Capturing conferences

Yesterday I grumbled about secret meetings. Enough whining, what's the opportunity?

Some technical societies already understand the need for recording proceedings. SPE workshops have clearly-stated deliverables, for example at the Marginal Fields workshop in Cairo later this year:

SPE workshop deliverables

That's more like it. It would be better to publish the proceedings to the world, not just attendees, and to use an open license, but it's definitely a good start.

As we reported earlier, we used a variety of methods to capture the unsession we hosted at the Canada GeoConvention in May — video, photos, drawings and notes, interviews, a wiki, and an article. This is messy and chaotic, but it's also transparent and open, making it easier to reference and more likely that someone (including us!) can use it.

What other things should we be considering? Here are some ideas:

• Livestreaming. This enables people who couldn't make it to take part in at least one or two sessions via streaming video and social media. It's amazingly effective and can increase the audience by a factor of 5 or more. Even better: at the end of it, you have video of everything!
• Published proceedings. This is something we used to do all the time in geoscience, but it takes a lot of coordination. The GSL is the only body I know of that still manages it regularly. Perhaps a wiki-based publishing approach would be easier to arrange?
• Graphic recording. I have witnessed this a few times, and even tried it myself. In a workshop, it's a terrific way to engage the audience in real time; in a conference, it makes for some great conversation pieces in the break. It's also a brilliant way to listen.
• Podcasting. Having a small team of reporters capture the proceedings in short interviews, video clips, and opinion pieces could be a fun way to engage non-attendees, and leave the event with a record of what went on.
• Code and data. We could experiment with more 'doing' sessions, where code is written, wiki pages are hacked on, data is collected, and so on. The product then is clear: a new code repository, open dataset, or set of wiki pages. This one could be the easiest one to pull off, and the most valuable to the community.

Here's more inspiration: the EGU tweeting its round-up from Vienna this morning:

Looking back at the #EGU2013 - a whole lot of online action, excellent scientists, geo-photos, journals & more ow.ly/lE0jH#GeoQ — EGU (@EuroGeosciences) June 6, 2013

Have you seen unusually effective or innovative ways to record events you've been at? What would you like to see? What would you be prepared to do?

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Update on 2013-06-07 21:51 by Matt Hall

In my inbox today: SEG are offering video of something like 200 talks (of the 1000+) from last year's Annual Meeting. Unfortunately, they're trying to monetize, but at least they're only $0.99. I enjoyed this one on 3D image segmentation live — but haven't tried it online.

The forum that never happened

Recently, I keep seeing this on SEG meeting information:

Note: The mechanical recording of any portion of the [meeting] in any form (photographic, electronic, etc.) is strictly prohibited. Printed reference to the [...] presentations or discussions is not permitted without the consent of the parties involved. All participants are requested to omit public reference to the [...] proceedings in any published work or oral presentation. Only registrants are permitted to attend Forum sessions. Each participant agrees to these regulations when application is accepted [...]

Interesting! 'Regulations' about what a person can and can't say or write about a scientific meeting, a sort of gag order. It goes further: in an attempt to limit what is revealed to the outside world, abstracts are not required at some meetings, only short descriptions. There shall be no evidence of the talk even taking place.

I am convinced that meetings like this are unhelpful, unscientific, and unproductive. Here's why:

We are free. I am a professional scientist and I own my brain. If I want to talk about my field with other professionals, in public if I so wish, then I am entitled to do that. Of course I won't disclose proprietary information, but that's different — proprietary information hasn't been presented at a conference of my competitors.

Public is public. Here's how a forum should work: people should present things they wish to make public. When they're public, they're public, end of story. Asking for secret meetings is like asking for privacy on Facebook. If you want secret, pick up the phone or huddle in dark corners. Or consider the Chatham House Rule.

Secrecy is a bug, not a feature. SEG is a technical society for the advancement of applied geophysics and those who practise it. It's not The Magic Circle. The difference between science and magic is that in science, we do things transparently whenever we can. I know industry is a bit different, but in the interests of innovation and excellence, we need more openness, not less.

