Huntsville AI

Vibe Coding Tips and Tricks
2026-02-25 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Chicago) | 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

Built by Claude Code
2026-05-20 18:00 - 19:30 | CohesionForce, 101 Quality Circle, Suite 140, Huntsville, AL, 35806, United States
Good evening,
First off, please note that we will be meeting at CohesionForce this week. We’ll be using the door in the back of the building, so you probably want to park there. The address is below in the details list.
This week David and I will team up to present applications that we have built – nearly entirely with Claude Code.
From David – “Is it possible to create a fully functioning game in Unity3D entirely from user prompts in Claude Code?”. Based on what I have seen David show in the last few weeks, “everything” includes icons, sounds, game play – everything.
The project that I’ve been working on is more of a standard web-based stack (React over FastAPI) all hosted on AWS. The purpose of this project is to explore how available satellite data can be used to provide alerts for farmers based on certain defined events. My piece of the session will focus a bit more on what it is like to manage Claude Code compared with managing a staff of developers.

How the design is captured and presented
How the work is defined and tracked
What the COCOMO II software estimation model says it should have taken to build this instead of just kicking off Claude on the weekends.

Links: N/A
Details:

Date – 05/20/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – CohesionForce
Address – 101 Quality Circle, Suite 140, Huntsville, AL 35806
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/yjg-hqmr-nas

Future Video Frame Prediction
2026-05-27 18:00 - 19:30 | Deloitte, 3414 Governors Dr SW STE 220, Huntsville, AL, 35805
We will be meeting at Deloitte this week. The best way to park and get to the office is via the large parking lot on the west side of the building (across from Food City). You can enter the building from that side and head upstairs to the 2nd floor. The address is below in the details list.
This week we have Benjamin Robinson presenting his paper “A Mutually Exclusive 3D Convolution Based Time Dilation Framework for Future Frame Prediction in Video Streams of Natural Events” which was published in 2025 IEEE World AI IoT Congress.
The paper introduces a new deep learning framework designed to predict future frames in videos of natural processes. The system achieves this by looking at how objects change both in space (across the image) and over time (from frame to frame)—to inherently learn the underlying physical laws governing the scene.

Links:

Paper – https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11105342

Details:

Date – 05/27/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – Deloitte, Singing River Conference Room
Address – 3414 Governors Dr SW STE 220, Huntsville, AL 35805
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/das-ksve-vyj

Modal and AWS AI Frameworks
2026-06-03 18:00 - 19:30 | CohesionForce, 101 Quality Circle, Suite 140, Huntsville, AL, 35806, United States
This week we will have two smaller presentations between myself and Matt Brooks. We’ll meet up at CohesionForce again – so come in the back door to our large conference room.
My presentation will be on using Modal to host a serverless AI endpoint with nearly zero setup. The use case we’ll cover is to host a SAM2 model to automatically determine the boundary of a corn field.
Matt Brooks’ presentation introduces Amazon Bedrock and Bedrock AgentCore, AWS services for building and operating generative AI applications and autonomous agents. We will cover the core capabilities of each service, common use cases, and how AgentCore provides a serverless runtime for AI agents similar to how AWS Lambda provides a managed runtime for functions.

Links:

Modal – https://modal.com/
Amazon Bedrock – https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock
Bedrock AgentCore – https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/agentcore

Details:

Date – 06/03/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – CohesionForce, main conference room
Address – 101 Quality Circle, Suite 140, Huntsville, AL 35806
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/jpm-abxy-dvc

Casual AI Conversations
2026-06-10 17:30 - 19:30 | Stovehouse, 3414 Governors Dr SW, Huntsville, AL, 35805
This week we’re switching things up. Instead of a focused meetup with presentations, we’ll be having a casual AI discussion night.
Weather permitting, we’ll meet at Stovehouse common area on Wednesday night. David Showalter will be there from 5:30–7:30 PM to facilitate a few tables for the group, unless it’s absolutely storming.
Come on out, grab some food from the restaurant of your choice, and join the conversation. Talk through current AI news, share what you’re building, or just compare notes with the rest of the group. No agenda, no slides — just show up and dig in.
Details:

Date – 06/10/2026
Time – 5:30 – 7:30 pm
Location – Stovehouse
Address – 3414 Governors Dr SW, Huntsville, AL 35805

Virtual Paper Review - AI Agents, Graphs, and Tabletop Worlds
2026-06-17 18:00 - 20:00
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/yie-fbgk-juj

