The July technical meeting saw PESA Queensland team up with ASEG Queensland to present an evening with SEG distinguished lecturer Dr Kurt Marfurt.
Dr Kurt Marfurt serves as the Frank and Henrietta Schultz Professor of Geophysics within the ConocoPhillips School of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Oklahoma. His primary research interests are the development and calibration of new seismic attributes to aid in seismic processing, seismic interpretation and reservoir characterisation. In addition to his work at the University of Oklahoma and with SEG, Dr Marfurt also serves as Editor in Chief of the AAPG/SEG journal Interpretation.
Following on from the successful one-day short course presented by Dr Marfurt on Seismic Attributes, the evening talk was titled “Finding and exploiting correlations between 3D seismic, log and engineering data using machine learning” or “the future requirements of integrated E&P: Shallow learning but deep thinking!”. With some entertaining examples from the world of online dating, Dr Marfurt discussed some of the applications of machine learning using worked subsurface examples. Whilst technology enables this technique, which has elicited some great results, he cautioned on the importance of human quality control – to try to understand why a correlation might exist before you start looking for it and to enable you to apply an identified relationship to appropriate alternate situations.
The crowd were appreciative of the humanised examples and discussions followed around: the challenges in applying the technique to frontier areas with limited data, and; the risks to confusing correlation and causation when analysing datasets. Swapping to his Editor in Chief hat, Dr Marfurt finished up with a request to the audience to start thinking about paper submissions for a thematic collection (or two!) in the Interpretation journal – watch out for further news!
Thanks again to our speaker Dr Kurt Marfurt and ASEG Queensland for co-hosting the event.
