W-10: FWI Hackathon Showcase

Full wavefield inversion (FWI) has rapidly progressed in the seismic industry during the past decade. Tremendous progress has been made in addressing FWI’s technical challenges and moving the technology closer to realizing its ultimate vision. However, FWI method and its application is complex when it comes to implementation and getting meaningful solutions. The scope of this workshop is to increase the uptake of this technology in the seismic community via hands-on experience leveraging publicly available codes and distributable model and data. Given the computation complexity, we will focus this workshop theme to 2D models and inversion. However, we are interested in evaluating the participants’ approaches to tackling the multi-parameter FWI problem. The timing and plan for this workshop are outlined below:
1. Three months before IMAGE 2026, the scope of the workshop will be widely distributed via the SEG website and other social media venues. This will help participants to gauge their interest in contributing to this workshop. Folks can form their team to work on the problem.
2. A team may comprise 1-4 members with a team leader identified by the team
3. 2 months prior to the start of the IMAGE conference an online zoom meeting will be organized to discuss the availability of the data, models and the associated open source codes.
a. Data and UT-provide open source code will be made available to the participating teams at that meeting.
b. Incorporating variants of the UT-provided open source code is highly recommended.
c. Teams will submit their codes, run files and the results one week before the IMAGE conference.
4. On the Sunday preceding the start of the IMAGE conference, a full day course will be conducted where the convenors will give a couple of short presentations followed by discussion on the progress on the exercise and help categorize the learnings in different areas of FWI among the participants.
5. Three winners will be chosen by a committee of judges; award will be given.
6. On the Friday (post-conference workshop) the participating teams will present their workflow and results. All participating teams will be asked to make poster presentations while each of the winning teams will be asked to a 20-minute-long oral presentation.
7. A panel discussion will follow on the learnings and observations from usage of the open source codes.

Lead Organizer

Erkan Ay, Consultant

Co-Organizer(s)

Mrinal Sen, University of Texas at Austin
Faqi Liu, TGS
Partha Routh, ExxonMobil
Imtiaz Ahmed, BP
Joel Le Calvez, SLB
Hongyu Sun, University of Texas at El Paso
Shiva Maitra