I can't believe it's been a month since my last post! But I've now recovered from the craziness of the spring — with its two hackathons, two conferences, two new experiments, as well as the usual courses and client projects — and am ready to start getting back to normal. My goal with this post is to tell you all the exciting stuff that's happened in the last few weeks.Meet our newest team memberThere's a new…

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Last week we released Code Show version 1.0. In a new experiment, we teamed up with Total and the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers at the EAGE Annual Conference and Exhibition in Copenhagen. Our goal was to bring a little of the hackathon to as many conference delegates as possible. We succeeded in reaching a few hundred people over the three days, making a lot of new friends in the process. See the action in…

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Huge news for data scientists and educators. Equinor, the company formerly known as Statoil, has taken a bold step into the open data arena. On Thursday last week, it 'disclosed' all of its subsurface and production data for the Volve oil field, located in the North Sea. What's in the data package?A lot! The 40,000-file package contains 5TB of data, that's 5,000GB! This collection is substantially larger, both deeper and broader, than any other open subsurface dataset…

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The Copenhagen edition of the Subsurface Hackathon is over! For three days during the warmest June in Denmark for over 100 years, 63 geoscientists and programmers cooked up hot code in the Rainmaking Loft, one of the coolest, and warmest, coworking spaces you've ever seen. As always, every one of the participants brought their A game, and the weekend flew by in a blur of creativity, coffee, and collaboration. And croissants. Pierre enjoying the Meta…

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We're in Copenhagen for the Subsurface Bootcamp and Hackathon, which start today, and the EAGE Annual Conference and Exhibition, which starts next week. Walking around the city yesterday, basking in warm sunshine and surrounded by sun-giddy Scandinavians, it became clear that Copenhagen is a pretty special place, where northern Europe and southern Europe seem to have equal influence.The event this weekend promises to be the biggest hackathon yet. It's our 10th, so I think we…

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The Salt Lake City hackathon â€” only the second we've done with a strong geology theme — is a thing of history, but you can still access the event page to check out who showed up and who did what. (This events page is a new thing we launched in time for this hackathon; it will serve as a public document of what happens at our events, in addition to being a platform for people to register,…

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Wednesday was a good day. Over 150 participants came to Room 251 for all or part of the first 'unsession' at the AAPG Annual Conference and Exhibition in Salt Lake City. I was one of the hosts of the event, and emceed the afternoon. In a nutshell, it was awesome. I have facilitated unsessions before, but this event was on a new scale. Twelve tables of 8–10 seats — covered in sticky notes, stickers, coloured…

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Thirty geoscientist-coders swarmed into Salt Lake City this past weekend to hack at Church & State, a co-working space in a converted church. There, we spent two days appealing to the almighty power of machine learning.Nine teams worked on the usual rich variety of projects around the theme. Projects included AIs that pick unconformities, natural language processing to describe stratigraphy, and designing an open data platform in service of machine learning. I'll do a run-down of the…

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Most sessions at your average conference are about results — the conclusions and insights from completed research projects. But at AAPG this year, there's another kind of session, about beginnings. The 'Unsession' is back!   Machine Learning Unsession   Room 251 B/C, 1:15 pm, Wednesday 23 MayThe topic is machine learning in geoscience. My hope is that there's a lot of emphasis on geological problems, especially in stratigraphy. But we don't know exactly where it will go,…

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An orienteer leaving a control site.  If you love studying maps or solving puzzles, and you love being outside, then orienteering — the thinking runner's sport — might be the sport you've been looking for.There are many, many flavours of orienteering (on foot, on skis, in kayaks, etc), but here's how it generally works:Competitors make their way to an event, perhaps on a weekday evening, maybe a weekend morning.Several courses are offered, varying in length…

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