultation Request Packs (when agents ask for human guidance)
Merge-Readiness Packs (what evidence reviewers actually need)
Open research lanes: briefing quality, loop design, tooling, governance, teaming

NOTE – We are moving from Zoom to Google Meet this week for a trial run. 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:

Main Paper: Agentic Software Engineering: Foundational Pillars and a Research Roadmap — https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06216

Details:

Date – 10/08/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/tuq-utxh-riq
Dial in:‪(US) +1 260-344-4610‬ PIN: ‪207 448 030‬#

AI Workloads with Runpod
2025-10-01 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
I have just completed moving nearly all of transcribe.hsv.ai off of an AWS stack and over to a Runpod backend with the web ui hosted with DigitalOcean. The cost of AWS had been incrementally increasing over the years, and we’ll take a look at what the residual hosting costs were when I shut it down.
This session will cover the types of serverless hosting (along with cost) provided by Runpod and discuss both the asynchronous and streaming versions of hosting.
Depending on who is available at the session (I’m no expert!) – we will also talk about securing workloads that are running on non-traditional hosts.
So far, the transition from AWS Fargate / Lambda has been super easy since I was using Docker images for both and the signature of the handling function is similar.
Feedback Request:
Also – I could use your feedback on how to best communicate sessions that are open to the community versus sessions that we do in support of other organizations. Those are often open if people want to attend but not always. The best idea I have so far is to put “Supporting – ” before the event name. Scroll down to the Upcoming Schedule to see what this looks like.

Links & Other Resources:

Serverless Documentation – https://docs.runpod.io/serverless/overview

Details:

Date – 10/01/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86596678663?pwd=[REDACTED]

Lightning Talks
2025-09-17 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
We’ll have several of our folks give short talks about what they are working on or learning.

Virtual Paper Review: Occupational Implications of Generative AI
2025-09-10 18:00 - 19:30 | AL
Join us virtually this Wednesday at 6 pm to continue our monthly Paper Review series! We will walk through a recent paper from Microsoft titled “Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI”. This paper uses Microsoft’s unique position to analyze 200,000 anonymized conversations with Microsoft Bing Copilot (now Microsoft Copilot) from U.S. users in 2024.
The basic premise of the paper is to evaluate how much Generative AI use overlaps with different occupations.
More specifically, we will look at:

Dual Role Analysis: User Goals vs. AI Actions
The paper distinguishes between the tasks users want AI to help with and what the AI actually does, enabling a nuanced view of augmentation versus automation.
AI Applicability Score Framework
By integrating coverage, success, and scope metrics into an applicability score, the study provides a quantitative, occupation-level measure of AI relevance that aligns well with theoretical models.
Socioeconomic Insights & Cautions on Impact Interpretation
The correlation with predicted models, modest wage/education effects, and the historical perspective on economic consequences underscore both the promise and the uncertainty of AI’s real-world occupational effects.

Links:

Paper – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07935

Details:

Date – 9/10/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81918891827?pwd=[REDACTED]

Midjourney - Beginner to Expert
2025-09-03 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
Join us this week to learn how to get the most of out Midjourney! David Showalter will be leading this session, drawing on his experience with more than 75,000 prompts. David has used Midjourney for personal creativity and exploration, concept art for work projects and presentations, and a few finished images for work.
This session will be a live demo covering the journey from getting started as a beginner to expert level tips for image and video creation:

Signup and Costs
General prompt structure
Overview of settings and commands
Personalization and mood boards
Editing and Retexturing
Video
Auto-prompt generation using other AI

Links & Other Resources:

Midjourney – https://www.midjourney.com/home
Documentation and Guides – https://docs.midjourney.com/hc/en-us/categories/32013335627533-Documentation
Midjourney TV – https://www.midjourney.tv/
v7 SREF Catalog – https://www.playbook.com/s/cqdesigns/new-v7-sref-mining

Details:

Date – 9/03/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88395736080?pwd=[REDACTED]

Group Project Roundup
2025-08-20 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we are back at HudsonAlpha to talk about group projects. There are a few projects that we’ve worked in the past that I’ll bring up again to evaluate new possibilities due to advances in LLMs.
There are some other projects that folks in the community have been talking about, so we’ll see if we can get a few people to present some ideas for those as well. We can also take a look to see if there are any running competitions that we might be interested in.
With the time left, we’ll cover my recent experience with moving the transcription service from AWS Fargate, over to AWS Lambda, and then to Runpod.io. Also – as you can tell from the session schedule toward the bottom of the email, we need to come up with some additional topics to cover.

Links & Other Resources:

Bug Analysis project (a.k.a NLP before LLMs) – https://github.com/HSV-AI/bug-analysis
Product Recommendation – https://github.com/HSV-AI/product-recommendation
Hackathon Starter Kit – https://github.com/HSV-AI/hackathon-starterkit

Details:

Date – 8/20/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89675917660?pwd=[REDACTED]

Virtual Paper Review - Agentic Memory for Autonomous Debugging
2025-08-13 18:00 - 19:30 | AL
Join us virtually this Wednesday at 6 pm to continue our monthly Paper Review series! We will examine SWE-Exp, a study that equips code-repair agents with an “experience bank”, a persistent memory that turns isolated fixes into reusable knowledge.
As usual we will split up the review into two segments. In the first half we will cover foundations for understanding the paper content and in the second we will cover the paper content in detail.
Foundations

Why long-horizon bug fixes outgrow any context window
How agent trajectories can be converted into memories
Storage choices for experience banks: vector DBs, pruning, and versioning

Paper walkthrough & live prototype

Instructor–Assistant roles and where memory is injected during MCTS search
Live demo: spin up a minimal SWE-Exp prototype, index two sample fixes, and watch the agent retrieve and apply them in real time
Open questions: memory freshness, cross-repo generalization, and maintenance workflows

Links:

Paper – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23361

Details:

Date – 8/13/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88233490506?pwd=[REDACTED]

SMD Field Trip
2025-08-06 15:00 - 17:00 | 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]
