Transform 2021 rolled out

On Friday we wrapped up the 2021 edition of TRANSFORM, the Software Underground’s annual virtual conference. We stuffed a hackathon, 21 tutorials, 20 lightning talks, and an annual general meeting into a week-long celebration of open subsurface code and data.

Many thanks to our sponsors — especially Studio X in Austin, Texas — and to all of the participants who donated to the conference this year. As a pay-what-you-like event, we depend on generosity to fund the things we do. In return, we are trying to bring some new superpowers to the community. So far, so good.

Just like last year, the event kicked off with a hackathon, which again lasted all week. The event saw 9 projects being worked on. this number included long-lived projects like Subsurface, GemGIS, SEGY-SAK and Striplogm as well as new projects looking at seismic footprint removal and well correlation, among other things. We’ll tell you all about these projects in the coming days.

The heart of the conference week itself was the 21 amazing tutorials — 33% more than we had in 2020! The instructors and presenters this year participated from all over the world:

The 29 instructors and 20 presenters this year came from all over the world.

We’re so fortunate to have scientists in our community that not only spend hours (years!) writing open source software for others to use, but then will also contribute open content to help others use it. Many, many thanks to our team of instructors:

Day 1: Ashley Russell (NOR), Claire Veillard (NOR), Florian Wagner et al (DEU), Anne Estoppey (NOR), Miguel de la Varga (DEU), Diana Acero-Allard (USA), Maria Cecilia Bravo (NOR), Michael Pyrcz (USA), Thomas Martin (USA).

Day 2: Tony Hallam (GBR), Lachlan Grose & Mark Jessop (AUS), Olawale Ibrahim (NGA), Øystein Klemetsdal (NOR), Nathaniel Jones (USA), Bane Sullivan (USA), Seogi Kang (USA).

Day 3: Jørgen Kvalsvik (NOR), Graeme Mackenzie (NOR), Edward Caunt (GBR), Steve Purves (ESP), Matteo Ravasi (SAU), Dewey Dunnington (CAN), Santi Soler (ARG), Irene Wallis (NZL), Katie McLean (NZL).

It wasn’t all Python either — one tutorial used R, another MATLAB/Octave — and we even had a tutorial in Spanish this year. We also had participants from well outside the usual petroleum-rich industries: geothermal, mining, hydrology, and technology were all represented. I hope we continue to see increased diversity in languages, industries, location, and in all dimensions.

The best thing of all, especially if you weren’t able to take part last week? Everything is on YouTube, so check it out, follow along, and learn some new tricks.

One of the really remarkable things this year was the prevalence of tutorials and hackathon projects that combined multiple software projects from the open subsurface stack (which was the goal of TRANSFORM all along). Several events combined two or more of GemPy, Devito, PyVista, Subsurface, segyio/SEGYSAK, or lasio/welly/striplog. It’s exciting and encouraging to see, and signals a new level of maturity among these tools. The future for the open subsurface stack looks bright.

Thank you to the organizing team — Dieter Werthmuller, Ashley Russell, Irene Wallis, Brendon Hall, Rob Leckenby and Sofiyah Mokhtar — for helping pull everything together.

And thank you to everyone that participated in TRANSFORM 2021. I hope you learned something new, and met someone interesting. Please tell your friends and come back next year!

TRANSFORM 2020

We did it! Surrounded by sawdust from the recent incorporation of the Software Underground as a non-profit, we emerged from the wreckage of the Covid-cancelled hackathons in Amsterdam and Houston. Not just alive, but full of vigour and hope for the new world of online scientific events. And everything — well, almost everything — worked out.

Before saying anything more, a huge Thank You to our sponsors for making our events possible. And a special mention for DELL Technologies, who have been an unflinching supporter of the Software Underground and Agile’s community events for years.

The audacious plan

Initially, our purpose was to move the cancelled hackathons online. So from 6 June to 14 June, Filippo Broggini and others hosted a 9-day hackathon. This worked so fantastically well that I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it was the most successful subsurface hackathon ever. But I’ll leave Filippo to tell you all about it in the coming days.

