An international team of scientists from Oxford and VŠB-TUO described the methodology of neural networks based on electrochemistry.

Collaboration between the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory at the Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford and the Department of Chemistry and Physico-Chemical Processes, Faculty of Materials Science and Technology, VŠB-TUO, has led to joint publication. The paper entitled "Discovering Electrochemistry with an Electrochemistry-Informed Neural Network (ECINN)" was published in the prestigious journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

The authors of the paper, Dr. Haotian Chen, Dr. Minjun Yang and Professor Richard G. Compton for the University of Oxford and Professor Bedřich Smetana, Assoc. Professor Vlastimil Matějka and Dr. Vlastimil Novák for FMT present the Electrochemistry-Informed Neural Network (ECINN) methodology in a joint publication. This paper describes the ECINN methodology by implementing the Butler-Volmer, Nernst and diffusion equations for multi-task detection of electrochemical parameters. Thus, it contributes to the topic of chemistry-based machine learning, which provides a better interpretability and generalization of the data obtained in electrochemistry, which has considerable potential in various applications.

The cooperation between the two universities was inspiring and rewarding. "We believe this article is just the beginning of the future development of cooperation between Oxford and the Faculty of Materials Science and Technology of VŠB TUO. It is just one of many steps that await us on the road to a deeper understanding of machine learning in electrochemistry," says Prof. Smetana, adding: "This collaboration is an example of how combining knowledge and experience from different institutions can yield innovative results that have the potential to impact scientific research on a global level." Prof.  Smetana’s comment was seconded by Prof. Compton at University of Oxford: “The supercomputing center named IT4Innovations located at Ostrava removed the computational bottleneck for electrochemistry and allowed electrochemists to embrace the era of Big Data and Big Compute”. 

In the years to come, we look forward to continuing our collaboration.