Projects from the Geothermal Hackathon 2021

The second Geothermal Hackathon happened last week. Timed to coincide with the Geosciences virtual event of the World Geothermal Congress, our 2-day event brought about 24 people together in the famous Software Underground Chateau (I’m sorry if I missed anyone!). For comparison, last year we were 13 people, so we’re going in the right direction! Next time I hope we’re as big as one of our ‘real world’ events — maybe we’ll even be able to meet up in local clusters.

Here’s a rundown of the projects at this year’s event:

Induced seismicity at Espoo, Finland

Alex Hobé, Mohsen Bazagan and Matteo Niccoli

Alex’s original workflow for creating dynamic displays of microseismic events was to create thousands of static images then stack them into a movie, so the first goal was something more interactive. On Day 1 Alex built a Plotly widget with a time zoomer/slider in a Jupyter Notebook. On day 2 he and Matteo tried Panel for a dynamic 3D plot. Alex then moved the data into LLNL Visit for fully interactive 3D plots. The team continues to hack on the idea.

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Fluid inclusions at Coso, USA

Diana Acero-Allard, Jeremy Zhao, Samuel Price, Lawrence Kwan, Jacqueline Floyd, Brendan, Gavin, Rob Leckenby and Martin Bentley

Diana had the idea of a gas analysis case study for Coso Field, USA. The team’s specific goal was to develop visualization tools for interetpaton of fluid inclusion gas data to identify fluid types, regions of permeability, and geothermal processes. They had access to analyses from 29 wells, requiring the usual data science workflow: find and load the data, clean the data, make some visualizations and maps, and finally analyse the permeability. GitHub repo here.

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Utah Forge data pipeline

Andrea Balza, Evan Bianco, and Diego Castañeda

Andrea was driven to dive into the Utah FORGE project. Navigating the OpenEI data portal was a bit hit-and-miss, having to download files to get into ZIP files and so on (this is a common issue with open data repositories). The team eventually figured out how to programmatically access the files to explore things more easily — right from a Jupyter Notebook. Their code for any data on the OpenEI site, not just Utah FORGE, so it’s potentially a great research tool. GitHub repo here.

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Pythonizing a power density estimation tool

Irene Wallis, Jan Niederau, Hannah Wood, Will Middlebrook, Jeff Jex, and Bill Cummings

Like a lot of cool hackathon projects, this one started with spreadsheet that Bill created to simplify the process of making power density estimates for geothermal fields under some statistical assumptions. Such a clear goal always helps focus the mind and the team put together some Python notebooks and then a Streamlit app — which you can test-drive here! From this solid foundation, the team has plenty of plans for new directions to take the tool. GitHub repo here.

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Computing boiling point for depth

Thorsten Hörbrand, Irene Wallis, Jan Niederau and Matt Hall

Irene identified the need for a Python tool to generate boiling-point-for-depth curves, accommodating various water salinities and chemistries. As she showed during her recent TRANSFORM tutorial (which you must watch!), so-called BPD curves are an important part of geothermal well engineering. The team produced some scripts to compute various scenarios, based on corrections in the IAPWS standards and using the PHREEQC aqueous geochemistry modeling software. GitHub repo here.

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A big Thank You to all of the hackers that came along to this virtual event. Not quite the same as a meatspace hackathon, admittedly, but Gather.town + Slack was definitely an improvement over Zoom + Slack. At least we have an environment in which people can arrive and immediately get a sense of what is happening in the event. When you realize that people at the tables are actually sitting in Canada, the US, the UK, Switzerland, South Africa, and Auckland — it’s clear that this could become an important new way to collaborate across large distances.

Do check out all these awesome and open-source projects — and check out the #geothermal channel in the Software Underground to keep up with what happens next. We’ll be back in the future — perhaps the near future! — with more hackathons and more geothermal technology. Hopefully we’ll see you there! 🌋

Transformation in 2021

Virtual confererences have become — for now — the norm. In many ways they are far better than traditional conferences: accessible to all, inexpensive to organize and attend, asynchronous, recorded, and no-one has to fly 5,000 km to deliver a PowerPoint. In other ways, they fall short, for example as a way to meet new collaborators or socialize with old ones. As face-to-face meetings become a possibility again this summer, smart organizations will figure out ways to get the best of both worlds.

The Software Underground is continuing its exploration of virtual events next month with the latest edition of the TRANSFORM festival of the digital subsurface. In broad strokes, here’s what’s on offer:

• The Subsurface Hackathon, starting on 16 April — all are welcome, including those new to programming.

