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 […]
Category Archives: Science
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 […]
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 […]
SEG-Y sucks! Or does it?
Many a times I have been cursing, when I got a new seismic file. Be it a 2D line, 3D cubes or pre-stack data, the standard is seldomly adhered to by most companies. The Standard SEGY as defined by the standard is now in revision 2. Most standards will likely be rev1 in these days. […]
Geophysical Assumptions
If you assume you make an ASS of yoU and ME. That may be true in personal connections, but assumptions are necessary in physics. Particularly, geophysics needs all the assumptions it can get. The subsurface isn’t exactly nice, giving us data. We can only look from one side (mostly). The Earth itself filters our signal, […]
Uncertainty in Geoscience – Bayes and Expert opinions
In geoscience we’re not all that great with uncertainty. Since everything is uncertain, calculating the error margins in geoscience itself is often neglected. However, a geologist is perfectly suited to understand Bayes theorem, a little tool that statisticians swoon over. I haven’t been on too many field trips, however, most of the time it would […]
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 […]
Did Quantum Physics solve Seismic Inverse theory? – A SEG Honorary Lecture
Short answer: kind of yes. Keep reading anyways. I passed by the poster of announcements and read “Full-wavefield …” and figured that talk might be outside of the realm of what I understand. Anyone working in FWI has always been clear that it is very complicated. So I never tried. But this was the Honorary […]
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 […]
