PRESS START

The dust has settled from the Subsurface Hackathon 2016 in Vienna, which coincided with EAGE's 78th Conference and Exhibition (some highlights). This post builds on last week's quick summary with more detailed descriptions of the teams and what they worked on. If you want to contact any of the teams, you should be able to track them down via the links to Twitter and/or GitHub.

A word before I launch into the projects. None of the participants had built a game before. Many were relatively new to programming — completely new in one or two cases. Most of the teams were made up of people who had never worked together on a project before; indeed, several team mates had never met before. So get ready to be impressed, maybe even amazed, at what members of our professional community can do in 2 days with only mild provocation and a few snacks.

Traptris

An 8-bit-style video game, complete with music, combining Tetris with basin modeling.

Team: Chris Hamer, Emma Blott, Natt Turner (all MSc students at the University of Leeds), Jesper Dramsch (PhD student, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen). GitHub repo.

Tech: Python, with PyGame.

Details: The game is just like Tetris, except that the blocks have lithologies: source, reservoir, and seal. As you complete a row, it disappears, as usual. But in this game, the row reappears on a geological cross-section beside the main game. By completing further rows with just-right combinations of lithologies, you build an earth model. When it's deep enough, and if you've placed sources rocks in the model, the kitchen starts to produce hydrocarbons. These migrate if they can, and are eventually trapped — if you've managed to build a trap, that is. The team impressed the judges with their solid gamplay and boisterous team spirit. Just installing PyGame and building some working code was an impressive feat for the least experienced team of the hackathon.

Prize: We rewarded this rambunctious team for their creative idea, which it's hard to imagine any other set of human beings coming up with. They won Samsung Gear VR headsets, so I'm looking forward to the AR version of the game.

Flappy Trace

A ridiculously addictive seismic interpretation game. "So seismic, much geology".

Team: Håvard Bjerke (Roxar, Oslo), Dario Bendeck (MSc student, Leeds), and Lukas Mosser (PhD student, Imperial College London).

Tech: Python, with PyGame. GitHub repo.

Details: You start with a trace on the left of the screen. More traces arrive, slowly at first, from the right. The controls move the approaching trace up and down, and the pick point is set as it moves across the current trace and off the screen. Gradually, an interpretation is built up. It's like trying to fly along a seismic horizon, one trace at a time. The catch is that the better you get, the faster it goes. All the while, encouragements and admonishments flash up, with images of the doge meme. Just watching someone else play is weirdly mesmerizing.

Prize: The judges wanted to recognize this team for creating such a dynamic, addictive game with real personality. They won DIY Gamer kits and an awesome book on programming Minecraft with Python.

Guess What!

Human seismic inversion. The player must guess the geology that produces a given trace.

Team: Henrique Bueno dos Santos, Carlos Andre (both UNICAMP, Sao Paolo), and Steve Purves (Euclidity, Spain)

Tech: Python web application, on Flask. It even used Agile's nascent geo-plotting library, g3.js, which I am pretty excited about. GitHub repo. You can even play the game online!

Details: This project was on a list of ideas we crowdsourced from the Software Underground Slack, and I really hoped someone would give it a try. The team consisted of a postdoc, a PhD student, and a professional developer, so it's no surprise that they managed a nice implementation. The player is presented with a synthetic seismic trace and must place reflection coefficients that will, she hopes, forward model to match the trace. She may see how she's progressing only a limited number of times before submitting her final answer, which receives a score. There are so many ways to control the game play here, I think there's a lot of scope for this one.

Prize: This team impressed everyone with the far-reaching implications of the game — and the rich possibilities for the future. They were rewarded with SparkFun Digital Sandboxes and a copy of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.

DiamondChaser

aka DiamonChaser (sic). A time- and budget-constrained drilling simulator aimed at younger players.

Team: Paul Gabriel, Björn Wieczoreck, Daniel Buse, Georg Semmler, and Jan Gietzel (all at GiGa infosystems, Freiberg)

Tech: TypeScript, which compiles to JS. BitBucket repo. You can play the game online too!

