Looking forward to EAGE

Evan, Diego and I are flying to Paris today for the EAGE Conference and Exhibition. It's exciting. We're excited. 

But the excitement starts before the conference. The Subsurface Hackathon is this weekend!

My diary

Even the hackathon excitement starts before the weekend, because tomorrow, Friday, we're running the hacker's bootcamp — a sort of short course appetizer for the hackathon. We have about 25 geoscientists coming to the Booster TOTAL (an event space at TOTAL's La Défense offices) to get some hands-on practice with Python and the latest in machine learning tools. It's especially exciting because we'll also have engineers from NVIDIA on hand to help with the coaching. The idea is to help people hit the ground running when the hackathon starts on Saturday.

After that, on Saturday and Sunday,  it's the hackathon itself. We have no fewer than 60 geoscientists and engineers registered for this breakout event. They're coming to the Booster to work on a wide array of machine learning ideas for the subsurface. It's going to be epic. You can read all about what happens next week, I promise. 

Then on Monday it's the Data Science for Geoscience workshop, at which I'm giving a keynote. Since I'm far from possessing expertise, I'm using it as a chance to get people jazzed about helping make the coming AI revolution in geoscience a positive experience. I'm really looking forward to it.

The conference itself starts on Tuesday. In the afternoon I'm co-chairing a session on machine learning (have you spotted the theme yet?) in seismic interpretation, along with Victor Aare of Schlumberger. It will be awesome to see what kind of progress our community is making in this field — it's fun to imagine what seismic interpretation might be like in a few years. There are so many fascinating problems to work on! Here are the talks in that session:

• H Di, M Shafiq and G AlRegib (Georgia Institute of Technology), Multi-attribute K-means Cluster Analysis for Salt Boundary Detection
• H Hashemi et al. (Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran), Clustering Seismic Datasets for Optimized Facies Analysis Using a SSCSOM Technique
• S Hadiloo et al. (Research Institute of Applied Sciences, ACECR), Seismic Facies Analysis by ANFIS and Fuzzy Clustering Methods to Extract Channel Patterns
• A Waldeland and A Solberg (University of Oslo), Salt Classification Using Deep Learning
• H Di & G AlRegib (Georgia Institute of Technology), Seismic Multi-attribute Classification for Salt Boundary Detection - A Comparison
• P Xu, W Lu and B Wang (Tsinghua University), Multi-Attribute Classification Based On Sparse Autoencoder - A Gas Chimney Detection Example
• Y Alaudah and G AlRegib (Georgia Institute of Technology), Weakly Supervised Seismic Structure Labeling via Orthogonal Non-Negative Matrix Factorization
• J Amtmann et al. (University of Leoben/ Geo5 GmbH), Testing of Clustering Algorithms on Different 3D Seismic Models
• R Noemani Rad and G Gharabeigli (NIOC Research & Technology Directorate), Half Graben Evolution in the Kopet Dagh Fold-and-thrust Belt - Sedimentation and Pale Current History

On Wednesday we'll be taking in some more talks and posters, then in the afternoon I'm reprising my keynote talk at IFPEN, a subsurface research institute in the Bois de Boulogne. I've never been there before, although I have met a few IFP scientists before. I'm looking forward to it very much. 

It all ends for us on Thursday. Evan and Diego fly home and I'm off to Cambridge (the old one in the fens, not the one in Massachusetts) for a few days with family (and bookshops). Until then, expect much blogging!

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Going to EAGE?

If you're reading this and would like to meet up with us at Agile or some of the Software Underground crowd — the friendliest bunch of coding geoscientists you could hope for — let's plan to meet at the end of the workshop, at the workshop location. Look for the Software Underground shirts.