Hewlett Packard Enterprise Data Science Institute

There has been a recent addition of new courses at UH pertaining to the application side of machine learning. Yingcai Zheng, associate professor of seismology at UH, offers a new course that will join the list. The course entitled, Seismic Processing and Interpretation of Earth and Mars, will provide experience, tools and knowledge in processing real seismic data on Earth, Mars and the moon. Course enrollment will be available for spring 2021.

• What inspired you to offer this new course?
   
• Yingcai Zheng: We will see more space missions in the future, some of which will have seismometers. In fact, there are already a lot of seismic data available currently to study the interior of the Moon, Earth and Mars. I offered this new course to try to break the domain barrier so people can enter this field, work on seismic data and make discoveries. There are still a lot of things to be discovered.
   
• Is this course open to all majors or specific majors?
   
• YZ: This course is open to all graduate students who are interested in learning the basics of seismic data.
   
• What differentiates this course from other courses at UH that focus on the application side of machine learning?
   
• YZ: There are many excellent courses, but I haven’t seen one related to processing seismic data. I think the concept and programming skills acquired from other courses will be very useful in this course.
   
• Does HPE DSI’s course ‘Introduction to Machine Learning’ complement your course in any way?
   
• YZ: Definitely, seismic data is big data and it has a wealth of complex information. I think the existing machine learning skills in data sorting/classification, computing and visualization acquired from that course will be extremely useful for this course.
   
• What can students do in order to be successful in this class?
   
• YZ: Be curious and willing to try new things. Do the homework and give two presentations. Also, there are no exams.
   
• Overall, how will this course impact students and the UH community as a whole?
   
• YZ: Access to resources! I’ve seen a lot of internships and job opportunities in earthquake seismology. The principles taught in this course can also be used to help students image subsurfaces for energy using man-made sources or human bodies using ultrasonic transducers. This course will be useful for students and the UH community because the energy and medicine industries are key economic drivers in Houston.

Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.