Huntsville AI

Fall Social
2025-10-15 17:30 - 20:00 (America/Chicago) | 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

Congressional Office of International Leadership
2025-11-04 09:00 - 12:00
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.

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]

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

Agent Workshops Preview
2026-01-07 18:00 - 19:30 | 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

Learning Quest - AI 101
2026-01-14 13:00 - 14:30 | Huntsville Madison County Library, 915 Monroe St, Huntsville, AL, 35801, United States
This session is supporting LearningQuest to provide an AI-101 class for its members.
Home

Virtual Paper Review - AI Agent Benchmarks
2026-01-14 18:00 - 19:30
For our first paper review of 2026, we will have Tom Plunkett lead us through papers that define benchmarks used to evaluate Agentic AI.
This will be an hour long deep dive into an Agentic AI benchmark, the Tau benchmark. We’ll start with the 2024 Tau Benchmark paper, then cover the 2025 Tau2 benchmark paper. Finally, we’ll take a look at the tau2 bench Github and using the tau2 benchmark with example agents from the Retail, Telecom, and Airline domains .

Links:

τ -bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains: Shunyu Yao, Noah Shinn, Pedram Razavi, Karthik Narasimhan https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12045
τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environment: Victor Barres, Honghua Dong, Soham Ray, Xujie Si, Karthik Narasimhan https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07982

Details:

Date – 01/14/2026
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/jfo-rrvd-aqv
Phone: ‪(US) +1 402-864-0236‬ PIN: ‪332 674 634‬#

Learning Quest #2 - AI 101
2026-01-21 13:00 - 14:30 | Huntsville Madison County Library, 915 Monroe St, Huntsville, AL, 35801, United States
This second session is supporting LearningQuest to provide an AI-101 class for its members.
lquest.org

AI Literacy & SamGeo
2026-01-21 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
Jacquelyn Neal is facilitating a workshop at Vanderbilt on AI literacy the first weekend of February. She will do a run through of a hands-on activity and get some feedback from the group.
We had a similar conversation about AI Literacy last week with the LearningQuest group. I presented a set of categories and asked for input. I could use the same input from this email distribution if you would like to reply.
AI Literacy Levels:

UNAWARE – people that use AI, but don’t know it. Email spam filters, product recommendations, voice assistants, map navigation, etc.
ADOPTED – people that use available AI tools as part of their daily life or job. Summarizing text, researching questions, planning, etc.
ADVANCED – people that are trying the latest and greatest advancements, possibly in new ways.

For the second half of the meetup, I will cover what I have been working with using satellite imagery, combined with Cropscape data to identify individual agriculture fields.

Links:

SamGeo – https://samgeo.gishub.org/
CropScape Data – https://nassgeodata.gmu.edu/CropScape/index.jsp?state=AL

Details:

Date – 01/21/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/mof-nhkk-jes

Supporting - 2026 AI Symposium
2026-01-27 00:00 - 2026-01-29 23:59 | Space & Rocket Center, 1 Tranquility Base, Huntsville, AL, 35805, United States
Several folks from Huntsville AI will be giving talks and workshops at the 2026 AI Symposium at the Space & Rocket Center
https://www.rocketcenter.com/2026-AI-Symposium/speakers

AI Symposium Recap
2026-02-04 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
We’re meeting this Wednesday at 6pm in the executive conference room at HudsonAlpha. The door is on the right as you walk up to the main entrance.
We’ll do a rundown of all of the sessions at the AI Symposium that we were able to cover. There were several slots where there were two sessions and one workshop all going at the same time, so it’s only possible to cover the entire schedule by dividing and conquering.
We’ll also capture comments that we can flow back to the organizers to prepare for next year.

Coming Up:
Next week we will have a virtual paper review led by Josh Phillips. We will be dissecting SAM 3 (Segment Anything Model 3), a unified model that bridges the gap between geometric segmentation (clicks and boxes) and semantic understanding (text and concepts). I’ll get more details out later this week.
There’s also a new monthly meetup at UAH I2C that Carl Holden (Zellus Marketing) and the ARC are starting. They are starting off with a demo of Lovable that should be interesting, as well as providing food & drinks. There is no cost for this meetup. More info at the cool Lovable site that Carl thew out there – https://ai-after-hours.lovable.app/

AI Huntsville Workforce Development Committee:
We met in January to start planning for the year and see how we can impact the workforce in the Huntsville area. The strategy that I’m advising here is that we find a way to measure the AI Literacy of the greater Huntsville workforce. Then we can put together a strategy to “move the needle” to drive adoption of AI tools that will make us more productive, while watching the risk of tasks being replaced by AI driven automation.
If you have thoughts in this direction, please let me know. We’re doing a working lunch this week to try to put together a session for March.