No product? No point. If you organize a workshop and there is no tangible outcome — no abstracts, no proceedings (remember those?), no recording — then it's my conviction that there was no point in your workshop, except perhaps for the handful of people who came.

Down with elitism. Surely SEG stands for technical excellence among all of its members, not just the privileged few with the time and resources to write papers and travel to workshops? If you're using the resources of technical societies (their time, attention, and marketing clout) then I believe it's your duty to the membership, and to the science as a whole, to share.

An unsolved problem. Corporate secrecy was identified as one of the top unsolved problems of subsurface science in our recent unsession. So what are we playing at? Are we professionals and scientists or just industrial magicians, selfishly hoarding our ideas and data, and slowing innovation down for everyone? What do you think?

Update on 2013-06-06 12:21 by Matt Hall

Don't miss the follow-up article — Capturing conferences — in which I stop whining and propose some things I think we should be doing. Let us know what you think! 

Proceedings of an unsession

Two weeks ago today Evan and I hosted a different kind of session at the Canada GeoConvention. It was an experiment in collaboration and integration, and I'm happy to say it exceeded our expectations. We will definitely be doing it again, so if you were there, or even if you weren't, any and all feedback will help ensure the dial goes to 11.

One of the things we wanted from the session was evidence. Evidence of conversation, innovation, and creative thinking. We took home a great roll of paper and sticky notes, and have now captured it all in SubSurfWiki, along with notes from the event. You are invited to read and edit. Be bold! And please share the link...

  ageo.co/unsession

The video from the morning is in the editing suite right now: watch for that too.

We have started a write-up of the morning. If you came to the session, please consider yourself a co-author: your input and comments are welcome. You might be unaccustomed to editing a community document, but don't be shy — that's what it's there for. 

We want to share two aspects of the event on the blog. First, the planning and logistics of the session — a cheatsheet for when we (or you!) would like to repeat the experience. Second, the outcomes and insights from it — the actual content. Next time: planning an unsession.

Fitting a model to data

In studying the earth, we can't afford to take enough observations, and they will never be free of noise. So if you say you do geoscience, I hereby challenge you to formulate your work as a mathematical inverse problem. Inversion is a question: given the data, the physical equations, and details of the experiment, what is the distribution of physical properties? To answer this question we must address three more fundamental ones (Scales, Smith, and Treitel, 2001):

• How accurate is the data? Or what does fit mean?
• How accurately can we model the response of the system? Have we included all the physics that can contribute signifcantly to the data?
• What is known about the system independent of the data? There must be a systematic procedure for rejecting unreasonable models that fit the data as well.

Setting up an inverse problem means coming up with the equations that contain the physics and geometry of the system under study. The method for solving it depends on the nature of the system of equations. The simplest is the minimum norm solution, and you've heard of it before, but perhaps under a different name.

To fit is to optimize a system of equations

For problems where the number of observations is greater than the number of unknowns, we want to find which unknowns fit the best. One case you're already familiar with is the method of least squares — you've used it fitting a line of through a set of points. A line is unambiguously described by only two parameters: slope a and y-axis intercept b. These are the unknowns in the problem, they are the model m that we wish to solve for. The problem of line-fitting through a set of points can be written out like this,

As I described in a previous post, the system of the problem takes the form d = Gm, where each row links a data point to an equation of a line. The model vector m (M × 1), is smaller than the data d (N × 1) which makes it an over-determined problem, and G is a N × M matrix holding the equations of the system.

Why cast a system of equations in this matrix form? Well, it turns out that the the best-fit line is precisely,

which are trivial matrix operations, once you've written out G.  T means to take the transpose, and –1 means the inverse, the rest is matrix multiplication. Another name for this is the minimum norm solution, because it defines the model parameters (slope and intercept) for which the lengths (vector norm) between the data and the model are a minimum. 

