Are virtual conferences... awful?

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Yeah, mostly. But that doesn’t mean that we just need to get back to ‘normal’ conferences — those are broken too, remember?

Chris Jackson, now at Manchester, started a good thread the other day:

This led, in a roundabout way, to some pros and cons — some of which are just my own opinions:

Good things about LIVE conferences

  • You get to spend a week away from work.

  • When you’re there, you’re fully focused.

  • You’re somewhere cool or exotic, or in Houston.

  • You get to see old friends again.

  • (Some) early career people get to build their networks. You know which ones.

  • There is technical content.

BAD things about LIVE conferences

  • You’re away from your home for a week.

  • You have to travel to a remote location.

  • You’re trapped in a conference centre.

  • The networking events are lame.

  • Well, maybe ECRs can make connections… sorry, who’s your supervisor again?

  • There’s so much content, and some of it is boring.

Good things about VIRTUAL conferences

  • Take part — and meet people — from anywhere!

  • The cost is generally low and more accessible.

  • You’re not away from work or home.

  • They are much easier to organize.

  • Live-streaming or posting to YouTube is easy-peasy.

  • No-one needs to give millions of research dollars to airline and hotel companies.

Bad things about VIRTUAL conferences

  • You don’t actually get to meet anyone.

  • Tech socs don’t make money from free webinars.

  • So many distractions!

  • The technology is a hassle to deal with.

  • If you’re in the wrong timezone, too bad for you.

  • The content is the same as live conferences, and some of it is even worse as a digital experience. And we’re all exhausted from all-day Zoom. And…

My assertion is that most virtual conferences are poor because all most organizers have really done is transpose a poor format, which was at least half-optimized for live events, to a pseudodigital medium. And — surprise! — the experience sucks.

So what now?

What now is that it’s beyond urgent to fix damn conferences. A huge part of the problem — and the fundamental reason why most virtual conferences are so bad — is that most of the technical societies completely failed to start experimenting with new, more accessible, more open formats a decade ago. This, in spite of the fact that, to a substantial extent, the societies are staffed by professional event organizers! These professionals weren’t paying attention to digital technology, or openness and reproducibility in science, or accessibility to disadvantaged and underrepresented segments of the community. I don’t know what they were paying attention to (okay, I do know), but it wasn’t primarily the needs of the scientific community.

Okay okay, sheesh, actually what now?

Sorry. Anyway, the thing to do is to focus on the left-hand columns in those lists up there, and try to eliminate the things on the right. So here are some things to start experimenting with. When? Ideally 2012 (the year, not the time). But tomorrow will do just fine. In no particular order:

  • Focus on the outcomes — conferences are supposed to serve their community of practice. So ask the community — what do you need? What big unsolved problems can we solve to move our science forward? What social or community problems are stopping us from doing our best work? Then design events to move the needle on that.

  • Distributed events — Local chapters hire awesome, interesting, cool spaces for local face-to-face events. People who can get to these locations are encouraged to show up at them — because there are interesting humans there, the coffee is good, and the experience is awesome.

  • Virtually connected — The global event is digitally connected, so that when we want to do global things with lots of people, we can. This also means being timezone agnostic by recording or repeating important bits of the schedule.

  • Small is good — You’re experimenting, don’t go all-in on your first event. Small is less stress, lower risk, more sustainable, and probably a better experience for participants. Want more reach? There are other ways.

  • Dedicated to open, accessible participation — We need to seize the idea that events should accommodate anyone who wants to participate, wherever they are and whatever their means. Someone asking, “How do we make sure the right people are there?” is a huge warning sign.

  • Meaningful networking — Gathering people in a Hilton ballroom with cheap beer, frozen canapés, and a barbershop quartet is not networking, it’s a bad wedding party. Professionals want to forge lasting connections by collaborating with each other on deep or valuable problems. I don’t think non-technical event organizers realize that we actually love our work and technical collaboration is fun. Create the conditions for that kind of work, and the socializing will happen.

  • Diversity as a superpower — Focus on increasing every dimension of diversity at your events, and good things will follow. For example: stop talking about hackathons as ‘great for students’ — no wonder ECRs need networking opportunities if you create events that seal them off from everyone! How do you do this? Increase the diversity of your organizing task force.

  • Stop doing the following things — endless talks (settle down, some talks are fine), digital posters, panels of any kind, ‘discussion’ that involves one person talking at a time, and all the other broken models of collaboration. Not sure what to replace them with? Read about open space technology, world cafe, unconferences, unsessions, hackathons, datathons, lightning talks, birds of a feather, design charettes, idea jams. General rule, if most of the people in an event can be described as ‘audience’ and not ‘participants’, you’re doing it wrong. Conversation, not discussion.

