AI Literacy & SamGeo
2026-01-21 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Chicago) | 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 | AL
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 | AL
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 | AL
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 | AL
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 | AL
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