Links:

I was going to link to the SRC AI Symposium page, but I get an access denied 🙁

Details:

Date – 02/04/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha – Executive Conference Room
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/qbz-ehjb-qij

Virtual Paper Review – SegementAnything3: Segment Video with Text
2026-02-11 18:00 - 19:30
Join us virtually Wednesday Feb 11th at 6 pm CST to continue our monthly Paper Review series! We will be dissecting SAM 3 (Segment Anything Model 3), a unified model that bridges the gap between geometric segmentation (clicks and boxes) and semantic understanding (text and concepts). While previous versions excelled at “segmenting that thing,” SAM 3 introduces Promptable Concept Segmentation (PCS), the ability to find, segment, and track all instances of a specific concept (e.g., “striped cat” or “red apple”) across both images and videos.
Topics we will cover :

PVS vs. PCS: The evolution from Promptable Visual Segmentation (points/masks) to Promptable Concept Segmentation (noun phrases/exemplars).
Localization-Recognition Conflict: Why forcing a model to know “where” something is often conflicts with knowing “what” it is, and how open-vocabulary detection has historically struggled with this.
Data Engine Basics: The role of human-in-the-loop vs. model-in-the-loop pipelines for generating massive-scale segmentation datasets.
Architecture: How SAM 3 fuses an image-level DETR-based detector with a memory-based video tracker using a shared Perception Encoder (PE) backbone.
Presence Head: A look at the novel “presence token” that decouples recognition (is the concept in the image?) from localization (where are the pixels?)
SA-Co dataset (4M unique concepts).
Video Disambiguation: Strategies for handling temporal ambiguity, including “masklet” suppression and periodic re-prompting during tracking failures.

Links:

Paper:
https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/segment-anything-model-3-sam-3/
Code:
https://github.com/facebookresearch/sam3
Demo:
https://segment-anything.com

Details:

Date – 02/11/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/drf-dydt-mgn

Vibe Coding Tips and Tricks
2026-02-25 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
There have been a lot of recent advancements in both models and tools used for AI assisted coding. Some of these tools are more agentic, while others are still chat-based. There has also been a lot of movement by the big AI companies to either acquihire opensource projects or use other approaches to gain an advantage.
For this session, we will share our successes and failures with using these tools. I know that we will likely have folks in the room actively using Claude Code, Codex, Cline, OpenCode, and maybe a few others. If you would like to come and share your setup, that would be appreciated as well.
Here are some of the concepts that we will try to make sense of. Each tool seems to have its own set of terminology which may or may not overlap with others.

Prompts
Specs
Tasks
Skills
Agents
Hooks
Memory Bank

Hopefully we will come to some sort of collection of practices that others entering this phase of development can use as a starting point.

Links:

I don’t know what Zencoder is, but this is a pretty good intro for spec driven development – https://docs.zencoder.ai/user-guides/tutorials/spec-driven-development-guide

Details:

Date – 02/25/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha – Executive Conference Room
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/krb-aizx-fja

Intro to OpenClaw
2026-03-04 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week, we’ll attempt to cover OpenClaw. Some in the group have used it, but many of us haven’t had a chance – or may just be hesitant based on the potential for hazards. So this week will be a little more of an ad-hoc discussion. If you have used OpenClaw, we would love to hear about your experience.
OpenClaw is a free, open-source, self-hosted AI agent designed to act as a 24/7 digital employee rather than just a chatbot.
It can read/write files, run terminal commands, and control a web browser. You interact with it via apps you already use, such as Telegram, WhatsApp, or Discord, rather than a proprietary web portal. It remembers your preferences, past conversations, and long-term goals, evolving into a tailored assistant over time. It can be programmed to work while you sleep—monitoring GitHub repos, checking flights, or even conducting business outreach autonomously.

Links:

https://openclaw.ai/

Details:

Date – 03/04/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha – Executive Conference Room
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/xyk-amgy-ojt

Virtual Paper Review: AI Labor Market Impacts
2026-03-18 18:00 - 19:30
This week, we’ll cover a recent blog post by Anthropic: “Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence” and combine that with labor statistics from the Huntsville MSA. The Huntsville Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) in northern Alabama consists of Limestone and Madison counties, anchored by the city of Huntsville.
We will also look at the latest results for GDPval provided by the latest drops of GPT-5.4 and Sonnet 4.6.
My schedule for this week and last are very crazy, and there is a chance that I will be away from keyboard for this call. If that’s the case, we will dial in an have a discussion using the links below.
I also plan to present some personal findings with using the COCOMO II estimation model to reverse the SLOC and complexity of the Ag Tech project that I’m working with to show the estimated hours to build the same code that I’ve generated.