One benefit that comes from estimating a best-fit model is that you get the goodness-of-fit for free. Which is convenient because making sense of the earth doesn't just mean coming up with models, but also expressing their uncertainty, in terms of the errors with which they are linked.

I submit to you that every problem in geology can be formulated as a mathematical inverse problem. The benefit of doing so is not just to do math for math's sake, but it is only through quantitatively portraying ambiguous inferences and parameterizing non-uniqueness that we can do better than interpreting or guessing. 

Reference (well worth reading!)

Scales, JA, Smith, ML, and Treitel, S (2001). Introductory Geophysical Inverse Theory. Golden, Colorado: Samizdat Press. 

Laying it all out at the Core Conference

Bobbing in the wake of the talks, the Core Conference turned out to be more exemplary of this year's theme, Integration. Best of all were SAGD case studies, where multi-disciplinary experiments are the only way to make sense of the sticky stuff.

Coring through steam

Travis Shackleton from Cenovus did a wonderful presentation showing the impact of bioturbation, facies boundaries, and sedimentary structures on steam chamber evolution in the McMurray Formation at the FCCL project. And because I had the chance to work on this project with ConocoPhillips a few years ago, but didn't, this work induced both jealousy and awe. Their experiment design is best framed as a series of questions:

• What if we drilled, logged, and instrumented two wells only 10 m apart? (Awesome.)
• What if we collected core in both of them? (Double awesome.)
• What if the wells were in the middle of a mature steam chamber? (Triple awesome.)
• What if we collected 3D seismic after injecting all this steam and compare with with a 3D from before? (Quadruple awesome.)

It is the first public display of SAGD-depleted oil sand, made available by an innovation of high-temperature core recovery. Travis pointed to a portion of core that had been rinsed by more than 5 years of steam circulating through it. It had a pale brown color and a residual oil saturation S_O of 15% (bottom sample in the figure). Then he pointed to a segment of core above the top of the steam chamber. It too was depleted, by essentially the same amount. You'd never know just by looking. It was sticky and black and largely unscathed. My eyes were fooled, direct observation deceived.

A bitumen core full of fractures

Jen-Russel-Houston held up a half-tube of core of high-density fractures riddled throughout bitumen saturated rock. The behemoth oil sands that require thermal recovery assistance have an equally promising but lesser known carbonate cousin, still in its infancy. It is the bitumen saturated Grosmont Formation, located to the west of the more mature in-situ projects in sand. The reservoir is entirely dolomite, hosting its own unique structures affecting the spreading of steam and the reduction of bitumen's viscosity to a flowable level.

Jen and her team at OSUM hope their pilot will demonstrate that these fractures serve as transport channels for the steam, allowing it to creep around tight spots in the reservoir, which would otherwise be block the steam in its tracks. These are not the same troubling baffles and barriers caused by mud plugs or IHS, but permeability heterogeneities caused by the dolomitization process. A big question is the effective permeability at the length scales of production, which is phenomenologically different to measurements made from cut core. I overheard a spectator suggest to Jen that she try to freeze a sleeve of core, soak it with acid then rinse the dolomite out the bottom. After which only a frozen sculpture of the bitumen would remain. Crazy? Maybe. Intriguing? Indeed. 

Let's do more science with rocks!

Two impressive experiments, unabashedly and literally laid out for all to see, equipped with clever geologists, and enriched by supplementary technology. Both are thoughtful initiatives—real scientific experiments—that not only make the operating companies more profitable, but also profoundly improve our understanding of a precious resource for society. Two role models for how comprehensive experiments can serve more than just those who conduct them. Integration at its very best, centered on core.

What are the best examples of integrated geoscience that you've seen?

Submitting assumptions for meaningful answers

The best talk of the conference was Ran Bachrach's on seismics for unconventionals. He enthusiastically described the physics to his spectators with conviction and duty, and explained why they should care. Isotropic, VTI, and orthorhombic media anisotropy models are used not because they are right, but because they are simple. If the assumptions you bring to the problem are reasonable, the answers can be considered meaningful. If you haven't considered and tested your assumptions, you haven't subscribed to reason. In a sense, you haven't held up your end of the bargain, and there will never be agreement. This talk should be mandatory viewing for anyone working seismic for unconventionals. Advocacy for reason. Too bad it wasn't recorded.

