Machine-Learning

A Mechanical Engineer Walks Into a Neural Network I need to be honest about something. When ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness, I felt left behind. Everyone was talking about it. Using it. Marvelling at it. And I was sitting there thinking: I have no idea what is actually happening inside that thing. That bothered me more than it should have. You see, I have never liked black boxes. In my simulation work, I need to know why a model behaves a certain way. Is it a physics limitation? A numerical instability? A mistake in my boundary conditions? If I cannot explain the failure, I cannot fix it. ...

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons The Smallest Unit of the Marvel Before transformers. Before attention. Before LLMs. There was the Artificial Neural Network. The humble building block that started it all. Back in 2013, when none of this was the talk of the town, neural networks were quietly fascinating. Not because they were powerful. They were not. Compared to today, they were weak. Slow. Limited. ...

The Quiet Problem Inside Every Battery If you own a smartphone or an electric vehicle, you have experienced battery degradation. That slow, frustrating decline where a full charge used to last all day and now barely makes it to dinner. The science behind this is actually fascinating, even if the experience is annoying. Inside every lithium-ion battery, a protective layer called the Solid Electrolyte Interphase (SEI) forms during the first charge. This layer is essential - without it, the battery would destroy itself immediately. But here is the cruel part: the SEI never stops growing. It creeps thicker over time, consuming active lithium that could otherwise be used to power your device. ...