AI in Astrophotography
2025-12-03 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Chicago) | 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 | AL
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

Virtual Paper Review - AI Agent Benchmarks
2026-01-14 18:00 - 19:30 | AL
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#

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
