The TRANSFORM 2020 hackathon, Part 2

This is part 2 of a pair of posts about the TRANSFORM 2020 Hackathon. Read part 1 here.

Welcome back to the TRANSFORM 2020 Hackathon project round-up!

Last time we shared six projects; the remaining projects are listed below. As before, to find out more about a project, get in touch with its champion, or visit its channel, in the Software Underground Slack. The channels all start with #t20- so, for example, the GemGIS channel is #t20-gemgis.

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Seismic processing

Alan Richardson set himself the ambitious task of wrapping CPSeis, an open source seismic processing system, in Python. However, this proved fiddly, so he set himself the even more ambitious task — albeit one with fewer dependencies — of writing a seismic processing system in Python. Punchline: he’s building it with TorchScript. It’s going to be epic. Repo.

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Covid-19

Artash Nath, a talented 8th grader from Toronto, led a project to observe the impact of COVID-19 lockdown restricitons on the traffic movement in several Canadian cities. Specifically, Artash’s goal was to measure the change in the seismic vibrations in major cities before, during, and after their lockdown period. Repo.

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GemGIS

Alexander Juestel and Arthur Endlein attempted to meld the worlds of GIS and GemPy. Their goal was to build a 3D geological model from a geological map (a shapefile) and a DEM (a raster). The process was fully interactive, so they could digitize a cross-section right in a notebook. Repo.

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Geothermal field

Alexis Lamparski and Elisa Heim, along with a few others, analyzed and visualized seasonal upper soil temperatures over a geothermal field. Their goal was to find a correlation with fluid temperature differences inside the horizontal pipes connecting borehole heat exchangers to the heat pump. Repo.

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Litho-boundary from gamma

Jared Armstrong, after reading a recent paper about generating lithological boundaries from gamma using wavelet tessellations, Jared decided to stay up late and join from Down Under. Jared joined forces with Leo C and Martin Bentley and together they were able to create promising initial results. Repo.

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Devito

Gerard Gorman and Fabio Luporini, together with other project developers, took advantage of the hackathon to improve the documentation and to start tackling issues related to HPC and distributed computing for the Devito geophysical modeling project.

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Space rocks

Hunter Danque took a shot at the Moon… using the lunar GPR data from China's Yutu 2 rover. Hunter started working towards his goal to load the data to eventually extract geotechnical properties for future lunar site investigations. Repo.

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This amazing event was the first big virtual hackathon we’ve taken on. With at least 60 people collaborating on 13 projects, it was undoubtedly a success, but we learned a few things too. It was less accessible to new programmers than our live events usually are. And it was hard to even begin to approximate some of the social aspects of a live hackathon.

One thing is certain: we will be doing this again — and you’re invited. See you then!

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Many thanks to our sponsors for their generous support of this event

The TRANSFORM 2020 hackathon, Part 1

TRANSFORM 2020 started and ended as a hackathon, with a virtual conference sandwiched in between. It became the beating heart of the entire TRANSFORM event, bringing people together around ambitious digital subsurface projects. One participant said on day 1: “It’s easier to connect meaningfully with people here than at a live conference.”

Previous hackathon have lasted a weekend but this one took over two weekends and, for some teams, every day in between. So there was plenty of time to get stuck in, and teams with people in far-flung timezones were able to work almost around the clock. It made for an intense 9 days.

The first batch of projects are listed below. To find out more about a project, get in touch with its champion, or visit its channel, in the Software Underground Slack. The channels all start with #t20- so, for example, the segysak channel is #t20-segysak.

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52-things

Matteo Niccoli coordinated Dan Austin, Matt Hall, and 1 or 2 others around the 52 Things You Should Know About Geocomputing book project. This long-term project got a much-needed boost and is now ready to go to the next stage. (And there is still time to help if you are interested!) — Repo.

“Calculation of the distance between objects in a photograph has been around since the mid-19th century —nearly as long as modern photography itself. Digital photogrammetry, or structure-from-motion, is the modern equivalent: a technique that can reconstruct, in detail, the relative location of millions of features...”

— Adam Cawood & Clare Bond

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welliovoz

Justin Gosses has been hacking on a JavaScript well-data viewer for a while, and it has now reached a good level of functionality. Nathan Jones, Lorenzo Perozzi and Nikita helped out, along with 3 or 4 others. Repo.

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gostin

Dieter Werthmüller led the ‘geo open-source tie-in’ project, to form an umbrella for non-seismic ideas using the GemPy–Fatiando–SimPeg—PyGIMLi universe, along with PyVista and some other projects. This incredibly active team involved at least 20 or so people; get get the lowdown from this document. Repo.

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segysak

Tony Hallam coordinated an effort to wrap segyio with xarray, resulting in the SEG-Y Swiss Army Knife (segysak). This was one of the most active projects during Transform, and the team, which included Steve Purves, Gijs Straathof, Fabio Contreras, and Alessandro Amato del Monte, got a lot done. If you use seismic data in Python, you need this! Repo.