Details: This tight-knit group of colleagues — all professional developers, but using unfamiliar technology — produced an incredibly polished app for the demo. The player is presented with a blank cross section, and some money. After choosing what kind of drill bit to start with, the drilling begins and the subsurface is gradually revealed. The game is then a race against the clock and the ever-diminishing funds, as diamonds and other bonuses are picked up along the way. The team used geological models from various German geological surveys for the subsurface, adding a bit of realism.

Prize: Everyone was impressed with the careful design and polish of the app this team created, and the quiet industry they brought to the event. They each won a CellAssist OBD2 device and a copy of Charles Petzold's Code.

Some of the participants waiting for the judges to finish their deliberations. Standing, from left: Håvard Bjerke, Henrique Bueno dos Santos, Steve Purves. Seated: Jesper Dramsch, Lukas Mosser, Natt Turner, Emma Blott, Dario Bendeck, Carlos André, Björn Wieczoreck, Paul Gabriel.

Credits and acknowledgments

Thank you to all the hackers for stepping into the unknown and coming along to the event. I think it was everyone's first hackathon. It was an honour to meet everyone. Special thanks to Jesper Dramsch for all the help on the organizational side, and to Dragan Brankovic for taking care of the photography.

The Impact HUB Vienna was a terrific venue, providing us with multiple event spaces and plenty of room to spread out. HUB hosts Steliana and Laschandre were a great help. Der Mann produced the breakfasts. Il Mare pizzeria provided lunch on Saturday, and Maschu Maschu on Sunday.

Thank you to Kristofer Tingdahl, CEO of dGB Earth Sciences and a highly technical, as well as thoughtful, geoscientist. He graciously agreed to act as a judge for the demos, and I think he was most impressed with the quality of the teams' projects.

Last but far from least, a huge Thank You to the sponsor of the event, EMC, the cloud computing firm that was acquired by Dell late last year. David Holmes, the company's CTO (Energy) was also a judge, making an amazing opportunity for the hackers to show off their skills, and sense of humour, to a progressive company with big plans for our industry.

Automated interpretation highlights

As you probably know by know, I've been at the EAGE conference in Vienna this week. I skipped out yesterday and flew over to the UK for a few days. I have already written plenty about the open source workshop, and I will write more soon about the hackathon. But I thought I'd pass on my highlights from the the Automated Interpretation session on Tuesday. In light of Monday's discussion, I made a little bit of a nuisance of myself by asking the same post-paper question every time I got the chance:

Can I use your code, either commercially or for free?

I'll tell you what the authors responded.

---

The universal character of salt

I especially enjoyed the presentation by Anders Waldeland and Anne Solberg (University of Oslo) on automatically detecting salt in 3D seismic. (We've reported on Anne Solberg's work before.) Anders described training eight different classifiers, from a simple nearest mean to a neural network, a supprt vector model, and a mixture of Gaussians classifier. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the simplest model turned out to be the most effective at discrimination. He also tried a great many seismic attributes, letting the model choose the best ones. Three attributes consistently proved most useful: coherency, Haralick energy (a GLCM-based texture attribute), and the variance of the kurtosis of the amplitude distribution (how's that for meta?). What was especially interesting about his approach was that he was training the models on one dataset, and predicting on an entirely different 3D. The idea is that this might reveal the universal seismic characteristics of salt. When I asked the golden question, he said "Come and talk to me", which isn't a "yes", but it isn't a "no" either.

Waldeland and Solberg 2016. Salt probability in a North Sea dataset (left) and the fully tracked volume (right). The prediction model was trained on a Gulf of Mexico dataset. Copyright of the authors and EAGE, and used under a Fair Use claim.

Secret horizon tracker

Horizons tracked with Figueiredo et al's machine learning algorithm. The horizons correctly capture the discontinuities. Copyright of the authors and EAGE. Used under a Fair Use claim.

