Barely a day goes by without another headline about AI: that it’s going to save us or destroy us, revolutionize everything or hollow it out. The discourse tends toward the binary: transformative tool or existential threat. I find myself wanting to offer something more modest. A lived experience, still unresolved. I’m a geophysicist, and I’ve …
I keep carrying around this fantasy that one semester I’ll finally “arrive” with a finished course: I’ll dust off last year’s slides, tweak a date or two, and stroll into class to deliver a polished, low-effort masterpiece. Other professors, I imagine, do this. They skim their notes for five minutes, walk into the room, and …
Chasing a Moving Target: Seven Years of Never Finishing a Course Read More »
Our senses offer us the most immediate means of perceiving and understanding the physical world, yet they are limited in scope. Many phenomena lie beyond the range of our perception and require specialized instruments to detect and understand. In the audible realm, our ears are sensitive to acoustic waves (pressure waves in the atmosphere) at frequencies …
Custom sensors enable new insights into the inaudible realm Read More »
I’m proud to lead a dynamic research group, and 2024 has been a good year for us! This year, the SMU seismoacoustic group comprised four graduate students, a postdoc, and nine full-time research staff. This critical mass enables us to tackle unique and challenging research problems. While journal articles don’t capture the full scope of …
I taught an undergraduate class titled Climate Change Science this Spring. Without all the gory detail, below are six lessons that I’ve distilled from the class material. 1. Climate is fundamentally different than weather. One of the biggest mistakes that people make when talking about climate change is mistaking the weather and the climate. We’ve …
I just finished teaching a new class on Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and will be teaching another new class on Climate Change next semester. Teaching a new class is a massive amount of work. For me, it involves immersing myself in material about a subject. My problem, I’ve learned, is that I’m unwilling to take …
Teaching, Digital Signal Processing, and Climate Change Read More »
I was chatting with a visiting speaker at SMU a few months back about how the challenges of doing interdisciplinary science in academia. I believe that some of the most exciting opportunites in science are around the edges of the disciplines, where traditional fields overlap. I’ve tried to focus my career on these edges, and …
In seismology and acoustics, we often reduce the information in our measured waveforms by focusing on the properties of specific phases (packets of wave energy that travel in certain ways along specific paths). When I worked on my PhD, I focused entirely on the study of teleseismic P, PKP, and PKIKP waves (longitudinal waves that …
On the ‘Phase Breadth’ of our seismoacoustic research group Read More »
There’s a lot of buzz right now about the new AI-powered chatbot from OpenAI, ChatGPT. I decided to give it a test drive on a simple coding problem I wanted to solve to see how it might be useful for me. I don’t really have much time to write code these days, so I’m a …
AI is going to change the process of doing research Read More »
This semester I’m teaching a ‘Science Breadth’ class, a category of class that all undergraduate students at SMU must take to graduate. While many students are often taking the course reluctantly – as a means to check off this dreaded science requirement – I nevertheless enjoy teaching it because I believe in the importance of …
I gave a talk at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Denver last week on our teams work exploring the use of infrasound to probe the atmosphere. Our paper was selected for a press conference, and a video of my 5-minute summary and short Q&A is posted here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/j1pfpp9zua45kh8/Explosions-Help-Probe-Elusive-Atmospheric-Waves.mp4?dl=0 My wife said I did …
If it were trained on all the literature on seismology, statistics, and computer science, could an A.I. generate a passable review article titled ‘Big Data Seismology’? I have to admit, this was the question I asked myself when reading about the capability of the latest large language models in a recent New York Times article …
I have to admit that I have a general dislike for awards and medals in science, as they always seem too binary (there are winners and losers), scientists don’t do science to get medals, and the whole scientific enterprise is collaborative (it can be hard to separate and assign value to different contributors). Issac Newton …
Introductory science textbooks – the kind we use in my Intro Earth Science class – typically have an introduction section where they explain science as this very linear hypothesis-driven endeavor. Scientists follow this recipe in the process of doing science: they start with a hypothesis, gather data, and test the hypothesis. According to the textbooks, …
I’ve been slow to fully embrace machine learning in my research, but it’s rapidly becoming an important tool for seismological research. Recent papers in seismology, especially on the application of deep neural networks for automating seismic phase identification, picking, and association, have produced some really impressive results. In addition, it’s pretty clear that machine learning …
There is a long history of open data in seismology, which has been fundamental for a science where the ‘experiments’ often rely on access to measurements of ground motion around the world. For infrasound science – the study of low-frequency acoustic waves, and another science that relies on global measurements – open access to data …
We had a very early start on a cold January morning, but Miro (one of my graduate students), Gil (postdoc), and I heard and recorded over 50 explosions today as the US Army destroyed old munitions near McAlester, Oklahoma. We drove from Dallas, TX to Savanna, OK – a 2.5 hour drive – to install …
In my former job, I developed seismic and acoustic data processing algorithms for various government customers. At Sandia, I ended up with a dedicated team of software engineers coding these up and delivering them as software tools for analysts. One thing I was particularly proud of were my global-search probabilistic location algorithms, which could provide …
I’m currently looking for a PhD student and Postdoc to support a project to develop advanced signal processing algorithms for processing seismic and acoustic data. You’ll help develop the next generation of data processing algorithms, advance our understanding of urban signals and noise, and develop industry-relevant skills in Python programming. I can support a graduate …
In July this year, I had the opportunity to give a lecture on arrays and networks in seismology for an online graduate student summer school run by the AGU Seismology Section. The lecture was one of a series of talks by various speakers on different aspects of seismology, all of which are being posted online …
I wasn’t planning to spend a part of my summer lugging equipment around backyards in my neighborhood, but I guess most people’s summers haven’t exactly been turning out how they expected! After exploring changes in seismic noise with COVID-19 restrictions, I got interested in learning more about urban noise. In particular, there seem to be …
While most seismometers have been installed to detect earthquakes, they are also very sensitive to ambient vibrations caused by human activity. A series of recent news reports have highlighted the change in background seismic vibrations (seismic ‘noise’) with the various government restrictions on human movement (see this link). Seismic stations in Dallas, many deployed following …
When earthquakes are large and shallow, they act like giant subwoofers, shaking the ground and making sound. I’ve got a bit of a long-standing interest when it comes to infrasound (low-frequency sound) from earthquakes from Utah. I wrote a paper 8 years ago on understanding the infrasound generated by an earthquake in Southern Utah. When …
A fundamental tenet of science is the ability to reproduce the results of an experiment. With the increasing tendency of scientific research to rely on chains of algorithms embedded in computer code, the way we communicate scientific research may need to be rethought. How we teach students to communicate is an important part of meeting …
A reproducability crisis in scientific communication? Read More »
My first blog post, and it’s a heavy topic! I’m teaching a class this semester on forensic seismology that explores issues of nuclear arms control. Earth Science plays a key role here, just as it does in the other major existential threat to humanity: Climate change. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists publish the Doomsday …
Existential threats to humanity, and the role of Earth Science Read More »