Huntsville AI

Learning Quest - AI 101
2026-01-14 13:00 - 14:30 (America/Chicago) | 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.
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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
