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TRANSFORM 2022

TRANSFORM 2022

Last week the Software Underground hosted the latest edition of TRANSFORM, its annual festival of digital subsurface stuff. This year we had a packed schedule, including:

  • Folks sprinting on various software projects at the weekend.

  • 13 live hands-on tutorials on a wide range of topics.

  • Birds of a feather meet-ups to discuss the future of scientific virtual meetings.

  • Eight lightning talks on topics from sealice to web apps to scholarly communication.

  • The Annual General Meeting of the Software Underground organization.

All this was stitched together by the Slack chat, as usual. You can catch up on what you missed in the #t22-general channel. Our Slack is free to join and open to anyone.

The tutorials

Here’s a list of the tutorials, which were very high quality this year. All of them were 90 minutes to 2 hours long, and all are supported by fully open-source software and open-access materials. How awesome is that?

  • Getting started in Python, by Robert Leckenby (Agile).

  • GSTools, a toolbox for geostatistical modeling in Python, by Sebastian Müller (UFZ, Leipzig).

  • What is Markov chain Monte Carlo? By Miguel de la Varga (Terranigma).

  • Mandyoc, a finite element simulator for the mantle, by Agustina Pesce et al.

  • Machine learning models for geoscience, by Tom Ostersen (Datarock).

  • From Zero to Devito (geophysical modeling & inversion), by Rhodri Nelson (Devito).

  • Publishing your first Python package, by Matt Hall (Agile).

  • PyGIMLi (geophysical modeling & inversion), by Florian Wagner et al. (RWTH).

  • OccamyPy, an object-oriented optimization framework for large-scale inverse problems, by Francesco Picetti & Ettore Biondi (Stanford).

  • A geophysical tour of mid-ocean ridges, by Leonardo Uieda (U of Liverpool).

  • Self-supervised noise suppression, by Claire Birnie & Sixiu Liu (KAUST).

  • Julia for geoscience, by Francis Yin (Georgia Tech).

  • PyLops (geophysical modeling & inversion), by Matteo Ravasi et al. (KAUST).

If any of those sound good to you, and I hope they all do, check them out in this YouTube Playlist.

The lightning talks

As always, the lightning talks were a lot of fun. Check out the Description in this video for the full list of chapters:

That’s it for 2022. Hope to see you at TRANSFORM next year!

Transform 2021 rolled out

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.

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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.

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 2021 is coming

TRANSFORM 2021 is coming

Mark your calendar: 16 to 23 April. The virtual conference for the digital subsurface is returning, a little earlier this year, so that it can incorporate the Annual General Meeting of the Software Underground on Wednesday 21 April. It will be a rather momentous occasion, because it is the first AGM since we incorporated the society last spring. Please come and help us celebrate — and determine the future of this organization!

If you just want to get to the sign-up, click the button. If you want to learn more, read on!

As last year, the conference will focus on expanding the horizons of our members. This means helping people acquire new skills, meet new people, and find out about new problems in applied subsurface science and engineering. Here’s how the schedule looks from a very high level:

An outline schedule for TRANSFORM 2021. We will publish the timing of these blocks in the near future. For now, it’s just a guide and is subject to change.

An outline schedule for TRANSFORM 2021. We will publish the timing of these blocks in the near future. For now, it’s just a guide and is subject to change.

You may not have encountered some of these components before, especially not in a virtual world, so here’s a bit more detail:

  • Hackathon — Teams of up to about 8 collaborate on all sorts of projects, from Python libraries to open data to reproducing papers. Check out the report part one and part two from last year.

  • Tutorials — Get started on a new tool or skill! These 2-hour sessions will be 100% hands-on and can be consumed live or at your own pace. Check out the TRANSFORM 20 lessons.

  • Unconference — This is the bit of the conference where we tackle the big questions. We’ll announce these components as we get closer to the event.

  • Birds of a Feather (BOF) — Software Underground aims to be a platform to elevate other communities and projects. BOFs are where people with big ideas in common flock together.

  • Annual General Meeting (AGM) — The Underground incorporated in April. Our first AGM will see our first elections and voting on our constitution. You’re invited, please sign up here.

  • Lightning talks — Five minutes is not long, but it’s long enough to get a crowd stoked about your latest project or keenest insight! Watch the lightning bolts from Day 1 and Day 2 last year.

TRANSFORM 2020 brought over 700 digital subsurface professionals together to talk and learn about their craft. The virtual format means anyone can join us, wherever they are. And our Pay What You Like fee means that cost is never an issue. If you are planning to join us, sign up now and we’ll make sure you’re kept up to date.

💡 If your organization would like to sponsor TRANSFORM 2021 and grow the learning opportunities for scientists in our field, we’d love to hear from you! Find out more about supporting our programs.

TRANSFORM 2020

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.

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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.

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!

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!

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.

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.