Juneteenth 2020

Here at The Way of the Geophysicists, we have written about social justice before. Today marks Juneteenth. The day of slave liberation in the United States, where a lot of our readers come from. After the death of George Floyd and ongoing deaths through police brutality of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, … [I […]

Seismic I/O, Open Source, and Deep Double Descent – Friday Faves

This week in our Friday Faves, we have a new Python package for seismic compression and input/output, a conversation on the merits and caveats of open source and the confirmation that more data sometimes hurts machine learning models. Seismic Compression and I/O Equinor anounced the Python version of a compression algorithm for seismic data that […]

Keynote Bonanza and No Coffee – The EAGE / PESGB ML Workshop

Last month EAGE and PESGB organized the first machine learning workshop in geoscience in Europe. Clearly, I had every intention of going. And obviously, I met many of my favourite co-conspirators there, when I did. The workshop was divided between a day of keynotes and a day of technical talks. The keynotes accompanied the PETEX […]

By rawpixel on Unsplash

The Good, The Bad, The Weird – 2018 SEG Meeting

The SEG Annual Meeting 2018 in Anaheim, California has concluded. This was my first SEG and I can only compare it to the EAGE Exhibition and Conference I attended. There was light. There was shade. There were oddities. The Light Let’s talk about the light. You may have noticed that I am fully riding the […]

Cheaper Deep Learning by Transfer Learning Cats to Seismic [SEG Conference 2018]

This years SEG I got the opportunity to present some of my work on transfer learning. In automatic seismic interpretation, progress is preceived as incremental already, although the field has only been established fairly recently. It was shown with new deep neural networks, usually convolutional neural networks, that reproducing human seismic interpretation is possible. This […]

CC-BY-SA Pablormier DE

Making Full-Waveform Inversion Uncool again

You know what’s hype? Full-waveform inversion. If you’re in geophysics specifically involved in some sort of inversion, you want to be doing FWI. It’s what the cool kids do. You know what’s the problem? Cool kids really like to be an exclusive club. The same thing is happening in Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Fast.ai […]

Noise CC-BY Kevin Dooley

What’s with the noise?

We often only look at reflection data in a stack. But, along the way a lot of “noise” has been processed out of the seismic data to chisel out the “signal”. It’s all about signal against noise. However, one person’s noise may just be another person’s signal. Let me elaborate. If you’ve been around during […]

Challenges in Machine Learning

Geoscience and Machine Learning – EAGE 2017 Workshop

Is it data science? Machine learning? Big Data? Deep learning? Fancy math? Or just chalked up statistics with enough data? This Monday marked the start of the EAGE 2017 in Paris for me. If you have read this blog or the EAGE Student Newsletter before, you may have seen that I am some sort of […]