Gave a talk today on Artificial Intelligence to the UK Government Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). A focus on Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models and Machine Vision in the Geological Sciences.Areas I covered for these techniques included: geology, palaeontology, outreach and education, geotourism, hydrogeology, hydrology, environmental contamination and pollution, geohazards -... Continue Reading →

Delighted to be appointed Chair of the Artificial Intelligence Ethics Task Group of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) Commission on Geoethics. We will be working towards a white paper as a guiding document for the Union.

Using AI to describe fossils. I've been experimenting with GPT-4o to see how well it can describe fossils from smartphone photographs. At a high level it seems to perform reasonably well given most fossils found are not complete specimens.In my unscientific experiment using 10 commonly found fossils from the Jurassic Coast in England, it was... Continue Reading →

Free open-source tools: Automated petrographic image analysis by supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods. Interesting paper from Azzam, Blaise and Brigaud (2024).“We present two novel software tools: GrainSight, which utilizes a supervised deep learning model (FastSAM) for automated grain detection and morphological characterization; and PetroSeg, which employs an unsupervised segmentation approach to explore rock properties... Continue Reading →

I've been experimenting taking a large volume of text, building embeddings and using PCA for dimensionality reduction. These data can be an input for clustering e.g. k-means. In this example I've used thousands of minerals and lithologies. I've highlighted some of the associations to illustrate. Where there are associations (complex word association co-occurrence) that are... Continue Reading →

Some great work at Queen Mary University of London by Cedric John and Harriet Dawson using machine vision to automatically detect skeletal components in carbonates."The subsurface is a fantastic resource to store and extract freshwater, clean hydrogen fuel, store carbon emissions, or even extract heat from geothermal energy. But to do this requires a meticulous... Continue Reading →

Excellent presentation yesterday using Large Language Models to query seismic interpretations and data using natural language. Nate Suurmeyer from Onward and Anna Dubovik from WAIW ran through the possibilities with their framework, using natural language to ask questions of their structured data such as geological horizons and the sea floor, with basic data and analogues.... Continue Reading →

I thought I'd plot where the readers are of my free blog on Digital Geoscience. A total of 144 countries (45 in Europe, 32 in Asia, 30 in Africa, 26 in the Americas, 11 in the Middle East). I was having some challenges with the georeferencing and some countries don't appear but its good enough!I've... Continue Reading →