  • Stop trying to control the whole experience — most conference organizers seem to think they have to organize every aspect of a conference. In fact, the task is to create the conditions for the community to organize itself — bring its own content, make its own priorities, solve its own problems.

I know it probably looks like I’m proposing to burn everything down, but I’m really not proposing that we shred everything and only organize wacky events from now on. Some traditional formats may, in some measure, be fit for purpose. My point is that we need to experiment with new things, as soon as possible. Experiment, pay attention, adjust, repeat. (And it takes at least three iterations to learn about something.)

If you’re interested in doing more with conferences and scientific events in general, I’ve compiled a lot of notes over the years since Agile has been experimenting with formats. Here they are — please use and share and contribute back if you wish.

I’m also always happy to brainstorm events with you, no strings attached! Just get in touch: matt@agilescientific.com

Last thing: We try to organize meetings like this in the Software Underground. Join us!

Projects from the Geothermal Hackathon 2021

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.)

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.)

The evolution of the Software Underground

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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.

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Are these the heroes we need?

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First rule of criticism: balance it with something positive.

Technical societies — AAPG, SEG, SPE, EAGE, and the many others — do important work in our discipline. They publish some quality content, they organize a lot of meetings, and they help attract talent to work in subsurface science and engineering.

The door is wide open for them to play a central role in the change that’s coming to our lives as subsurface professionals.

Second rule of criticism: stick to the facts.

In spite of their central role in many scientists’ professional lives, and the magnitude of the changes that are underway, technical societies have struggled to maintain relevance and therefore members. It’s hard to know the extent of the problem, as AAPG doesn’t report how many members it has (it’s been “approximately 30,000” for years) and SEG stopped reporting numbers in 2017. Make of that what you will.

Anecdotally, many of my friends have let their memberships lapse. I have too.

Third rule of criticism: avoid negative language.

AAPG came up with a couple of cool superheroes. They commissioned some artwork: two fit, handsome geologists, ready for anything. Their names? Trap Mitchell and Alluvia Hunt.

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The laudable appearance of a woman — a non-white woman! — in this context rightly prompted praise:

How appalling is it that a geoscientist had to wait 23 years to see a female geoscientist take centre stage like this? I’m embarrassed by that. Kudos to AAPG for that decision.

Kudos which we have to partially revoke, unfortunately. Because the decision, if it was a decision, to change Alluvia’s skin colour in different situations is… well, it doesn’t look good. At best, it’s weird.

Fourth rule of criticism: be honest.

When I saw this dynamic duo, I rolled my eyes. Of course I did: I’m predisposed to criticize the technical societies and I’m a well-known marketing whiner. And as a scientist in Software Underground pointed out, it’s not targeted at me; she also found it uplifting. (Obvious in hindsight, but the whole point of my various privileges is that everything seems to be about me — it’s good to be reminded of our blindspots.)

But I’m trying to be positive here. I rolled my eyes because I think AAPG and the other societies can have a far-reaching and positive impact on our community, and on society. There is hard work to be done finding enough energy and raw materials for people to prosper.

The door is wide open

If AAPG wants to be part of the future, they have to figure out what ‘relevant’ means. Being relevant does not mean:

  • Promoting oil & gas exploration with dysmorphic Barbie & Ken super-hero cartoon characters.

  • Paywalled everything, especially journals and conference papers.

  • Awards named after men and given to mostly men. And don’t get me started on ‘Distinguished’ people.

  • Doing all the other things you’ve always done which have led you to feel ‘not relevant’ today.

I would urge AAPG and all technical societies to consider becoming more relevant in some new ways:

  • Understand that oil & gas, while certainly important to society today, needs to end. The sooner the better.

  • Realize that subsurface professionals can contribute to society, and industry, in hundreds of other ways.

  • See that this change is going to require a massive educational effort, both for us, and for society.

  • Believe that we need to massively broaden our community if we are to have the impact we can have.

  • Remove barriers to knowledge by committing to open access content and open data.

  • Remove barriers to participation by welcoming and representing everyone with equity and compassion.

The days of the hero explorer — tanned and lean, chiselled and serious, whacking stuff with hammers — are gone. Really, they never existed, or at least they were accompanied by a masculine monoculture and a total neglect for the environment.

The future can be different. Ms Hunt and Trap can be part of it. I believe we all can. But it’s going to require hard work, uncomfortable decisions, and abrupt, profound change. The door is wide open for AAPG, SEG, EAGE, and the other technical societies, if they would only notice.

What do you think? Are Trap & Alluvia just a bit of fun that might attract a new generation? Or do our technical societies need a lot more than cartoon heros and heroines? Let us know in the comments.

The hack returns to Norway

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Last autumn Agile helped Peter Bormann (ConocoPhillips Norge) and the FORCE consortium host the first geo-flavoured hackathon in Norway. Maybe you were there, or maybe you read about the nine fascinating machine learning projects here on the blog. If so, you’ll know it was a great event, so we’re doing it again!

