Virtual seminar on Seismic wave propagation and inversion with Neural Operators

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Our Liverpool Virtual Seminar Series on Data Intensive Science will continue on Tuesday 7th March 2023 at 4pm GMT. The seminar will be given by Zachary E. Ross, William H. Hurt Scholar and Assistant Professor of Geophysics at the Seismological Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology, who will present “Seismic wave propagation and inversion with Neural Operators”.

Seminars in this series cover R&D outside of the data intensive science CDT’s core research areas and give an insight into cutting edge research in this area. At the end of the talk there will be a Q&A session with the speaker.

About the talk

Seismic waveform modelling is a powerful tool for determining earth structure models and unravelling earthquake rupture processes, but it is computationally expensive. We introduce a scheme to vastly accelerate these calculations with a recently developed machine learning paradigm called the neural operator. Once trained, these models can simulate a full wavefield for arbitrary velocity models at negligible cost. We use a U-shaped neural operator to learn a general solution operator to the elastodynamic wave equations from an ensemble of numerical simulations performed with random velocity models and source locations. We show that full waveform modelling with neural operators is nearly two orders of magnitude faster than conventional numerical methods, and more importantly, the trained model enables accurate simulation for arbitrary velocity models, source locations, and mesh discretization, even when distinctly different from the training dataset. The method also enables efficient full-waveform inversion with automatic differentiation.

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About the speaker

Zachary Ross is a William H. Hurt Scholar and Assistant Professor of Geophysics at the Seismological Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology. He earned his Ph.D in Geophysics from the University of Southern California and then was a Postdoctoral Scholar in Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology. His research program aims to improve our understanding of earthquakes, fault zones, and volcanoes by incorporating recent technology from machine learning and applied and computational mathematics. For his research contributions, he has received several awards and honours including the Keiiti Aki Early Career Award from AGU, David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, National Science Foundation CAREER award, and Kavli Fellowship from the US National Academy of Sciences. 

How to attend

Participation is free, but you need to register to attend this and other webinars in the series. For more information and how to register please follow this link. Once registered, you will receive the Zoom connection details on the morning of the online seminar.

The seminar details

Speaker: Zachary E. Ross (California Institute of Technology)

Seminar title: “Seismic wave propagation and inversion with Neural Operators”

Date/Time: Tuesday 7th March at 4pm GMT