The FORCE Machine Learning Hackathon last week generated hundreds of new relationships and nine new projects, including seven new open source tools. Here’s the full run-down, in no particular order…Predicting well rates in real time Team Virtual Flow Metering: Nils Barlaug, Trygve Karper, Stian Laagstad, Erlend Vollset (all from Cognite) and Emil Hansen (AkerBP). Tech: Cognite Data Platform, scikit-learn. GitHub repo.Project: An engineer from AkerBP brought a problem: testing the rate from a well reduces…

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At our first machine-learning-themed hackathon, in New Orleans in 2015, we had fifteen hackers. TImes were hard in the industry. Few were willing or able to compe out and play. Well, it’s now clear that times have changed! After two epic ML hacks last year (in Paris and Houston), at which we hosted about 115 scientists, it’s clear this year is continuing the trend. Indeed, by the end of 2018 we expect to have welcomed…

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Geology is a descriptive science, which is to say, geologists are label-makers. We record observations by assigning labels to data. Labels can either be numbers or they can be words. As such, of the numerous tasks that machine learning is fit for attacking, supervised classification problems are perhaps the most accessible – the most intuitive – for geoscientists. Take data that already has labels. Build a model that learns the relationships between the data and labels.…

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No, of course there aren't.  Balance! The scourge of modern news. CC-BY by SkepticalScience.com Unless... unless you're a journalist, perhaps. Then a bit of pseudoscience can provide some much-needed balance — just to be fair! — to the monotonic barrage of boring old scientific consensus. Now you can write stories about flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, homeopathy, or the benefits of climate change!*So far, so good. It's fun to pillory the dimwits who think the moon landings were…

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In October we're hosting our first 'code sprint'! What is that?A code sprint is a type of hackathon, in which efforts are focused around a small number of open source projects. They are related to, but not really the same as, sprints in the Scrum software development framework. They are non-competitive — the only goal is to improve the software in question, whether it's adding functionality, fixing bugs, writing tests, improving documentation, or doing any of the…

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This tweet from the Ecological Society of America conference was interesting:I am currently moderating a session at #ESA2018 and was instructed by @ESA_org to ask the audience not to take photos of the presentations. This is all backwards,”. Presenters should have an opt-out “no-tweet” option instead, like @BritishEcolSoc does, not a mandatory “no-tweet” pic.twitter.com/PE8nNDwm06— Rob Salguero-Gómez (@DRobcito) August 7, 2018 This kind of thing is now new — many conferences have 'No photos' signs around…

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The latest Geophysical Tutorial came out this week in The Leading Edge. It's by my friend Gram Ganssle, and it's about neural networks. Although the example in the article is not, strictly speaking, a deep net (it only has one hidden layer), it concisely illustrates many of the features of deep learning.Whilst editing the article, it struck me that some of the features of deep learning are really features of life. Maybe humans can learn…

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Click here to visit the Google Doc write-up Back in May, I co-hosted a different kind of conference session — an 'unsession' — at the AAPG Annual Conference and Exhibition in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was successful in achieving its main goal, which was to show the geoscience community and AAPG organizers a new way of collaborating, networking, and producing tangible outcomes from conference sessions.It also succeeded in drawing out hundreds of ideas and…

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In Part 1, I wrote about six of the projects teams contributed at the Subsurface Hackathon in Copenhagen in June. Today I want to tell you about the rest of them. A data exploration toolTeam GeoClusterFu...n: Dan Stanton (University of Leeds), Filippo Broggini (ETH Zürich), Francois Bonneau (Nancy), Danny Javier Tapiero Luna (Equinor), Sabyasachi Dash (Cairn India), Nnanna Ijioma (geophysicist). Tech: Plotly Dash. GitHub repo.Project: The team set out to build an interactive web app — a…

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It's finally here! The round-up of projects from the Subsurface Hacakthon in Copenhagen last month. This is the first of two posts presenting the teams and their efforts, in the same random order the teams presented them at the end of the event.Subsurface data meets Pokemon GoTeam Geo Go: Karine Schmidt, Max Gribner, Hans Sturm (all from Wintershall), Stine Lærke Andersen (University of Copenhagen), Ole Johan Hornenes (University of Bergen), Per Fjellheim (Emerson), Arne Kjetil…

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