Hackthon: 18 and 19 September
Symposium: 20 September

Check out last year’s projects here. Projects included Biostrat!, Virtual Metering, sketch2seis, and AVO ML — a really interesting AVO approach exploiting latent spaces (see image, right). Most of them are on GitHub and could be extended this year.

Part of what I love about these things is that we have no idea what the projects will be. As last year, there’ll be a pre-hackathon meetup in Storhaug the evening before Day 1 (on 17 September) — we’ll figure it all out there. In the meantime, if you have an idea check out the link at the end of this post where you can share and discuss it with others.

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The hackathon will be followed by a one-day symposium on machine learning in the subsurface (left). This well attended event was also excellent last year, and promises to deliver again in 2019. Peter did a briliant job of keeping things rooted in real results from real research, so you won’t be subjected to the parade of marketing talks you might have been subjected to at certain other conferences.

Find out more and sign up on NPD.no! Don’t delay; places are limited.

Submit and discuss project ideas on Agile’s Events page. Note that this does not sign you up for the event.

Get on softwareunderground.com/slack to discuss the event in the #force-hack-2019 channel.

See you there!

TRANSFORM happened!

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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.

The digital subsurface water-cooler

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Back in August 2016 I told you about the Software Underground, an informal, grass-roots community of people who are into rocks and computers. At its heart is a public Slack group (Slack is a bit like Yammer or Skype but much more awesome). At the time, the Underground had 130 members. This morning, we hit ten times that number: there are now 1300 enthusiasts in the Underground!

If you’re one of them, you already know that it’s easily the best place there is to find and chat to people who are involved in researching and applying machine learning in the subsurface — in geoscience, reservoir engineering, and enything else to do with the hard parts of the earth. And it’s not just about AI… it’s about data management, visualization, Python, and web applications. Here are some things that have been shared in the last 7 days:

  • News about the upcoming Software Underground hackathon in London.

  • A new Udacity course on TensorFlow.

  • Questions to ask when reviewing machine learning projects.

  • A Dockerfile to make installing Seismic Unix a snap.

  • Mark Zoback’s new geomechanics course.

It gets better. One of the most interesting conversations recently has been about starting a new online-only, open-access journal for the geeky side of geo. Look for the #journal channel.

Another emerging feature is the ‘real life’ meetup. Several social+science gatherings have happened recently in Aberdeen, Houston, and Calgary… and more are planned, check #meetups for details. If you’d like to organize a meetup where you live, Software Underground will support it financially.

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We’ve also gained a website, softwareunderground.org, where you’ll find a link to sign-up in the Slack group, some recommended reading, and fantastic Software Underground T-shirts and mugs! There are also other ways to support the community with a subscription or sponsorship.

If you’ve been looking for the geeks, data-heads, coders and makers in geoscience and engineering, you’ve found them. It’s free to sign up — I hope we see you in there soon!

Slack has nice desktop, web and mobile clients. Check out all the channels — they are listed on the left:

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Subsurface Hackathon project round-up, part 1

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The dust has settled from the Hackathon in Paris two weeks ago. Been there, done that, came home with the T-shirt.

In the same random order they presented their 4-minute demos to our panel of esteemed judges, I present a (very) abbreviated round-up of what the teams made together over the course of the weekend. With the exception of a few teams who managed to spontaneously nucleate before the hackathon, most of these teams were comprised of people who had never met each other before the event.

Just let that sink in for a second: teams of mostly mutual strangers built 13 legit machine-learning-based geoscience applications in one weekend. 

Log Healer  

Log Healer

 

 

An automated well log management system

Team Un-well Loggers: James Wanstall (Glencore), Niket Doshi (Teradata), Joseph Taylor (Teradata), Duncan Irving (Teradata), Jane McConnell (Teradata).

Tech: Kylo (NiFi, HDFS, Hive, Spark)

If you're working with well logs, and if you've got lots of them, you've almost certainly got gaps or inaccuracies from curve to curve and from well to well. The team's scalable, automated well-log file management system Log Healer computes missing logs and heals broken ones. Amazing.

An early result from Team Janus. The image on the left is ground truth, that on the right is predicted. Many of the features are present. Not bad for v0.1!

An early result from Team Janus. The image on the left is ground truth, that on the right is predicted. Many of the features are present. Not bad for v0.1!

Meaningful cross sections from well logs

Team Janus: Daniel Buse, Johannes Camin, Paul Gabriel, Powei Huang, Fabian Kampe (all from GiGa Infosystems)

The team built an elegant machine learning workflow to attack the very hard problem of creating geologically realistic cross-section from well logs. The validation algorithm compares pixels to score the result. 