Our next thought was, “Let’s help people skill up and add some tutorials.” So Brendon Hall, Rob Leckenby and I hosted 14 completely free and fully interactive two- to three-hour tutorials during the week. All of these streamed direct to YouTube and will stay there forever (see links below).

Then we added two group-participation unsessions — one on geoscience careers, and one on open source tools — and two sets of lightning talks from anyone who wanted to give one. All of this while several of the hackathon projects were still in full swing. It was a hectic week!

The tutorials

Fair warning: there is about 37 hours of first-rate instruction in digital earth science here. The first two are totally approachable for beginners, (and there's no shortage of people in the Software Underground who can help you get started!) so there's truly something for everyone.

• Getting started with Python — Robert Leckenby — Video — Repo

• Using Python subsurface tools — Thomas Martin — Video — Repo

• Open-source spatial data analytics with GeostatsPy — Michael Pyrcz — Video — Repo

• Geological modeling with GemPy — Miguel de la Varga — Video — Repo

• Digital subsurface data loaders — Jørgen Kvalsvik — Video — Repo

• Geophysical Inversion in SimPEG — Lindsey Heagy — Video — Repo

• Geologic image processing with Python — Joe Kington — Video — Repo

• Intro to interactive visualization in Jupyter for well data — Ashley Russell — Video — Repo

• Geophysical modeling with Devito — Rhodri Nelson — Video — Repo

• From scattered data to gridded products using Verde — Leonardo Uieda — Video — Repo

• Scalable and resilient systems architecture — Liz Dennett — Video — Repo

• Scalable model training with Ray Tune — Steve Purves — Video — Repo

• Geospatial analysis in Python — Martin Bentley — Video — Repo

• Idea to MVP (web apps for scientists) — Matt Hall & Brendon Hall — Video — Repo

• On-demand seismic processing with AWS — Constantine Vavourak — Video — Repo

A huge Thank You to all of the instrutors, who not only gave freely of their time and insight, but also are all using open code and open data. No paywalls here!

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Lightning talks

I'm so glad we added these 24 five-minute talks to the schedule. It was no trouble filling them — people signed themselves up. Every single talk was enlightening in some way, and these sessions were both really fun to be in. Thank you to everyone who took part!

• Lightning talks, Day 1

• Lightning talks, Day 2

Here's Andrea Balza Morales talking about the GeoLatinas Coding Group, which meets on Zoom twice a week:

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The unsessions

An 'unsession' is a scientific meeting session, but without talks. Instead, we have a group discussion — but not the painful sort where you pass a mic around. We have a discussion that involves every scientist in the room. Since holding the first geoscience 'unsession' at CSEG in 2013, we've continued to evolve and adapt the methodology, but Monday was the first time I've tried to do one online.

I'll write more about these unsessions in the coming days, but here's a high-level description of what happened:

• Unsession 1: What is good career advice in 2020? Around 95 people showed up to the start of this conversation about jobs and skills. We shared our career paths so far, and groups chatted about the best — and worst! — job-related advice they'd received. Finally we identified and ranked ideas for tools the Software Underground could build to help us all help each other find work we love.

• Unsession 2: What open tools are needed now? The second session had around 55 people in conversation around open source tools. We talked about our favourite pieces of software, and what subsurface-flavoured versions might look like. And we heard how 4 current projects are trying to fill gaps in our current workflows, for example in seismic data management, and between geological models and GIS.

Here's where participants in the unsessions on Monday (blue) and Tuesday (red) were located:

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On Wednesday we cleared our schedule in support of the #ShutDownSTEM and #strike4blacklives activism. We did this to help shine a light on the fact that black and racialized people everywhere are systematically disadvantaged in academia, industry, government, and all avenues in which STEM is practiced. In place of our schedule,we individually used the day to educate ourselves and listen to black voices in STEM. We must do better.

If you have not already done so, I urge you to read and sign this petition, which seeks to directly address the diversity problem we face today in geoscience.

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If you took part in Transform 2020 — we thank you for your participation, and hope you learned something and will tell your friends and return next time.

We’ll write more soon about Transform 2020, which I hope and believe will have ramifications for how this community collaborates in the future. So stay tuned for that.