What would it take for an AI to be a useful assistant for a large tabletop campaign simulation? Not just a chatbot that vaguely remembers lore, but a system that knows which NPCs know which secrets, which factions are connected, which rumors came from which source pages, and which claims can actually be checked. That is our entry point for this month’s Virtual Paper Review. We will use a live tabletop campaign-world demo to introduce graph databases, ontologies, and evidence graphs, then connect those ideas to three recent papers on graph-backed AI agents.
Part I – Primer & Foundations

What graph databases are and why connected data matters
What an ontology is and why it is more than a schema diagram
How graph retrieval differs from normal RAG over text chunks
How evidence paths let an agent show its work instead of just citing something

Part II – Papers & Demo

SCOUT-RAG: agents walking graph neighborhoods for retrieval
Why Neighborhoods Matter: the difference between what an agent visited and what it cited
SHARP: checking graph claims against schema and source-grounded evidence
Live demo: Tabletop World Simulation

Links:

SCOUT-RAG: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08400
Why Neighborhoods Matter: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.15109
SHARP: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04190

Democratizing Health Data: Digital Signal Processing of PPG Signal
2026-06-24 18:00 - 19:30 | Deloitte, 3414 Governors Dr SW STE 220, Huntsville, AL, 35805
This week we will be in-person at Deloitte with Lorin Bales presenting.
This will be a deep dive into the engineering and life-saving potential of open-source Photoplethysmography (PPG) technology. This presentation explores how custom edge devices and applied machine learning can decode cardiovascular signals to prevent driver impairment, track pilot perfusion, and ultimately democratize health data for patients.
Related Links:

Kaggle Dataset: PPG Heart Beat for Cognitive Fatigue Prediction – https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/canaria/5-gamers
Pulse Sensor Official Site – Microcontroller Edge Device – https://pulsesensor.com
Adafruit QT Py ESP32 Pico – https://www.adafruit.com/product/5395

The best way to park and get to the Deloitte office is via the large parking lot on the west side of the building (across from Food City). You can enter the building from that side and head upstairs to the 2nd floor. The address is below in the details list.

Details:

Date – 06/24/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – Deloitte, Singing River Conference Room
Address – 3414 Governors Dr SW STE 220, Huntsville, AL 35805
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/rhp-nsmq-ckc

Unboxing a Robotic Ag Navigation Dataset
2026-07-01 18:00 - 19:30 | CohesionForce, 101 Quality Circle, Suite 140, Huntsville, AL, 35806, United States
July arrived earlier than expected! We’ll be over at CohesionForce this week to cover a dataset that is a great resource for training a visual navigation system. We may also have some time to cover the associated paper, which has references to previous work that is also a good trail to follow.
The paper is:
Cuaran, J., Baquero Velasquez, A. E., Valverde Gasparino, M., Uppalapati, N. K., Sivakumar, A. N., Wasserman, J., … & Chowdhary, G. (2023). Under-canopy dataset for advancing simultaneous localization and mapping in agricultural robotics. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 02783649231215372.
This dataset includes a lot of measurements from a TerraSentia robot as it was being manually driven. It also uses a lot of formats and other 3rd party libraries that I am not familiar with, but might be for those involved in the Robotic Operating System (ROS) community.
So if you know anything about the ZED SDK or Rosbag files, stop by and help us out!
Related Links:

TerraSentia Dataset Github – https://github.com/jrcuaranv/terrasentia-dataset
Link to the paper – https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375565255_Under-canopy_dataset_for_advancing_simultaneous_localization_and_mapping_in_agricultural_robotics

We will use the back door with direct access to the conference room, so please park around back.
Details:

Date – 07/01/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – CohesionForce main conference room
Address – 101 Quality Circle, Suite 140, Huntsville, AL 35806
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/xzc-vuef-esx

Virtual Paper Review - Visual Navigation Models
2026-07-08 18:00 - 19:30
This week we will meet VIRTUALLY to walk through the paper associated with the dataset that we unboxed last week. We’ll go through the results they found, and then we will check out a few of the models and their architecture.
The paper is:
Cuaran, J., Baquero Velasquez, A. E., Valverde Gasparino, M., Uppalapati, N. K., Sivakumar, A. N., Wasserman, J., … & Chowdhary, G. (2023). Under-canopy dataset for advancing simultaneous localization and mapping in agricultural robotics. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 02783649231215372.
We’ll take a look at the models in use when the dataset was created (2021) and then cover the newer models that have successfully decreased accuracy measurements and compute requirements.
Related Links:

Link to the paper – https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375565255_Under-canopy_dataset_for_advancing_simultaneous_localization_and_mapping_in_agricultural_robotics
ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM – https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.11898
VINS-Fusion: A General Optimization-based Framework for Local Odometry Estimation with Multiple Sensors – https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.03638
RTAB-Map: RTAB‐Map as an open‐source lidar and visual simultaneous localization and mapping library for large‐scale and long‐term online operation – https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06341

Details:

Date – 07/08/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/qxs-bmkq-yej

GenAI as Facade of Cognitive Extension
2026-07-22 18:00 - 19:30 | Deloitte, 3414 Governors Dr SW STE 220, Huntsville, AL, 35805
Next week we have the privilege of having Wes Winkler discuss his recent work on the intersection of Generative AI and Cognition.
From Wes:
We’ll cover:

How the use of language is a symbolic abstraction layer that sits between the environment and environmentally situated signals, boundaries, and skill based affordances.

How common AI implementation patterns reduce or eliminate systemic, sensory and signal feedback loops which undercuts the ability of individuals and organizations to develop and maintain affordance-based skills.

Implementation patterns that enable better sensory integration, cross-domain knowledge transfer, and skill maintenance when designing AI solutions.

Related Links:

Link to the paper – https://metanoiasystems.org/papers/genai-as-facade-of-cognitive-extension

The best way to park and get to the Deloitte office is via the large parking lot on the west side of the building (across from Food City). You can enter the building from that side and head upstairs to the 2nd floor. The address is below in the details list.

Details:

Date – 07/22/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – Deloitte, Singing River Conference Room
Address – 3414 Governors Dr SW STE 220, Huntsville, AL 35805
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/jsi-iozk-igs

Social at Yellohammer
2026-07-29 17:30 - 19:30 | Yellowhammer Brewing, 2600 Clinton Ave W, Huntsville, AL, 35805, United States
We’re getting together at Yellowhammer to connect and conversate about AI things.

OpenAI vs Hugging Face Play-by-Play
2026-08-05 18:00 - 19:30 | CohesionForce, 101 Quality Circle, Suite 140, Huntsville, AL, 35806, United States
This week we have Lorin Bales presenting a play-by-play of what occurred between OpenAI and Hugging Face last week.
In July 2026, an OpenAI model sat down to take a cybersecurity exam — and cheated.
Running with their safety controls deliberately switched off, the models were being tested on ExploitGym, a public benchmark measuring whether AI can turn software flaws into working attacks. Instead of solving it, they escaped the sealed test environment through its one permitted connection. The model spent four and a half days and roughly 17,600 actions breaking into Hugging Face’s production systems to steal it.
We’ll walk the timeline events, separate what’s confirmed from what’s still undisclosed, and look over how Hugging Face investigated with an open-weight model to complete the forensics.
Links:

“ExploitGym: Can AI Agents Turn Security Vulnerabilities into Real Attacks?” https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11086

Details:

Date – 08/05/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – CohesionForce, Inc
Address – 101 Quality Cir NW #140, Huntsville, AL 35806
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/emx-vbbb-fen

SMD Symposium Walk Through
2026-08-12 14:00 - 17:00 | Von Braun Center, 700 Monroe St SW, Huntsville, AL, 35801, United States

Building Artemis (our AI-powered Discord chatbot): Choosing an Agent Harness
2026-08-19 18:00 - 19:30 | Deloitte, 3414 Governors Dr SW STE 220, Huntsville, AL, 35805
Join us this week at Deloitte as Matt Brooks leads a hands-on session focused on building Artemis, our AI-powered Discord chatbot.
We’ll begin with an overview of the frameworks and agent harnesses that could power Artemis, including the Pi SDK, Codex SDK, OpenCode SDK, and Deep Agents SDK. We’ll look at the current state of the ecosystem and discuss what a harness provides and why we might want to use one.
From there, we’ll review the requirements for Artemis, make some key implementation decisions, and start building it together
Links:

Pi SDK – https://pi.dev/docs/latest/sdk
Codex SDK – https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/codex-sdk
OpenCode SDK – https://opencode.ai/docs/sdk/
Deep Agents SDK – https://docs.langchain.com/oss/python/deepagents/overview

The best way to park and get to the Deloitte office is via the large parking lot on the west side of the building (across from Food City). You can enter the building from that side and head upstairs to the 2nd floor. The address is below in the details list.

Details:

Date – 08/19/2026
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – Deloitte, Singing River Conference Room
Address – 3414 Governors Dr SW STE 220, Huntsville, AL 35805
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/shs-xmjd-acz
