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    <title>DEV Community: Malathi Venkatesan</title>
    <description>The latest articles on DEV Community by Malathi Venkatesan (@malvenkatesan).</description>
    <link>https://dev.to/malvenkatesan</link>
    <image>
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      <title>DEV Community: Malathi Venkatesan</title>
      <link>https://dev.to/malvenkatesan</link>
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    <language>en</language>
    <item>
      <title>CoolSense: an AC that tells you what's wrong, before the technician drives out</title>
      <dc:creator>Malathi Venkatesan</dc:creator>
      <pubDate>Sun, 18 Oct 2026 17:43:18 +0000</pubDate>
      <link>https://dev.to/malvenkatesan/coolsense-an-ac-that-tells-you-whats-wrong-before-the-technician-drives-out-51aa</link>
      <guid>https://dev.to/malvenkatesan/coolsense-an-ac-that-tells-you-whats-wrong-before-the-technician-drives-out-51aa</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is a submission for the &lt;a href="https://dev.to/challenges/hacktoberfest-week2-2026-10-12"&gt;Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  What I Built
&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The AC stops cooling. A technician finds a gas leak and says: &lt;em&gt;"I'll come back tomorrow with the parts."&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;One fault, two visits.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CoolSense&lt;/strong&gt; lets the AC say what's wrong first:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;① Detect (code):&lt;/strong&gt; spots when this unit drifts from its own normal.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;② Diagnose (TabPFN):&lt;/strong&gt; names the fault.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;③ Explain (Gemma, local):&lt;/strong&gt; messages the owner in their language. The technician gets &lt;strong&gt;what to bring&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who pays:&lt;/strong&gt; AC maintenance companies, per AC per month. They see which unit needs a visit, what's wrong, and what to put in the van.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  Demo
&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;  &lt;iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AB1HTRrCLRQ" width="710" height="399"&gt;
  &lt;/iframe&gt;
&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Real sensor data from a rooftop AC with a &lt;strong&gt;documented 40% gas leak&lt;/strong&gt; (Berkeley Lab), replayed as if live. Runs on my laptop.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Fqwi89rbituzkb9z7onka.png" class="article-body-image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;img src="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Fqwi89rbituzkb9z7onka.png" alt="Live view" width="800" height="364"&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Fq8azxgxaz5s1xxf7xmau.png" class="article-body-image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;img src="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Fq8azxgxaz5s1xxf7xmau.png" alt="Maintenance B2B company view" width="800" height="363"&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  Code
&lt;/h2&gt;


&lt;div class="ltag-github-readme-tag"&gt;
  &lt;div class="readme-overview"&gt;
    &lt;h2&gt;
      &lt;img src="https://assets.dev.to/assets/github-logo-5a155e1f9a670af7944dd5e12375bc76ed542ea80224905ecaf878b9157cdefc.svg" alt="GitHub logo"&gt;
      &lt;a href="https://github.com/malathilatha" rel="noopener noreferrer"&gt;
        malathilatha
      &lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href="https://github.com/malathilatha/coolsense" rel="noopener noreferrer"&gt;
        coolsense
      &lt;/a&gt;
    &lt;/h2&gt;
    &lt;h3&gt;
      AC fault detection that runs on a laptop: code spots the drift, TabPFN names the fault, and local Gemma explains it to the owner in their language, tested on real LBNL rooftop-AC data with a documented gas leak
    &lt;/h3&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;div class="ltag-github-body"&gt;
    
&lt;div id="readme" class="md"&gt;&lt;div class="markdown-heading"&gt;
&lt;h1 class="heading-element"&gt;❄️ CoolSense: the AC that tells you what's wrong&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Code detects → TabPFN diagnoses → Gemma explains.&lt;/strong&gt; All open models, all on one laptop, no cloud.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;When an AC fails, a technician usually visits once to find the fault and again with the parts
CoolSense watches the unit's own sensor readings, names the likely fault, writes the owner a plain
message in their language, and gives the technician a job card with &lt;strong&gt;what to bring&lt;/strong&gt;, so the first
visit can fix it.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who pays:&lt;/strong&gt; AC maintenance companies and facility managers (per AC, per month). They get a
priority list of which units need a visit, what's probably wrong, and what to put in the van.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/malathilatha/coolsense/docs/how_it_works.png"&gt;&lt;img src="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fmalathilatha%2Fcoolsense%2FHEAD%2Fdocs%2Fhow_it_works.png" alt="How it works"&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Built for the &lt;a href="https://dev.to/challenges/hacktoberfest-week2-2026-10-12" rel="nofollow"&gt;DEV Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge, Week 2: Side Hustle&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div class="markdown-heading"&gt;
&lt;h2 class="heading-element"&gt;Demo&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;div class="table-wrapper-paragraph"&gt;&lt;table&gt;
&lt;thead&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;th&gt;Live AC (owner + technician)&lt;/th&gt;
&lt;th&gt;Maintenance company (B2B)&lt;/th&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/thead&gt;
&lt;tbody&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;&lt;a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/malathilatha/coolsense/docs/live_view.png"&gt;&lt;img src="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fmalathilatha%2Fcoolsense%2FHEAD%2Fdocs%2Flive_view.png" alt="Live view"&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;&lt;a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/malathilatha/coolsense/docs/b2b_view.png"&gt;&lt;img src="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fmalathilatha%2Fcoolsense%2FHEAD%2Fdocs%2Fb2b_view.png" alt="B2B view"&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/tbody&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The app &lt;strong&gt;replays real recordings&lt;/strong&gt; from a rooftop AC with a documented…&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;div class="gh-btn-container"&gt;&lt;a class="gh-btn" href="https://github.com/malathilatha/coolsense" rel="noopener noreferrer"&gt;View on GitHub&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;


