Excellent PhD thesis online from Athanasios Nathanail at Heriot-Watt University. Quite thought provoking for future possibilities using Machine Vision, Natural Language Processing and Neural Networks. Abstract Geological interpretations are always linked with interpretational and conceptual uncertainty, which is difficult to elicit and quantify, often creating unquantified risks for understanding the subsurface. The complexity and variability of geological systems may lead geologists to analyse the same data and arrive at different conclusions based on their subjective interpretations, person ..read more

Are we building ethical AI chatbots in our scientific disciplines and industry sectors? There are many aspects to ethical AI for domain chatbot apps powered by Large Language Models (LLM). From a human centric perspective these include (1) privacy and data protection, (2) equality and non-discrimination and (3) transparency and explainability. From a content and literature perspective these include respecting copyright. Some content is not open access so cannot be used when building LLM’s without permission especially if publicly distributed. Some content is open access but covered by Creativ ..read more

Rocks, Birds, Water and Space? Not a trivia question but a rather innovative new online course for Machine Learning in the Natural Sciences from Portland State University Department of Geology. After being taught the basics of machine learning you can choose your topic of interest and dataset (rocks, birds, water or space) then follow a series of exercises that manipulate, extract, visualize and model these data.  Machine Learning for the Natural Sciences | Portland State University (pdx.edu) #geosciences #earthsciences #machinelearning ..read more

I co-authored a paper presented at the Geological Society of London late last year on the topic of transitioning geoscience (literature) into the age of AI. The aim is to inject more creativity into the way we explore big data geoscience documentation and release free, easy to use web apps using techniques enabled by AI. The design follows UNESCO guidelines on AI Ethics, so the provenance of the source information used to generate the output is transparent. Using Natural Language Processing to Discover Analogues and Insights in Unstructured Geoscience Literature Phoebe McMellon1, Alistai ..read more

Enjoyed giving the guest lecture today with Pascal Ezenkwu and students on the Energy Data Management with Business Analytics course at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. We covered Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models in Geoscience and the Subsurface, and the changing role of the data manager.  Lots of wonderful questions about skills (both soft and technical), gaps and opportunities in this area.  Data Management is the foundation of Digital Transformation. There has probably never been a more exciting time to work in this field. It cross-cuts so many traditional ..read more

The Global Forum on the ethics of AI took place recently in Kranj. Reading through the literature I was interested in the UNESCO recommendation on core values, particularly one on transparency: “The ethical deployment of AI systems depends on their transparency & explainability (T&E).” This relates to my “3 Laws” article last year. https://paulhcleverley.com/2023/10/26/the-three-laws-of-data-management/ I would argue that AI systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other domain focused Large Language Model driven chatbots are not ethical if they do not allow the user to be able to click on a ..read more

Some excellent open access papers published this week in the Geoscience Data Journal special issue. The preface states, “Studying a changing world requires observations going back in time to extend and contextualize our latest scientific knowledge. Old legacy data exist in non-digital formats. Thus, techniques and methodologies for the preservation, dissemination, interpretation, homogenization, calibration, and use of such legacy data and their associated metadata, as well as for their present scientific use are important topics for advancing our understanding of the changing Earth and of pa ..read more

An Open Platform for Geochemical Data Preservation, Dissemination and Synthesis. I came accoss this open data platform recently. A group of Australian university research laboratories (AuScope Geochemistry Network) built a collaborative platform to collate, preserve and disseminate geochronology and isotopic data. https://ausgeochem.auscope. Boone, S.C., Dalton, H., Prent, A., Kohlmann, F., Theile, M., Gréau, Y., Florin, G., Noble, W., Hodgekiss, S.A., Ware, B. and Phillips, D., 2022. AusGeochem: An Open Platform for Geochemical Data Preservation, Dissemination and Synthesis. Geostandards and ..read more

Interesting paper published by Jones et al (2024) on applying Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and NLP to hand written archives. Some descriptions date to the 18th century with over 2 Billion records in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), including habitat information related to geographical location, land cover, hydrological, soil and bedrock. “Habitat data can provide important evolutionary insight into drivers of biogeographical patterns at a global scale. Exploiting historical habitat data and linking this with the field of museomics (genomic data from museum samp ..read more

The European Geosciences Union (EGU) has recently released guidelines for the use of AI-based tools in the publication process. This is to help ensure the ethical use of AI tools in the rapidly evolving landscape of scholarly communication. https://www.egu.eu/news/1031/statement-on-the-use-of-ai-based-tools-for-the-presentation-and-publication-of-research-results-in-earth-planetary-and-space-science/ The American Geophysical Union (AGU) published their guidelines for ethical use of AI last year: https://news.agu.org/press-release/agu-publishes-guidelines-for-the-ethical-use-of-ai-in-the ..read more