Lightning Talks
2025-09-17 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Chicago) | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
We’ll have several of our folks give short talks about what they are working on or learning.

AI Workloads with Runpod
2025-10-01 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
I have just completed moving nearly all of transcribe.hsv.ai off of an AWS stack and over to a Runpod backend with the web ui hosted with DigitalOcean. The cost of AWS had been incrementally increasing over the years, and we’ll take a look at what the residual hosting costs were when I shut it down.
This session will cover the types of serverless hosting (along with cost) provided by Runpod and discuss both the asynchronous and streaming versions of hosting.
Depending on who is available at the session (I’m no expert!) – we will also talk about securing workloads that are running on non-traditional hosts.
So far, the transition from AWS Fargate / Lambda has been super easy since I was using Docker images for both and the signature of the handling function is similar.
Feedback Request:
Also – I could use your feedback on how to best communicate sessions that are open to the community versus sessions that we do in support of other organizations. Those are often open if people want to attend but not always. The best idea I have so far is to put “Supporting – ” before the event name. Scroll down to the Upcoming Schedule to see what this looks like.

Links & Other Resources:

Serverless Documentation – https://docs.runpod.io/serverless/overview

Details:

Date – 10/01/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86596678663?pwd=59DMLkfpF1jfWz9x9drUdwLRO6uTcZ.1

Virtual Paper Review - Structured Agentic Software Engineering
2025-10-08 18:00 - 19:30 | AL
Join us virtually this Wednesday at 6 pm to continue our monthly Paper Review series!
We’ll unpack how “SE 3.0” organizes human–AI teamwork so outcomes are traceable and reviewable. The paper proposes two coordinated workspaces and a set of lightweight scripts that turn vague tasks into auditable, versioned work.
Part I – Foundations

Why SE 3.0: from code suggestions to goal-driven engineering
Two workbenches explained: ACE (people) and AEE (agents)
Core scripts summarized: BriefingScript, LoopScript, MentorScript
What “merge-readiness” means as evidence, not opinion

Part II – Deep Dive

End-to-end flow: ticket → scripts → agent runs → evidence → decision
Consultation Request Packs (when agents ask for human guidance)
Merge-Readiness Packs (what evidence reviewers actually need)
Open research lanes: briefing quality, loop design, tooling, governance, teaming

NOTE – We are moving from Zoom to Google Meet this week for a trial run. I’ll be monitoring this email as we get started up, so please let me know if you have issues joining. You do not need a Google account to join, but I’m sure it will ask to use one if you have it.
Links:

Main Paper: Agentic Software Engineering: Foundational Pillars and a Research Roadmap — https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06216

Details:

Date – 10/08/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/tuq-utxh-riq
Dial in:‪(US) +1 260-344-4610‬ PIN: ‪207 448 030‬#

Fall Social
2025-10-15 17:30 - 20:00 | Stovehouse, 3414 Governors Dr SW, Huntsville, AL, 35805
It’s time (and finally cool enough) for our Fall Social! Come join us at Stovehouse after work on Wednesday and get to know the group. This is always a great way to get introduced to others in the group. I’ll try go grab a few tables by Pourhouse – probably as close to 5pm as I can leave work 🙂
Also – for those of you affected by the shutdown – We hope you’re doing well. If you are looking for some resources to pick up some new skills or techniques, let me know. Here’s a quick post from Anthropic on Context Engineering:
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/effective-context-engineering-for-ai-agents
There’s also a free virtual event all day tomorrow – International Day of Women in Statistics and Data Science – that has a very wide selection of topics. It’s also a global conference covering a full 24 hour period. https://www.idwsds.org/

Details:

Date – 10/15/2025
Time – 5:30 – 8:00 pm
Location – Stovehouse
Address – 3414 Governors Dr SW, Huntsville 35805

Congressional Office of International Leadership
2025-11-04 09:00 - 12:00 | AL
AI Discussion supporting the Congressional Office of International Leadership. There is a group of 6 from Latvia here as part of this program. The normal agenda has been greatly affected by the government shutdown (no NASA, etc), so they asked if I can talk about AI. The plan is to talk about AI, innovation, community, entrepreneurship, etc.

SW Engineering with AI Agents
2025-11-05 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
Join us as Josh Phillips leads the discussion and demonstration of SW Engineering with AI Agents. Prompting LLMs is one thing. Building reliable AI-assisted engineering workflows is another. This session covers a practical demonstration of several recent papers we’ve covered in our virtual paper review series to demonstrate a complete agentic engineering workbench.
Live demonstration featuring:

Arize Phoenix for observability,
Pydantic-AI for agent framework,
Playwright MCP for tool integration,
Claude Code and Codex for IDE integration,
A2A agent implementation

Interactive session with Q&A throughout. We’ll discuss implementation decisions and explore how these systems integrate in practice. GitHub repository with quickstart instructions provided – clone and adapt it to build your own workbench.

Details:

Date – 11/05/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88200172772?pwd=puBOnPGoe2aWV4gxLuIZDzwGanhUgF.1

Virtual Paper Review
2025-11-12 18:00 - 19:00 | AL
Join us virtually this Wednesday at 6 pm to continue our monthly Paper Review series!
This week I’m teaming up with David Showalter to cover three papers in two different domains. The first will be David covering “Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models” to talk about whether or not LLMs can actually detect what they are “thinking”. If you’ve been in some of our sessions before, you may have participated in discussions about LLM output describing what it’s thinking. The question is whether this is based on anything realistic – or just another place where a model was trained to give us output that we find acceptable.
The second set of papers we’ll cover are focused on the occupational and economic impact of AI. I have been getting more and more questions about whether “AI is going to take our jobs”. Instead of answering the question directly, we’ll look at the best studies we can find that provide real data about what types of tasks can be automated by AI and what jobs may be at risk.
NOTE – The previous paper review using Google Meet went really well, so we’re going to continue that approach. I’ll be monitoring this email as we get started up, so please let me know if you have issues joining. You do not need a Google account to join, but I’m sure it will ask to use one if you have it.

Links:

Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models – https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introspection/index.html
Measuring the performance of our models on real-world tasks – https://openai.com/index/gdpval/
Anthropic Economic Index, Understanding AI’s effects on the economy – https://www.anthropic.com/economic-index

Details:

Date – 11/12/2025
Time – 6-7:30pm
Location – VIRTUAL
Google Meet – https://meet.google.com/pqo-obmo-rkh
Dial in:‪(US) +1 573-343-8318‬ PIN: ‪687 416 010‬#

AI in Healthcare
2025-11-19 18:00 - 19:30 | HudsonAlpha, 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL, 35806
This week we have another guest speaker – Jacquelyn Neal! She has helped me a lot this year with background information and insights for the UAH Doctoral Intensive that we supported in September, so it will be great for the group to hear from her directly.
“Let’s talk about AI in Healthcare – the opportunities, the challenges, and the ethics. We’ll look at a broad scope of where AI is being implemented in the healthcare system and biomedical research. We’ll also discuss the many challenges, including data collection, standardization, and privacy at scale.”

Details:

Date – 11/19/2025
Time – 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Location – HudsonAlpha
Address – 601 Genome Way Northwest, Huntsville, AL 35806
Zoom – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87461791616?pwd=leIIzvDnCQDiICHlmCp5lXgS5KmhsV.1

AI in Astrophotography
2025-12-03 18:00 - 19:30 | 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=5TdnRleDW3U8psakiRyqBXMKZRLEQz.1

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