&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  How I Built It
&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;Detect:&lt;/strong&gt; gradient boosting learns what each sensor &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; read for the weather and load. Big gaps raise a flag.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;Diagnose:&lt;/strong&gt; TabPFN classifies flagged readings from labelled examples. Trained on simulation only, it got the real leak wrong. Add &lt;strong&gt;2 technician-confirmed days&lt;/strong&gt;, with no retraining, and it named &lt;strong&gt;98%&lt;/strong&gt; of flagged readings correctly.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;Explain:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;gemma3:4b&lt;/code&gt; via Ollama writes the message. &lt;strong&gt;It never picks the fault or the numbers.&lt;/strong&gt; The job card comes from a fixed checklist.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;div class="table-wrapper-paragraph"&gt;&lt;table&gt;
&lt;thead&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;th&gt;Real AC&lt;/th&gt;
&lt;th&gt;Days flagged&lt;/th&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/thead&gt;
&lt;tbody&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;Leak, June 2020&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;11 / 15&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;Healthy circuit, 2021&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2 / 109&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;"Healthy" circuit B, 2021&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;53 / 53&lt;/strong&gt;: looks like the leak came back (hypothesis)&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/tbody&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;&lt;/div&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not yet:&lt;/strong&gt; it's a replay. Next comes reading live data from building systems. Newer TabPFN weights are non-commercial, so the code has a gradient-boosting fallback.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;Open data&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href="https://doi.org/10.25984/1881324" rel="noopener noreferrer"&gt;LBNL, CC BY 4.0&lt;/a&gt;) let me test on a real leak.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;Open weights&lt;/strong&gt; run beside the AC: no cloud bill per unit, no building data leaving the site.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;A technician's confirmation updates TabPFN &lt;strong&gt;on the spot&lt;/strong&gt;, with no vendor in the loop.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  Prize Categories
&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;TabPFN&lt;/strong&gt;: diagnoses the fault and improves from 2 confirmed days.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;Gemma&lt;/strong&gt;: writes the owner's message locally in 7 languages.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

</description>
      <category>devchallenge</category>
      <category>hf26challenge</category>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>PathShala AI: Offline, Zero-Install Teaching Assistant</title>
      <dc:creator>Malathi Venkatesan</dc:creator>
      <pubDate>Sun, 01 Mar 2026 18:25:37 +0000</pubDate>
      <link>https://dev.to/malvenkatesan/pathshala-ai-offline-zero-install-teaching-assistant-1n1j</link>
      <guid>https://dev.to/malvenkatesan/pathshala-ai-offline-zero-install-teaching-assistant-1n1j</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is a submission for the &lt;a href="https://dev.to/challenges/weekend-2026-02-28"&gt;DEV Weekend Challenge: Community&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  The Community
&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I grew up watching teachers struggle in classrooms where the internet is either absent or unreliable. In rural Area, millions of school teachers face the same problem every single day: they are expected to deliver quality, engaging lessons — but the digital tools that could help them are locked behind a stable internet connection they simply don't have.&lt;br&gt;
Free AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini exist — but they're completely useless when there's no internet. Offline AI tools like Ollama and LM Studio exist — but they require terminal commands, admin rights, and software installation that a government school teacher cannot do.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  What I Built
&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;PathShala AI is a browser-native, zero-install AI teaching assistant that runs 100% offline after a one-time setup — no app, no admin rights, no internet, no API key. Ever.&lt;br&gt;
A teacher downloads one HTML file. Opens it in Chrome. Done. From that point, the full power of a local LLM is available — in a classroom with no WiFi, in a village with no mobile data, even on a flight.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Why a Single HTML File?&lt;br&gt;
Rural school computers run older Windows with no package manager, no Node.js, and no IT support. A single HTML file that a teacher can open in Chrome is the only deployment format that works in this reality.&lt;br&gt;
Installation is: download file → double-click. That's it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  Demo
&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/16_oLgegZQPoD8hdjUK0Th93wfDFdd7Oi/view?usp=sharing" rel="noopener noreferrer"&gt;Watch Demo Video&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  Code
&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://github.com/malathilatha/ShikshaLokam/blob/main/pathshala_ai_demo.html" rel="noopener noreferrer"&gt;PathShala AI – HTML Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  How I Built It
&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Tech Stack:&lt;br&gt;
WebLLM (Apache TVM) – In-browser inference&lt;br&gt;
Llama 3.2 1B (q4f32_1-MLC) – Quantized model&lt;br&gt;
WebGPU – Hardware acceleration&lt;br&gt;
Cache API + IndexedDB – Full offline storage (~900MB)&lt;br&gt;
Web Speech API – Offline TTS&lt;br&gt;
Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS – Zero dependencies&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Architecture&lt;br&gt;
Query → Local Model (Cache) → WebGPU Inference → Text/Voice Output&lt;br&gt;
No backend. No API key. No data leaves the device.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Team Submissions: Build By Malathi Venkatesan &lt;br&gt;
username: malathilatha199615&lt;/p&gt;

</description>
      <category>devchallenge</category>
      <category>weekendchallenge</category>
      <category>showdev</category>
    </item>
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