The Seismic Laboratory for Imaging and Modelling---SLIM, is a widely recognized world leader in the development of the next generation of seismic acquisition and imaging technology for the oil & gas industry. SLIM's interdisciplinary research team, with direct involvement of faculty from Computer Science and Mathematics, has leveraged recent developments in transformative fields of compressive sensing and machine learning ('big data') to drive innovations in exploration seismology. Integrating broad geophysical insights with cutting edge sampling and computational approaches has led to major improvements (see our mind map) in seismic data acquisition, modelling, imaging, and inversion. The main breakthrough of our approach is a new framework with acquisition and computational costs that are no longer determined by pessimistic sampling criteria. Instead, our costs depend on structure, e.g., sparsity or low rank, exhibited by the final inversion results and these costs will therefore no longer grow uncontrollably with the dimensionality of the inversion problem.

At the Georgia Institute of Technology, SLIM will continue build on past successes and expand its research program to include the application of machine learning to problems in computational seismology. In collaboration with the Center for energy & Geo Processing CeGP, we are in the final stages of starting the Center for Machine Learning for Seismic (ML4Seismic), which is aimed to bring together experts in quantitative interpretation and computational seismology. By leveraging recent developments in Machine Learning and access to the Cloud, we will drive innovations and train new talent in the exciting new area of ML4Seismic.