• 20 free & awesome tutorials, covering topics from Python to R, geothermal wells to seismic, and even reservoir simulation! And of course there’s a bit of machine learning and physics-based modeling in there too. Look forward to content from scientists in North & South America, Norway, Nigeria, and New Zealand.

• Lightning talks from 24 members of the community — would you like to do one?

• Birds of a Feather community meet-ups, a special Xeek challenge, and other special events.

• The Annual General Meeting of the Software Underground, where we’ll adopt our by-law and appoint the board.

We’ll even try to get at that tricky “hang out with other scientists” component, because we will have a virtual Gather.town world in which to hang out and hack, chat, or watch the livestreams.

If last year’s event is anything to go by, we can expect fantastic tutorial content, innovative hackathon projects, and great conversation between at least 750 digital geoscientists and engineers. (If you missed TRANSFORM 2020, don’t worry — all the content from last year is online and free forever, so it’s not too late to take part! Check it out.)

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Registering for TRANSFORM

Registration is free, or pay-what-you-like. In other words, if you have funding or expenses for conferences and training, there’s an option to pay a small amount. But anyone can attend TRANSFORM free of charge. Thank you to the event sponsors, Studio X, for making this possible. (I will write about Studio X at a later date — they are doing some really cool things in the digital subsurface.)

To register for any part of TRANSFORM — even if you just want to come to the hackathon or a tutorial — click this button and complete the process on the Software Underground website. It’s a ‘pay what you like’ event, so there are 3 registration options with different prices — these are just different donation amounts. They don’t change anything about your registration.

I hope we see you at TRANSFORM. In the meantime, please jump into the Software Underground Slack and get involved in the conversations there. (You can also catch up on recent Software Underground highlights in the new series of blog posts.)

Looking forward to 2021

I usually write a ‘lookback’ at this time of year, but who wants to look back on 2#*0? Instead, let’s look forward to 2021 and speculate wildly about it!

More ways to help

Agile has always been small and nimble, but the price we pay is bandwidth: it’s hard to help all the people we want to help. But we’ve taught more than 1250 people Python and machine learning since 2018, and supporting this new community of programmers is our priority. Agile will be offering some new services in the new year, all aimed at helping you ‘just in time’ — what you need, when you need it — so that those little glitches don’t hold you up. The goal is to accelerate as many people as possible, but to be awesome value. Stay tuned!

We are still small, but we did add a new scientist to the team this year: Martin Bentley joined us. Martin is a recent MSc geology graduate from Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He’s also a very capable Python programmer and GIS wizard, as well as a great teacher, and he’s a familiar face around the Software Underground too.

All over the world

While we’ll be making ourselves available in new ways in 2021, we’ll continue our live classes too — but we’ll be teaching in more accessible ways and in more time zones. This year we taught 29 virtual classes for people based in Los Angeles, Calgary, Houston, Bogotá, Rio de Janeiro, Glasgow, London, Den Haag, Krakow, Lagos, Brunei, Muscat, Tunis, Kuala Lumpur, and Perth. Next year I want to add Anchorage, Buenos Aires, Durban, Reykjavik, Jakarta, and Wellington. The new virtual world has really driven home to me how inaccessible our classes and events were — we will do better!

Public classes appear here when we schedule them: https://agilescientific.com/training

Maximum accessibility

The event I’m most excited about is TRANSFORM 2021 (mark your calendar: 17 to 23 April!), the annual virtual meeting of the Software Underground. The society incorporated back in April, so it’s now officially a technical society. But it’s unlike most other technical societies in our domain: it’s free, and — so far anyway — it operates exclusively online. Like this year, the conference will focus on helping our community acquire new skills and connections for the future. Want to be part of it? Get notified.

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Thank you for reading our blog, following Agile, and being part of the digital subsurface community. If you’re experiencing uncertainty in your career, or in your personal life, I hope you’re able to take some time out to recharge over the next couple of weeks. We can take on 2021 together, and meet it head on — not with a plan, but with a purpose.

The evolution of the Software Underground

The Software Underground started as a mailing list in 2014 with maybe twenty participants, in the wake of the first geoscience hackathons. There are now more than 2,160 “rocks + computers” enthusiasts in the Underground, with about 20 currently joining every week. It’s the fastest growing digital subsurface water-cooler in the world! And the only one.