Think Section's mindblowing photomicrograph labeling tool can also make novel camouflage patterns.

Think Section's mindblowing photomicrograph labeling tool can also make novel camouflage patterns.

Paint-by-numbers on digital thin sections

Team Think Section: Diego Castaneda (Agile*), Brendon Hall (Enthought), Roeland Nieboer (Fugro), Jan Niederau (RWTH Aachen), Simon Virgo (RWTH Aachen)

Tech: Python (Scikit Learn, Scikit Image, Flask, NumPy, SciPy, Pandas), AWS for hosting app & Jupyter server.

Description: Mineral classification and point-counting on thin sections can be an incredibly tedious and time consuming task. Team Think Section trained a model to segregate, classify, and label mineral grains in 200GB of high-resolution multi-polarization-angle photomicrographs.

Team Classy's super-impressive shot gather seismic event Detection technology. Left: synthetic gather. Middle: predicted labels. Right: truth.

Team Classy's super-impressive shot gather seismic event Detection technology. Left: synthetic gather. Middle: predicted labels. Right: truth.

Event detection on seismic shot gathers

Team Classy: Princy Ikotoko Ndong (EOST), Anna Lim (NTNU), Yuriy Ivanov (NTNU), Song Hou (CGG), Justin Gosses (Valador).

Tech: Python (NumPy, Matplotlib), Jupyter notebooks.

The team created an AI which identifies and labels different events on a shot gather image. It can find direct waves, reflections, multiples or coherent noise. It uses a support vector machine for classification, and is simple and fast. 

model2seismic: An entirely new way to do modeling and inversion. Take note: the neural network that made this image knows no physics.

model2seismic: An entirely new way to do modeling and inversion. Take note: the neural network that made this image knows no physics.

Forward and inverse modeling without the physics

Team GANsters - Lukas Mosser (Imperial), Wouter Kimman (Meridian), Jesper Dramsch (Copenhagen), Alfredo de la Fuente (Wolfram), Steve Purves (Euclidity)

Tech: PyNoddy, homegrown Python ML tools.

The GANsters created a deep-learning image-translation-based seismic inversion and forward modelling system. I urge you to go and look at their project on model2seismic. If it doesn't give you goosebumps, you are geophysically inert.

Team Pick Pick Log

Team Pick Pick Log

Machine learning for for stratigraphic interpretation

Team Pick Pick LOG - Antoine Vanbesien (EOST), Fidèle Degni (Mines St-Étienne), Massinissa Mesbahi (Pau), Natsuki Gunji (Mines St-Étienne), Cédric Menut (EOST).

This team of data science and geoscience undergrads attacked an automated stratigraphic interpretation task. They used supervised learning to determine lithology from well logs in Alberta's Athabasca play, then attempted to teach their AI to pick stratigraphic tops. Impressive!

Pretty amazing, huh? The power of the hackathon to bring a project from barely-even-an-idea to actual-working-code is remarkable! And we're not even halfway through the teams: tomorrow I'll describe the other seven projects. 

Running away from easy

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Matt and I are in Calgary at the 2017 GeoConvention. Instead of writing about highlights from Day 1, I wanted to pick on one awesome thing I saw. Throughout the convention, there is a air of sadness, of nostalgia, of struggle. But I detect a divide among us. There are people who are waiting for things to return to how they were, when life was easy. Others are exploring how to be a part of the change, instead of a victim of it. Things are no longer easy, but easy is boring. 

Want to start an oil and gas company? What resources are you going to need? Computers, pricey software applications, data. Purchase all of this stuff as a one-time capital expense, build a team, get an office lease, buy desks and a Keurig. Then if all goes well, 18 months later you'll have a slide deck outlining a play that you could pitch to investors. 

Imagine getting started without laying down a huge amount of capital for all those things. What if you could rent a desk at a co-working space, access the suite of software tools that you're used to, and use their Keurig. The computer infrastructure and software is managed and maintained by an IT service company so you don't have to worry about it. 

Yesterday at the Calgary Geoconvention I heard all about ReSourceYYC, a co-working space catering to oil and gas professionals, introduced ResourceNET, a subscription-based cloud workstation environment for freelancers, consultants, startups, and the newly and not-so-newly underemployed community of subsurface professionals.

In making this offering, ReSourceYYC has partnered up with a number of software companies: Entero, Seisware, Surfer, ValNav, geoLOGIC, and Divestco, to name a few. The limitations and restrictions around this environment, if any, weren't totally clear. I wondered: Could I append or swap my own tools with this stack? Can I access this environment from anywhere?

It could be awesome. I think it could serve just as many freelancers and consultants as "oil and gas startups". It seems a bit too early to say, but I reckon there are literally thousands of geoscientists and engineers in Calgary that'd be all over this.

I think it's interesting and important and I hope they get it right.