Links:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts
https://huggingface.co/datasets/Anthropic/EconomicIndex
https://www2.labor.alabama.gov/oes/OESTab.aspx
https://huggingface.co/datasets/openai/gdpval

Details:

Date – 03/18/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/oxb-khub-fid

AlphaFold 3
2026-03-25 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
Please join us for a discussion on how we study the shapes of biological molecules, leading up to the new AlphaFold 3 AI model from Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs. We will start by talking about the famous protein folding problem and how scientists used to figure out these shapes using older methods like X-ray crystallography and Ramachandran plots. From there, we will quickly review how the first AlphaFold and AlphaFold 2 models were built and why they were such a big deal for science.
Next, we will dive into what makes AlphaFold 3 a major step forward. While older versions mostly focused on proteins, this new model uses an updated design and a diffusion network to predict the 3D shapes of almost all of life’s molecules, including DNA, RNA, and drug molecules. It is much more accurate at showing how all these parts interact with each other.

Links:

https://deepmind.google/science/alphafold/
Nature Publication for AlphaFold 3
Github Repo for AlphaFold 3

Details:

Date – 03/25/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha – Executive Conference Room
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/fyi-oqjg-fiz

Spring Social
2026-04-01 17:30 - 20:00 | Back Forty Beer Company, 3254 Leeman Ferry Rd SW, Huntsville, AL, 35801, United States
Good evening!
It’s time for our Spring Social! The forecast looks like rain, so we’re going to get together at Back Forty Beer Company. There’s a lot of room inside, and they also have good food.

Virtual Paper Review - Gemma 4 & TurboQuant: Fitting New Models on Your Hardware
2026-04-15 18:00 - 19:30
Join us virtually this Wednesday at 6 pm to continue our monthly Paper Review series! Google released the Gemma 4 model family and TurboQuant KV cache compression about a week apart. We’ll look at what’s actually new in the architecture, how TurboQuant holds up against its claims, and walk through fitting these models across different hardware.
Part I – Foundations

KV cache: what it is and why it’s the bottleneck for long contexts
Per-Layer Embeddings: why half the parameters “don’t count”
Sliding window + global attention and the 5:1 hybrid layer approach
Quantization tradeoffs from fp16 down to sub-4-bit

Part II – Deep Dive

Gemma 4 architecture: what matters for local deployment
TurboQuant: the algorithm, the claims, and what implementations show
Live experiments across RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell, RTX 5090, A6000 Ampere, Mac M3 Pro
Fine-tuning with Unsloth/TRL on local hardware

Links:
Gemma 4 Model Card: https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/core/model_card_4
Gemma 4 HF Blog: https://huggingface.co/blog/gemma4
TurboQuant Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19874
Details:

Date – 04/15/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/acw-zrnm-akn

NVIDIA GTC and Hackathon Approach
2026-04-22 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we have Tom Plunkett reviewing his recent experience at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference and winning the associated hackathon. We will be in the Executive Conference Room this week.
Here’s the breakdown of what Tom plans to cover:

What I saw at the NVIDIA GTC conference in San Jose March 16-19.
Competing and Winning the GTC Hack to Create Hackathon with vibe coding, DGX GB10, OpenClaw, and other technologies.
Creating a first draft of a patent application using Gemini Pro 3.1 Preview and other AI technologies.
A high level examination of Databricks AI/ML Strategy

Previous Meetups:
I finally got the recordings posted from our last two meetups:

Gemma-4 and TurboQuant – https://hsv.ai/2026/04/15/gemma-4-turboquant/
AlphaFold 3 – https://hsv.ai/2026/03/25/alphafold-3/

I didn’t get the video started for AlphaFold at the very beginning, so it picks up about 5 minutes into the presentation from Alexa.

Links:

https://www.nvidia.com/gtc/ – many of the sessions are available to watch

Details:

Date – 04/22/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha – Executive Conference Room
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/gsv-zhtr-yah

Virtual Only - Training a Generally Curious Agent
2026-05-06 18:00 - 19:30
This event is going to be virtual only due to weather.
This week we have Sumaita Rahman presenting the paper “Training a Generally Curious Agent” that was previously presented at 2025 ICML.
The paper provides a fine-tuning method that improves AI agents’ ability to explore new environments by first exposing a language model to diverse simulated tasks and then using preference-based scoring to reinforce which strategies led to success. To maximize learning efficiency, it prioritizes tasks by their “learning potential,” forming a curriculum similar to how students progress through increasing difficulty. This encourages the model to develop general problem-solving strategies
We’ll be in the Executive Conference room again this week. You should be able to use the front door directly into the conference room.

Links:

https://icml.cc/virtual/2025/oral/47218 – abstract and video of the ICML presentation

Details:

Date – 05/06/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha – Executive Conference Room
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/oca-dckk-aso

Virtual Paper Review - Measuring Progress Toward AGI
2026-05-13 18:00 - 19:30
Place holder for a virtual paper review

Join us virtually next Wednesday for a focused discussion of two recent AI papers: Google DeepMind’s framework for measuring progress toward AGI and Stanford HAI’s AI Index Report 2026. We’ll look at how AGI is being defined, what the latest AI data actually shows, and what remains hard to measure.

Links:

Measuring Progress Toward AGI: A Cognitive Framework — Google DeepMind PDF
Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2026 — Stanford HAI

Details:

Date – 05/13/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/hrb-vfvr-roq