The most substantial piece of machine learning I saw was Eduardo Figueiredo from Pontifical Catholic University in Rio, in the same session as Waldeland. He's using a neural net called Growing Neural Gas to classify (aka or 'label') the input data in a number of different ways. This training step takes a little time. The label sets can now be compared to decide on the similarity between two samples, based on the number of labels the samples have in common but also including a comparison to the original seed, which essentially acts as a sort of brake to stop things running away. This progresses the pick. If a decision can't be reached, a new global seed is selected randomly. If that doesn't work, picking stops. Unfortunately he did not show a comparison to an ordinary autotracker, either in terms of time or quality, but the results did look quite good. The work was done 'in cooperation with Petrobras', so it's not surprising the code is not available. I was a bit surprised that Figueiredo was even unable to share any details of the implementation.

More on interpretation

The other two interesting talks in the session were two from Paul de Groot (dGB Earth Sciences) and Gaynor Paton (GeoTeric). Paul introduced the new Thalweg Tracker in OpendTect — the only piece of software from the session that you can actually run, albeit for a fee — which is a sort of conservative voxel tracker. Unsurprisingly, Paul was also very thorough with his examples, and his talk served as a tutorial in how to make use of, and give attribution to, open data. (I'm nearly done with the grumbling about openness for now, I promise, but I can't help mentioning that I find it a bit ironic that those scientists unwilling to share their work are also often a bit lax with giving credit to others whose work they depend on.)

Gaynor's talk was about colour, which you may know we enjoy thinking about. She had gathered 24 seismic interpreters, five of whom had some form of colour deficiency. She gave the group some interpretation tasks, and tried to gauge their performance in the tasks. It seemed interesting enough, and I immediately wondered if we could help out with Pick This, especially to help grow the sample size, and by blinding the study. But the conclusion seemed to be that, if there are ways in which colour blind interpreters are less capable at image interpretation, for example where hue is important, they compensate for it by interpreting other aspects, such as contrast and shape. 

Paton's research into how colour deficient people interpret attributes. There were 5 colour deficient subjects and 19 colour normal. The colour deficient subjects were more senstive to subtle changes in saturation and to feature shapes. Image copyright Paton and EAGE, and used here under a fair use claim.

That's it for now. I have a few other highlights to share; I'll try to get to them next week. There was a bit of buzz around the Seismic Apparition talks from ETHZ and Statoil, for example. If you were at the conference, I'd love to hear your highlights too, please share them in the comments.

References

A.U. Waldeland* (University of Oslo) & A.H.S. Solberg (University of Oslo). 3D Attributes and Classification of Salt Bodies on Unlabelled Datasets. 78th EAGE Conference & Exhibition 2016. DOI 10.3997/2214-4609.201600880. Available in EarthDoc.

M. Pelissier (Dagang Zhaodong Oil Company), C. Yu (Dagang Zhaodong Oil Company), R. Singh (dGB Earth Sciences), F. Qayyum (dGB Earth Sciences), P. de Groot* (dGB Earth Sciences) & V. Romanova (dGB Earth Sciences). Thalweg Tracker - A Voxel-based Auto-tracker to Map Channels and Associated Margins. 78th EAGE Conference & Exhibition 2016. DOI 10.3997/2214-4609.201600879. Available in EarthDoc. 

G. Paton* (GeoTeric). The Effect of Colour Blindness on Seismic Interpretation. 78th EAGE Conference & Exhibition 2016. DOI 10.3997/2214-4609.201600883. Available in EarthDoc.

A.M. Figueiredo* (Tecgraf / PUC-Rio), J.P. Peçanha (Tecgraf / PUC-Rio), G.M. Faustino (Tecgraf / PUC-Rio), P.M. Silva (Tecgraf / PUC-Rio) & M. Gattass (Tecgraf / PUC-Rio). High Quality Horizon Mapping Using Clustering Algorithms. 78th EAGE Conference & Exhibition 2016. DOI 10.3997/2214-4609.201600878. Available in EarthDoc.