I am both privileged and obliged to celebrate such nuggets of awesomeness. That's a big reason why I blog. And on the contrary, we should call out crappy talks when we see them to raise the bar. Indeed, to quote Zen Faulkes, "...we should start creating more of an expectation that scientific talks will be reviewed and critiqued. And names will be named."

The talk from HEF Petrophysical entitled, Towards modelling three-dimensional oil sands permeability distribution using borehole image logs, drew me in. I was curious enough to show up. But as the talk unfolded, my curiosity was left unsatisfied. A potentially interesting workflow of transforming high-resolution resistivity measurements into flow permeability was obfuscated with a pointless upscaling step. The meat of anything like this is in the transform itself, but it was missing. It's also the most trivial bit; just cross-plot one property with another and show people. So I am guessing they didn't have any permeability data. If that was the case, how can you stand up and talk about permeability? It was a sandwich without the filling. The essential thing that defines a piece of work is the creativity. The thing you add that wasn't there before. I was disappointed. Disappointed that it was accepted, and that no one else piped up. 

I will paraphrase a conversation I had with Ran at the coffee break: Some are not aware, some choose to ignore, and some forget that works of geoscience are problems of extreme complexity. In fact, the only way we can cope with complexity is to make certain assumptions that make our problem solvable. If all you do is say "here is my solution", you suck. But if instead you ask, "Have I convinced you that my assumptions are reasonable?", it entirely changes the conversation. It entirely changes the specialist's role. Only when you understand your assumptions can we talk about whether the results are reasonable. 

Have you ever felt conflicted on whether or not you should say something?

A really good conversation

Today was Day 2 of the Canada GeoConvention. But... all we had the energy for was the famous Unsolved Problems Unsession. So no real highlights today, just a report from the floor of Room 101.

Today was the day. We slept about as well as two 8-year-olds on Christmas Eve, having been up half the night obsessively micro-hacking our meeting design (right). The nervous anticipation was richly rewarded. About 50 of the most creative, inquisitive, daring geoscientists at the GeoConvention came to the Unsession — mostly on purpose. Together, the group surfaced over 100 pressing questions facing the upstream industry, then filtered this list to 4 wide-reaching problems of integration:

• making the industry more open
• coping with error and uncertainty
• improving seismic resolution
• improving the way our industry is perceived

We owe a massive debt of thanks to our heroic hosts: Greg Bennett, Tannis McCartney, Chris Chalcraft, Adrian Smith, Charlene Radons, Cale White, Jenson Tan, and Tooney Fink. Every one of them far exceeded their brief and brought 100× more clarity and continuity to the conversations than we could have had without them. Seriously awesome people.  

This process of waking our industry up to new ways of collaborating is just beginning. We will, you can be certain, write more about the unsession after we've had a little time to parse and digest what happened.

If you're at the conference, tell us what we missed today!

A revolution in seismic acquisition?

We're in warm, sunny Calgary for the GeoConvention 2013. The conference feels like it's really embracing geophysics this year — in the past it's always felt more geological somehow. Even the exhibition floor felt dominated by geophysics. Someone we spoke to speculated that companies were holding their geological cards close to their chests, but the service companies are still happy to talk about (ahem, promote) their geophysical advances.

Are you at the conference? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

We caught about 15 talks of the 100 or so on offer today. A few of them ignited the old whines about half-cocked proofs of efficacy. Why is it still acceptable to say that a particular seismic volume or inversion result is 'higher resolution' or 'more geological' with nothing more than a couple of sections or timeslices as evidence?