The beating heart of the Software Underground is its free, open Slack chat room. Accessible to anyone, it brings this amazing community right to your mobile device or computer desktop. When it comes to the digital subsurface, it has a far higher signal:noise ratio than LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. Here are some of the topics under discussion this week:

• The role of coding challenges in job interviews.

• Handling null values in 2D grids such as airborne gamma-ray.

• How to load an open seismic dataset into OpendTect.

• A new series of tutorials for the GeoStats.jl Julia package.

• Plenty of discussion about how to interpret negative oil prices!

But the Software Underground — or Swung as its population affectionately call it — is more than just a chatroom. It organizes events. It compiles awesome documents. And it has great ambitions.

Evolution

To better explore those ambitions, the Underground is evolving.

Until now, it’s had a slightly murky existence, or non-existence, operating in mysterious ways and without visible means of support. When we tried to get a ‘non-profit’ booth at a conference last year, we couldn’t because the Software Underground isn’t just a non-profit, it’s a non-entity. It doesn’t legally exist.

Most of the time, this nonexistence is a luxury. No committees! No accounts! No lawyers!

But sometimes it’s a problem. Like when you want to accept donations in a transparent way. Or take sponsorship from a corporation. Or pay for an event venue. Or have some accountability for what goes on in the community. Or make a decision without waiting for Matt to read his email. Sometimes it matters.

A small band of supporters and evangelists have decided the time has come for the Software Underground to stand up and be counted! We’re going legal. We’re going to exist.

What will change?

As little as possible! And everything!

The Slack will remain the same. Free for everyone. The digital subsurface water-cooler (or public house, if you prefer).

We’re taking on our biggest event yet in June — a fully online conference called TRANSFORM 2020. Check it out.

Soon we will exist legally, as we move to incorporate in Canada as a non-profit. Later, we can think about how membership and administration will work. For now, there will be some ‘interim’ directors, whose sole job is to establish the terms of the organization’s existence and get it to its first Annual General Meeting, sometime in 2021.

The goal is to make new things possible, with a new kind of society.

And you’re invited.

TRANSFORM happened!

How do you describe the indescribable?

Last week, Agile hosted the TRANSFORM unconference in Normandy, France. We were there to talk about the open suburface stack — the collection of open-source Python tools for earth scientists. We also spent time on the state of the Software Underground, a global community of practice for digital subsurface scientists and engineers. In effect, this was the first annual Software Underground conference. This was SwungCon 1.

The space

I knew the Château de Rosay was going to be nice. I hoped it was going to be very nice. But it wasn’t either of those things. It exceeded expectations by such a large margin, it seemed a little… indulgent, Excessive even. And yet it was cheaper than a Hilton, and you couldn’t imagine a more perfect place to think and talk about the future of open source geoscience, or a more productive environment in which to write code with new friends and colleagues.

It turns out that a 400-year-old château set in 8 acres of parkland in the heart of Normandy is a great place to create new things. I expect Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant thought the same when they stayed there 150 years ago. The forty-two bedrooms house exactly the right number of people for a purposeful scientific meeting.

This is frustrating, I’m not doing the place justice at all.

The work

This was most people’s first experience of an unconference. It was undeniably weird walking into a week-long meeting with no schedule of events. But, despite being inexpertly facilitated by me, the 26 participants enthusiastically collaborated to create the agenda on the first morning. With time, we appreciated the possibilities of the open space — it lets the group talk about exactly what it needs to talk about, exactly when it needs to talk about it.

The topics ranged from the governance and future of the Software Underground, to the possibility of a new open access journal, interesting new events in the Software Underground calendar, new libraries for geoscience, a new ‘core’ library for wells and seismic, and — of course — machine learning. I’ll be writing more about all of these topics in the coming weeks, and there’s already lots of chatter about them on the Software Underground Slack (which hit 1500 members yesterday!).

The food

I can’t help it. I have to talk about the food.

…but I’m not sure where to start. The full potential of food — to satisfy, to delight, to start conversations, to impress, to inspire — was realized. The food was central to the experience, but somehow not even the most wonderful thing about the experience of eating at the chateau. Meals were prefaced by a presentation by the professionals in the kitchen. No dish was repeated… indeed, no seating arrangement was repeated. The cheese was — if you are into cheese — off the charts.

There was a professionalism and thoughtfulness to the dining that can perhaps only be found in France.

Sorry everyone. This was one of those occasions when you had to be there. If you weren’t there, you missed out. I wish you’d been there. You would have loved it.

The good news is that it will happen again. Stay tuned.