The Only Moat worthy for a Geologists Lair

Did you ever wonder how to protect your lair once you turn to the dark side? (Listen up Elon) Randal Munroe of xkcd fame collaborated with Minute Physics to solve this problem. How to build a Lava Moat: It’s a collaboration to promote the new book “How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems“. […]

Kaggle Days SF Group Photo

Kaggle Days Two – Googling in San Francisco

Have you met our Lord and Saviour AutoML? Day two of the Kaggle Days was, what it had to be, a competition. Very interesting to be in a room with Grandmasters, Pros and then there’s me. But the real struggle was for everyone to compete with the AutoML solutions by Google and H2O.ai. One of […]

A Week in Tech Heaven – Googling in San Francisco [1/3]

So am I understanding this correct: You are here for a $1600 conference. And it’s not for work. This is your free time? Yes. I recently travelled to San Francisco to attend the Google Next conference. Clearly neither a scientific conference nor related to geophysics. And also clearly, the immigration officer was not particularly on […]

Geysers in Slow Motion

Geysirs are a force of nature. Even as a kid I knew about Old Faithful and mind you it’s across the Atlantic for me. A natural system that produces a clock like massive effect just seems magical. Luckily, the YouTube channel “Slow Mo Guys” went to Iceland and filmed a Geysir. The name may give […]

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 […]

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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 […]

Preprints – What’s the worst that could happen?

Early career scientists are laying the building blocks of their career. Giving away your best ideas for free and everyone to read can seem risky. Pre-prints, on the surface, may look just like that, but are they? Pre-print servers like EarthArXiv are sprouting in many scientific disciplines. They proclaim the benefits of research being cited […]

I placed 1300th on Kaggle and it’s amazing!

I placed 1360 in a deep learning competition and here’s why that is a win in my book. I spend too much time on social media, but this time I was lucky. I checked my feed on LinkedIn quickly and saw an announcement from TGS a seismic contractor. They had teamed up with Kaggle, a […]

Culture Neutral - CC-BY Karl-Ludwig Poggemann

Data Is Not Neutral

  I like data driven processes. You’ve seen me drum on about CRS and Full-Waveform Inversion. Sometimes we like to pretend that data is pure. Well , it’s noisy and full of kinks but if we process it just right, we extract the truth. Turns out that is a little bit wrong. The data collection […]