People are excited about designing seismic acquisition expressly for wavefield reconstruction. In a whole session devoted to the subject, for example, Mauricio Sacchi showed how randomization helps with regularization in processing, allowing us to either get better image quality, or to lower cost. It feels like the start of a new wave of innovation in acquisition, which has more than its fair share of recent innovation: multi-component, wide azimuth, dual-sensor, simultaneous source...

Is it a revolution? Or just the fallacy of new things looking revolutionary... until the next new thing? It's intriguing to the non-specialist. People are talking about 'beyond Nyquist' again, but this time without inducing howls of derision. We just spent an hour talking about it, and we think there's something deep going on... we're just not sure how to articulate it yet.

Unsolved problems

We were at the conference today, but really we are focused on the session we're hosting tomorrow morning. Along with a roomful of adventurous conference-goers (you're invited too!), looking for the most pressing questions in subsurface science. We start at 8 a.m. in Telus 101/102 on the main floor of the north building.

What is an unsession?

Yesterday I invited you (yes, you) to our Unsolved Problems Unsession on 7 May in Calgary. What exactly will be involved? We think we can accomplish two things:

1. Brainstorm the top 10, or 20, or 50 most pressing problems in exploration geoscience today. Not limited to but focusing on those problems that affect how well we interface — with each other, with engineers, with financial people, with the public even. Integration problems.
2. Select one or two of those problems and solve them! Well, not solve them, but explore ways to approach solving them. What might a solution be worth? How many disciplines does it touch? How long might it take? Where could we start? Who can help?

There are bright, energetic young people out there looking for relevant problems to work on towards a Master's or PhD. There are entrepreneurs looking for high-value problems to create a new business from. And software companies looking for ways to be more useful and relevant to their users. And there is more than one interpreter wishing that innovation would speed up a bit in our industry and make their work a little — or a lot — easier. 

We don't know where it will lead, but we think this unsession is one way to get some conversations going. This is not a session to dip in and out of — we need 4 hours of your time. Bring your experience, your uniqueness, and your curiosity.

Let's reboot our imaginations about what we can do in our science.

An invitation to a brainstorm

Who of us would not be glad to lift the veil behind which the future lies hidden; to cast a glance at the next advances of our science and at the secrets of its development during future centuries? What particular goals will there be toward which the leading [geoscientific] spirits of coming generations will strive? What new methods and new facts in the wide and rich field of [geoscientific] thought will the new centuries disclose?

— Adapted from David Hilbert (1902). Mathematical Problems, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 8 (10), p 437–479. Originally appeared in in Göttinger Nachrichten, 1900, pp. 253–297.

Back at the end of October, just before the SEG Annual Meeting, I did some whining about conferences: so many amazing, creative, energetic geoscientists, doing too much listening and not enough doing. The next day, I proposed some ways to make conferences for productive — for us as scientists, and for our science itself. 

Evan and I are chairing a new kind of session at the Calgary GeoConvention this year. What does ‘new kind of session’ mean? Here’s the lowdown:

The Unsolved Problems Unsession at the 2013 GeoConvention will transform conference attendees, normally little more than spectators, into active participants and collaborators. We are gathering 60 of the brightest, sparkiest minds in exploration geoscience to debate the open questions in our field, and create new approaches to solving them. The nearly 4-hour session will look, feel, and function unlike any other session at the conference. The outcome will be a list of real problems that affect our daily work as subsurface professionals — especially those in the hard-to-reach spots between our disciplines. Come and help shed some light, room 101, Tuesday 7 May, 8:00 till 11:45.

What you can do

• Where does your workflow stumble? Think up the most pressing unsolved problems in your workflows — especially ones that slow down collaboration between the disciplines. They might be organizational, they might be technological, they might be scientific.
• Put 7 May in your calendar and come to our session! Better yet, bring a friend. We can accommodate about 60 people. Be one of the first to experience a new kind of session!
• If you would like to help host the event, we're looking for 5 enthusiastic volunteers to play a slightly enlarged role, helping guide the brainstorming and capture the goodness. You know who you are. Email hello@agilegeoscience.com.