Every year, the CSEG Board of Directors renews its commitment to support and grow educational opportunities for CSEG members. Despite the persistently challenging economic environment in 2019, the Society’s Educational Services are proud to retain existing educational opportunities and introduce new ones for all members.
This year, the CSEG offered a range of familiar educational opportunities such as Technical Luncheons, GeoConvention, Doodletrain and Symposium. For the first time this year, the DoodleShip initiative offered a training class for CSEG East Coast members and geophysical practitioners. We'd like to give a big thanks to the great effort of the volunteers, lecturers and participants who all made it a successful event that the Society intends to build upon. The Recorder editorial team works tirelessly to bring high-quality technical publications of great interest and relevance. Also due to the team’s hard work, members have an online access to the Recorder. The Society’s Educational Services have recognized economic challenges and have provided an option to subsidize DoodleTrain classes for under-employed members. The Society provides free-of-charge learning opportunities like Lunch Box and MUG run by dedicated sub-committees of volunteers. These events cover a wide range of geophysical topics. In addition, the CSEG Foundation has a range of initiatives to financially aid young and underemployed members to undertake learning opportunities.
2019 is also the year when a range of “new” terms percolated into geophysical world and demonstrated the capacity to stay within the discipline for the foreseen future: AI (artificial intelligence, not acoustic impedance) and deep learning, data analytics, cloud-based interpretation, processing and storage have been on the horizon for a few years. This year’s GeoConvention and SEG International Exposition in San Antonio clearly demonstrated how these technologies made a robust move from experimental efforts and academic endeavours into the current geophysical workflows and the way industry is addressing ever growing technological and business challenges.
What should be a present-day geophysical discipline practitioner’s view of these new technologies? Should these practices and techniques be fully embraced and adopted, further developed and improved, challenged and scrutinized, ignored? Would these technologies only be relevant to software developers and code writers? Are they applicable to the “every day” tasks of acquisition, processing and interpretation that practitioners working in the WSCB, or East coast, or Arctic or international assets face daily?
Clearly, the answers to these questions reside in the domain of well informed and educated knowledge-based solutions. The CSEG is seeking to facilitate the search for these solutions through learning and educational efforts and the content of the programs the Society has been offering this year and will offer in the future. The CSEG Educational Services strive to provide technical expert opinions and knowledge-based content not only to the promising buzz-words technologies, but also to the advancements in established techniques. Informed and knowledge-grounded selection of these techniques and practices will underpin delivery of the most advanced and cost-effective subsurface characterizations to provide energy solutions for today and the future.
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