I'm thrilled to introduce the latest book in the 52 Things series!52 More Things You Should Know About Palaeontology is out. You can buy it direct from us, on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, and it will soon be available all over the world via Amazon's other stores.In common with all the books from Agile Libre, it is a scholarly text with some weird features. For example:It's fun and easy to read. Each of the 52 essays is…

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Sometimes you have to swallow your fear. This is one of those times.The proliferation of 3D seismic in the 1980s was a major step forward for the petroleum industry. However, it took more than a decade for the 3D seismic method to become popular. During that decade, seismic equipment continued to evolve, particularly with the advent of telemetry recording systems that needed for doing 3D surveys offshore.Things were never the same again. New businesses sprouted up…

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Following on from Part 1 yesterday, here are the other seven team projects from the hackathon: Interactive visualization of Water Table heights over many years. Water, water everywhereWater Underground: Martin Bentley (NMMU), Joseph Barraud (Rolls Royce), Rabah Cheknoun (UPPA)The team built readers for the groundwater data available from dinoloket.nl, both the groundwater levels and the hydrochemistry. They clustered the data by aggregating by month and then looking for similarities in levels in the boreholes and built…

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The dust has settled from the Hackathon in Paris two weeks ago. Been there, done that, came home with the T-shirt.In the same random order they presented their 4-minute demos to our panel of esteemed judges, I present a (very) abbreviated round-up of what the teams made together over the course of the weekend. With the exception of a few teams who managed to spontaneously nucleate before the hackathon, most of these teams were comprised of…

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Agile has been reverberating inside the machine learning echo chamber this past week at EAGE. The hackathon's theme was machine learning, Monday's workshop was all about machine learning. And Matt was also supposed to be co-chairing the session on Applications of machine learning for seismic interpretation with Victor Aare of Schlumberger, but thanks to a power-cut and subsequent rescheduling, he found himself double-booked so, lucky me, he invited me to sit in his stead. Here are my…

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We're at EAGE in Paris. I'm sitting in a corner of the exhibition because the power is out in the main hall, so all the talks for the afternoon have been postponed. The poor EAGE team must be beside themselves, I feel for them. (Note to future event organizers: white boards!)Yesterday Diego, Evan, and I — along with lots of hackathon participants — were at the Data Science for Geosciences workshop, an all-day machine learning…

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It happened! The Subsurface Hackathon drew to a magnificent close on Sunday, in an intoxicating cloud of code, creativity, coffee, and collaboration. It will take some beating. Nine months in gestation, the hackathon was on a scale we have not attempted before. Total E&P joined us as co-organizers and made this new reach possible. They also let us use their amazing Booster — a sort of intrapreneurship centre — which was perfect for the event.…

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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 diaryEven 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…

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Right now there's a conference happening in Stavanger, Norway: National Data Repository 2017. My friend David Holmes of Dell EMC, a long time supporter of Agile's recent hackathons and general geocomputing infrastructure superhero, is there. He's giving a talk, I think, and chairing at least one session. He asked a question today on Software Underground: “If anyone has any thoughts or ideas as to what the regulators should be doing differently now is a good…

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It's a while since we had a 'conferences are broken' rant on the Agile blog!Five or six of the sessions at this year's conference were... different. I already mentioned the Value In Geophysics session, which was a cross between a regular series of talks and a panel discussion. I went to another, The modern geoscientist, which was structured the same way. A third one, Fundamentals of Professional Career Branding, was a mini workshop with Jackie Rafter…

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