Sergey Fomel
University of Texas
Austin, Texas, USA
Sergey Fomel is Wallace E. Pratt Professor of Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin and the director of the Texas Consortium for Computational Seismology (TCCS). He received a PhD in geophysics from Stanford University in 2001. For his contributions to exploration geophysics, Sergey has been recognized with a number of professional awards, including SEG’s J. Clarence Karcher Award in 2001 and the EAGE Conrad Schlumberger Award in 2011. He has served SEG in different roles, most recently as the Vice President, Publications. Sergey devotes part of his time to developing "Madagascar," an open-source software package for geophysical data analysis.
Summary
Recent developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning can automate different tasks in data analysis. I will discuss the quest for automation by tracking the development of automatic picking algorithms, from velocity picking in seismic processing to horizon picking in seismic interpretation. We will search for the limits of automation to discover the distinguishing qualities that separate human geophysicists from machines.