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DASH WELL VIZ

Doug McClymont made a great start on a framework for a well-log web app, with tons of activity from a large team including Kent Inverarity (creator of lasio), Michael Harty, Behrooz Bashokooh, Julio Rodriguez, Wesley Banfield, Brian Burnham, and Kieran Blacker. Repo. Check out the app.

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Bruges Geomech

Friso Brouwer and Alessandro Amato del Monte, along with several others, made some good progress on adding geomechanics functionality (Zobackogram, anyone?) to the bruges library. Repo (will be added to the main bruges repo soon).

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And that’s only half of the projects! More soon, stay tuned.

UPDATE: Read Part 2 of this post.

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Many thanks to our sponsors for their generous support of this event

#ShutDownSTEM at TRANSFORM

In support of #ShutDownSTEM, #strike4blacklives and the anti-racism movement, we are shutting down TRANSFORM and the Software Underground on Wednesday 10 June, and clearing Wednesday's conference schedule.

The TRANSFORM 2020 virtual conference is officially underway. But as you know, there is a great deal of unrest in the world at the moment, particularly around the issue of racism and especially anti-black racism. The Software Underground has stated that we would do more to fight racism in earth science, and to strive to be the most diverse, inclusive community we can be.

On Friday, black academics in astronomy proposed action: a strike in science and technology of at least 1 day — Wednesday 10 June — in support of Black Lives Matter and the anti-racism movement. Please read this call to action: https://www.particlesforjustice.org/

It ends like this:

we call on people who are not Black to spend a day undertaking discussion and action that furthers this work, while providing Black scientists with a day of rest. Every single institution around the world can and should get involved in this work, and the strike marks an opportunity to recommit to the humanist values which should underpin academic work, including the belief that Black Lives Matter.

This, in turn, led to the #ShutDownSTEM action on Wednesday, which you can also read about via the Twitter hashtag.

There is also currently an open petition drawing attention to the same injustice, but in geoscience: Call for a Robust Anti-Racism Plan for The Geosciences (https://www.change.org/p/geoscientists-call-for-a-robust-anti-racism-plan-for-the-geosciences). This is the core of that document:

we humbly but firmly demand all geoscience societies and organizations take concrete action against racism – particularly the anti-Black racism that plagues our community – because written and/or oral denouncement does not go far enough.

This is more than just a petition, it is a call to clear, accountable action. It sets out what we can do, as individual scientists and as a society, to fight systemic racism in our field and beyond. Please consider signing it.

As for the events we had planned for Wednesday, we are still figuring out the new schedule. Wednesday's content will move to other days. The conversations will pick up again on Thursday. Then, over the coming months, we will find ways to act and make a difference. As part of our ambition to be a better and more inclusive society, we will plan events to discuss diversity, equity, inclusion, access, and justice.

Something new has surfaced

“In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

— Eric Hoffer

It is an exciting time to be a subsurface scientist. Studying the earth makes you familiar with the idea that the world is continually changing. The pace of change is usually gradual, but occasionally there are periods of intense transition. The changes in the economy, technology, and society have affected many aspects of our lives. Digital tools have been augmenting our workflows with machine intelligence. Remote work and online collaboration is now a reality for many of us. The energy transition is real even if the outcome is uncertain. The skill and experience profile required for a successful subsurface science career today is quite different than it was even five years ago, and it continues to evolve.

The Software Underground (or Swung, as it has come to be known) is a community of digital subsurface science enthusiasts — students, academics and professionals who make and use open digital tools to study the subsurface. Swung too has changed considerably from its humble beginning in 2014 as a mailing list of a couple of dozen people. It has become a thriving online community of over 2400 members who share the understanding that digital technology and subsurface science are no longer separable. Humanity needs digital-first earth science.

The Software Underground has organized events and activities to nurture this community. Hackathons and meetups are happening in cities all over the world. A popular conversation topic recently has been about what the professional societies have been doing to reflect this change and support our careers. They have made some attempts, but generally haven’t kept up with the pace of change. We realized we could do something about it.

One of the Software Underground events in 2019 — the first Transform conference

The new society

We are happy to announce that the Software Underground is now officially registered as a non-profit organization with the following stated purposes:

• Serving and growing an online community of practice.

• Organizing, and supporting community organization of, educational events such as conferences, meetings, meet-ups, courses, hackathons.

• Maintaining, and supporting community maintenance of, open-access educational resources for the community.

• Publishing an open-access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal.

• Building relationships with industry and academia to promote the professional interests of our members.

Initially, we are required to name some founding directors, to kick things off and get the society started. We will have elections at the first Annual General Meeting for a more democratic approach to selecting directors. The founding directors are:

• Filippo Broggini

• Jesper Dramsch 

• Brendon Hall 

• Matt Hall 

• Steve Purves

• Chance Sanger 

• Jo Walsh 

• Dieter Werthmüller

If you are already a member, and are content with the conversations on Slack, nothing will change. But if you want to see more happening in the community, we’re ready to support you. If you would like to get involved building the Software Underground join the conversation on the #swung-org channel.

Can’t wait to get started? You’re in luck: today, we are kicking off our biggest event ever — Transform 2020 — a week-long celebration of digital geoscience, with hackathons, tutorials, lightning talks, and group discussions. Don’t miss it!

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