Open source geoscience is _________________

As I wrote yesterday, I was at the Open Source Geoscience workshop at EAGE Vienna 2016 on Monday. Happily, the organizers made time for discussion. However, what passes for discussion in the traditional conference setting is, as I've written before, stilted.

What follows is not an objective account of the proceedings. It's more of a poorly organized collection of soundbites and opinions with no real conclusion... so it's a bit like the actual discussion itself.

TL;DR The main take home of the discussion was that our community does not really know what to do with open source software. We find it difficult to see how we can give stuff away and still make loads of money. 

I'm not giving away my stuff

Paraphrasing a Schlumberger scientist:

Schlumberger sponsors a lot of consortiums, but the consortiums that will deliver closed source software are our favourites.

I suppose this is a way to grab competitive advantage, but of course there are always the other consortium members so it's hardly an exclusive. A cynic might see this position as a sort of reverse advantage — soak up the brightest academics you can find for 3 years, and make sure their work never sees the light of day. If you patent it, you can even make sure no-one else gets to use the ideas for 20 years. You don't even have to use the work! I really hope this is not what is going on.

I loved the quote Sergey Fomel shared; paraphrasing Matthias Schwab, his former advisor at Stanford: 

Never build things you can't take with you.

My feeling is that if a consortium only churns out closed source code, then it's not too far from being a consulting shop. Apart from the cheap labour, cheap resources, and no corporation tax.

Yesterday, in the talks in the main stream, I asked most of the presenters how people in the audience could go and reproduce, or simply use, their work. The only thing that was available was a commerical OpendTect plugin of dGB's, and one free-as-in-beer MATLAB utility. Everything else was unavailble for any kind of inspection, and in one case the individual would not even reveal the technology framework they were using.

Support and maintenance

Paraphrasing a Saudi Aramco scientist:

There are too many bugs in open source, and no support. 

The first point is, I think, a fallacy. It's like saying that Wikipedia contains inaccuracies. I'd suggest that open source code has about the same number of bugs as proprietary software. Software has bugs. Some people think open source is less buggy; as Linus Torvalds said: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." Kristofer Tingdahl (dGB) pointed out that the perceived lack of support is a business opportunity for open source community. Another participant mentioned the importance of having really good documentation. That costs money of course, which means finding ways for industry to support open source software development.

The same person also said something like:

[Open source software] changes too quickly, with new versions all the time.

...which says a lot about the state of application management in many corporations and, again, may represent opportunity rather than a threat to open source movement.

Only in this industry (OK, maybe a couple of others) will you hear the impassioned cry, "Less change!" 

The fog of torpor

When a community is falling over itself to invent new ways to do things, create new value for people, and find new ways to get paid, few question the sharing and re-use of information. And by 'information' I mean code and data, not a few PowerPoint slides. Certainly not all information, but lots. I don't know which is the cause and which is the effect, but the correlation is there.

In a community where invention is slow, on the other hand, people are forced to be more circumspect, and what follows is a cynical suspicion of the motives of others. Here's my impression of the dynamic in the room during the discussion on Monday, and of course I'm generalizing horribly:

• Operators won't say what they think in front of their competitors
• Vendors won't say what they think in front of their customers and competitors
• Academics won't say what they think in front of their consortium customers sponsors
• Students won't say what they think in front of their advisors and potential employers

This all makes discussion a bit stilted. But it's not impossible to have group discussions in spite of these problems. I think we achieved a real, honest conversation in the two Unsessions we're done in Calgary, and I think the model we used would work perfectly in all manner of non-technical and in technical settings. We just have to start doing it. Why our convention organizers feel unable to try new things at conferences is beyond me.

I can't resist finishing on something a person at Chevron said at the workshop:

I'm from Chevron. I was going to say something earlier, but I thought maybe I shouldn't.

This just sums our industry up.