Huntsville AI

Choosing an Embedding Model
2024-04-17 18:00 - 19:00 (America/Chicago) | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
We have Josh Phillips presenting this week, so you don’t want to miss this!
Join us as we explore the crucial task of selecting optimal embedding models to enhance AI performance across a variety of applications. This meetup will delve into the Multilingual Transferable Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), a pivotal resource providing a comprehensive framework to evaluate embedding models over diverse task categories and numerous languages. The selection of the right embedding model is vital, yet challenging due to the myriad of options and their inherent trade-offs.
This presentation will not only introduce you to MTEB’s holistic approach across eight core NLP tasks but will also guide you through the practical steps of identifying, shortlisting, and benchmarking models to find the best fit for your specific needs.
Agenda:

Introduction to Embedding Models – Gain insights into why choosing the right model is critical for AI tasks.
Overview of MTEB – Understand the framework of the Multilingual Transferable Embedding Benchmark and its application across 100+ languages.
Deep Dive into MTEB Tasks – Explore the eight fundamental tasks within MTEB, including bitext mining, classification, clustering, and more.
Case Studies – Walk through real-world use cases, demonstrating how to apply MTEB in selecting models for tasks such as walking path recommendations, form filling automation, and building a documentation assistant.

Series:
Over the next several sessions, we will be diving deeper into separate components needed for RAG – hopefully resulting in a chat-based Q&A service for the NASA Technical Report Server. We were introduced to this data during our submission for the 2022 NASA SpaceApps Challenge – where we placed 2nd. Our submission was a semantic search based on the abstracts for the NSTR dataset of 10,000 papers.
I hope to have the video from our last session posted today. You can check for updates at https://hsv.ai/videos
Links:

Multilingual Transferable Embedding Benchmark (MTEB)
MTEB Github
MTEB Paper
Huntsville AI 2022 SpaceApps Submission – https://github.com/HSV-AI/spaceapps2022

Details:

Date – 04/17/2024
Time – 6-7pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81626946368?pwd=[REDACTED]

Document Chunks with LLM Sherpa
2024-04-03 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
Continuing our discussion about Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), this week we will incorporate LLM Sherpa to provide chunks of text from PDF documents that have been retrieved from the NASA archive.
Our initial attempt used PyPDF2 to read text from the PDF documents. It was very slow and provided limited strings of text that did not match the paragraphs in the documents. We’ll take a look back at what was available at the time, and then look through the LLM Sherpa API and see what it looks like with that piece incorporated.
As we get further into this project update, it has become apparent for the need to split the monolithic application into components that can be hosted and updated separately. We will go through what has been done so far to containerize both the ChromaDB vector database and the LLM Sherpa for chunking.

Vector Store with ChromaDB
2024-03-20 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
Continuing our discussion about Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), this week we will incorporate ChromaDB as the storage and query mechanism for the embeddings. Our initial SpaceApps submission held all of the embeddings in memory and used a cosine similarity metric for queries. We will go through the ChromaDB API and design decisions required to replace the custom approach with a more robust solution.
The initial work for converting this is posted in the SpaceApps repo linked below if you want to check it out early. Also – I double-checked our availability at HudsonAlpha, so we are set for an in-person meetup if you can make it.
Series:
Over the next several sessions, we will be diving deeper into separate components needed for RAG – hopefully resulting in a chat-based Q&A service for the NASA Technical Report Server. We were introduced to this data during our submission for the 2022 NASA SpaceApps Challenge – where we placed 2nd. Our submission was a semantic search based on the abstracts for the NSTR dataset of 10,000 papers.
I hope to have the video from our last session posted today. You can check for updates at https://hsv.ai/videos
Links:

Chroma DB – https://github.com/chroma-core/chroma
RAG Paper – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.11401.pdf
Huntsville AI 2022 SpaceApps Submission – https://github.com/HSV-AI/spaceapps2022

Details:

Date – 03/20/2024
Time – 6-7pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81139026249?pwd=[REDACTED]

Retrieval Augmented Generation
2024-03-06 18:00 - 19:00 | AL
This week we will be talking about Retrieval Augmented Generation – also known as RAG. The basic premise is to use an existing LLM to generate content based on an existing collection of documents. This removes the need to fine-tune an LLM, which is cost prohibitive and hardware constrained.
Over the next several sessions, we will be diving deeper into separate components needed for RAG – hopefully resulting in a chat-based Q&A service for the NASA Technical Report Server. We were introduced to this data during our submission for the 2022 NASA SpaceApps Challenge – where we placed 2nd. Our submission was a semantic search based on the abstracts for the NSTR dataset of 10,000 papers.
For this session, we will cover an overview of RAG as well as walk through the submission from the challenge. I have recently updated it to work with current versions of the dependent libraries – so we can demonstrate the starting point for this project.
Also – if you missed last week’s session on AI & Video – you can find the recording here – https://hsv.ai/2024/02/22/ai-breakthroughs-in-video/
Links:

RAG Paper – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.11401.pdf
Huntsville AI 2022 SpaceApps Submission – https://github.com/HSV-AI/spaceapps2022

Details:

Date – 03/06/2024
Time – 6-7pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82845221441?pwd=[REDACTED]

Hope to see you soon!
-J.

