Dr Gerald Stein studied Physics and Mathematics before starting in the oil industry 30 years ago. He started working in the Western Atlas Research group under the leadership of Dr Oz Yilmaz. This group had a vast collective experience in mathematics, geophysics and programming gained whilst creating the first interpretation and inversion systems with Western Atlas Software. Dr Stein along with a number of colleagues started the original Pays International company in 1994. The company had a clear mission to improve exploration and production success for clients by creating inversion, seismic classification and fault analysis workflows and the associated software products. In order to spread these ideas he created an inversion and machine learning classification training course which was delivered to over 80 training courses in 15 countries, making it one of the most prominent providers of geophysical inversion and ML classification training in the world. His company has been consistently at the cutting edge of machine learning technology in geoscience, and continue to innovate to this day.

For the past 3 years I have been closely involved with the PESGB. This has involved helping out with a variety of special interest groups which has inspired me to create a new SIG -the Machine Learning in Geoscience SIG. This SIG has been very popular with over 500 attendees to date. I am sure that I can be of more help to the PESGB in the development of SIG’s in general and the introduction of machine learning to our community in particular.