HudsonAlpha Tech Challenge
2024-03-01 18:00 - 2024-03-03 18:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This is a placeholder for the HudsonAlpha Tech Challenge. We usually support this event with mentors and/or teams to compete.

AI Breakthroughs in Video
2024-02-21 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we will be talking about some exciting breakthroughs in video generation and understanding. The main splash was with OpenAI’s announcement of Sora last week, but there have also been similar releases and updates from Google, Apple, and UC Berkeley. There’s a description of each below if you want to read ahead. It will be impossible to cover all of these papers in an hour, so let me know if you want to do a deeper dive into these at a later meetup.
February 15 – OpenAI Sora – “Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.” There is no paper linked to the release, but the post on OpenAI that covers the technical details is really good.

https://openai.com/sora
https://openai.com/research/video-generation-models-as-world-simulators

February 13 – UC Berkely – Large World Model – this is a multi-model (text and video) model capable of processing 1M tokens. It can generate images and videos as well as describe the content of videos or answer questions about what happened in a video.

https://largeworldmodel.github.io/
https://huggingface.co/LargeWorldModel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08268

February 8 – Apple KeyFramer – “A design tool for animating static images (SVGs) with natural language”. This isn’t necessarily a video tool, but generates CSS code to animate an SVG.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06071
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/14/24072917/apple-keyframer-ai-animation-tool-2d-images-text-descriptions

January 23 – Google Lumiere – Text to Video, Image to Video, and Stylized Generation.

https://lumiere-video.github.io
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12945

October 31, 2023 – SEINE: Short-to-Long Video Diffusion Model for Generative Transition and Prediction – I’m not sure how to attribute this to a particular organization, since it appears that several Chinese universities contributed. While not quite as impressive as the other releases above, it shows a broader move to video generation.

https://vchitect.github.io/SEINE-project/
https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.20700
https://github.com/Vchitect/SEINE

Details:

Date – 02/21/2024
Time – 6-7pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81284789520?pwd=[REDACTED]

AI Challenges and Competitions
2024-02-07 18:00 - 19:00 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
AI Challenges and Competitions will be the subject of our next meetup on Feb 7th. We switched our meetups to the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays for the month of February. We will likely stick to this through May.
When we started Huntsville AI back in 2018, the primary avenue for challenges and competitions was Kaggle. This brought notoriety to several people (e.g. Jeremy Howard) and led to an approach for quickly iterating through several approaches to find the model or data manipulation that best fit the problem.
The landscape for challenges and competitions is now much different, with many requiring a significant resource investment in hardware to be able to compete. We’ll take a look at several organizations that manage these competitions and walk through a few open competitions to discuss.
Links:

Challenge.gov
Kaggle
Numer.ai
Driven Data
AI Crowd
ML Contests

Details:

Date – 02/07/2024
Time – 6-7pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom –https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88417365505?pwd=[REDACTED]

HudsonAlpha Tech Challenge (HATCH) will be March 1-3 this year. They are not doing sessions specific to HATCH leading up to the event, so we will stick to our normal AI focused programming. If you would like to sign up as a tech mentor, there are still a lot of slots available. Sign up on their Sign-up Genius Form.
Huntsville AI Task Force is an effort by the City of Huntsville to put together a group of people to evaluate the impact of AI on Huntsville’s workforce and provide guidance to shape future efforts from the city. I was invited to participate and will be flowing information and questions to you. So far, there are members of this task force from the usual RSA folks (Army, FBI, NASA) along with HudsonAlpha, UAH, AAMU, Huntsville Hospital, Mazda Toyota, IBM, and Meta. There was a kickoff meeting on January 26, with the next meeting to follow at the end of this month.
Space and Rocket Center AI Symposium is happening on February 20-23. This might be of interest of you have the $450 to sign up for both days. If some of our folks can attend, maybe we can put together on overview to present afterward to help with our vision: “Our vision is a group of individuals and organizations in the metro Huntsville area who collaboratively advance the knowledge and application of artificial intelligence in ways that make it available to everyone and improve our quality of life.”
Topics for 2024 will be the end or our discussion on Wednesday. From the end of 2022 and all the way through 2023, there were ground-breaking announcements on a monthly basis that made it difficult to plan ahead. I feel like this may be settling down for a minute, so we should be able to get back to something more sensible. Take a look at what we have planned and completed in the past to see what’s already on the board. I have some scheduled based on SBIR topic releases, but I need your feedback for what other topics you would like to cover. You can reach the board on Github here: https://github.com/HSV-AI/presentations/projects/1
