No Comment (Part II)

(From here)

Post-doctoral / Internship position in Multiscale/Multirate Image Processing with Applications in the Geosciences

Laurent Duval a reader of this blog has a postdoc position (which does not require an understanding of compressive sensing):

Subject: Job: Post-doctoral / Internship position in Multiscale/Multirate Image Processing with Applications in the Geosciences

Organization: IFP
Location: Rueil-Malmaison, France
Deadline: Open until filled (beginning 2nd semester 2009)
Duration: 12 months
Gross salary: from ~2400 euros

Context:
IFP has an opening for a post-doctoral position in its Technology, Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department. IFP is located in Rueil-Malmaison, France, near Paris. The position offers the possibility of collaboration with the Signal and Communications group at University Paris-Est.

IFP is a world-class public-sector research and training center, aimed at developing the technologies and materials of the future in fields of energy, transport and the environment. It provides public and industry stakeholders with innovative solutions for a smooth transition to the more efficient, more economical, cleaner and sustainable energies and materials of the future.

IFP fosters knowledge transfer between long-term fundamental research, applied research and industrial development in keeping with the recommendations of the Barcelona European Council held in March 2002. IFP is funded both by a State budget and by resources provided by private French and foreign international partners.

More information on the Web :
http://www.ifp.fr/
http://www.ifp.com/
http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/LabInfo/equipe/signal
http://www-syscom.univ-mlv.fr/~pesquet/

Topic:
The topic proposed for this post-doctoral position is focused on the analysis of geophysical data and their filtering with the help of multiscale/multirate image processing algorithms. Historically, the complexity of seismic data and its interpretation have contributed to the development of several efficient signal processing tools such as the wavelet transform.

In certain seismic data however, different wave types mixed together cannot be separated easily by standard random noise filtering schemes. In order to remedy this issue, efforts have been underway to use models that can be partially matched with data in order to allow for adaptive identification or subtraction.

The aim of the proposed work is to develop innovative techniques for multiscale/ multirate data/model matching. The eventual goal is to exploit simultaneously model and sparse features in the transformed domain with the recently developed directional wavelets and filter banks, based on local multiscale attributes.

While the proposed subject is focused on seismic applications, it is strongly related to more general issues in model based signal processing and detection theory, found in many areas of engineering and science.

Related references:
-C. Chaux et al., 2006, IEEE Trans. Image Processing 15(8) 2397-2412, doi: 10.1109/TIP.2006.875178
Image Analysis Using a Dual-Tree M-Band Wavelet Transform

-A. Droujinine, 2006, J. Geophys. Eng. 3 59-81, doi: 10.1088/1742-2132/3/1/008
Multi-scale geophysical data analysis using the eigenimage discrete wavelet transform

-J. Gauthier et al., 2009, IEEE Trans. Signal Processing, doi: 10.1109/TSP.2009.2023947
Optimization of Synthesis Oversampled Complex Filter Banks


Qualifications:
(1) A PhD degree in Electrical Engineering (signal or image processing,
computer vision, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics), or other related
experience;
(2) Programming skills with MATLAB and C/C++;
(3) Excellent skills in signal/image analysis;
(4) Knowledge in Geophysics is desirable but not required;
(5) Knowledge in wavelets and filter banks is highly desirable.

Application procedure:
Candidates should send an application letter with a PDF detailed CV, together with a list of publications, a PDF copy of their PhD Thesis and at least two reference letters.

Documents should be sent at: laurent(dot)duval(at)ifp.fr

For further information, please contact:
Laurent Duval
IFP, R1130R
1 et 4 avenue de Bois-Preau
F-92852 Rueil-Malmaison Cedex
Tel: +33 1 47 52 61 02
Tel: +33 1 47 52 70 12

Deep down, Making sense of it all one bit at a time

Last month, Andrew Gould, the CEO of Schlumberger gave a prep talk at an open house.

SCHLUMBERGER OPEN HOUSE
Schlumberger businesses and technologies demonstrations will include subsurface fluid sampling, integrated well completions, robotic tractors in a wellbore, reservoir modeling software, and geophysical seismic exploration.
10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Zachry Lobby

OPEN PRESENTATION
Andrew Gould
Chairman and CEO, Schlumberger
TITLE: Engineering Challenges (and Successes) in the Search for Oil and Gas
4:00 p.m., Room 102 Zachry

The open presentation attracted a large crowd. During the presentation, I was intrigued by the statement by Andrew that Schlumberger was positioning itself to be a provider of service for Carbon burying technology. But when you think about it, it makes sense as they have devised many services and technologies that are needed for this type of undertaking.

The room was full of people who looked like they wanted to be hired and so it was difficult to have any of them ask questions at the very end of the talk. Pissing off the CEO of the company you want to join, is a very compelling argument to not talk or ask question, or so they believe.... So I ended up having to do the dirty deed, but I was in fact really interested in several answers.

I have mentioned Schlumberger in this blog a while back, it was because of their ability to get signals from 3000 meters underground by using pulsed mud telemetry in the process generally known as Logging While Drilling. The main point was that, in order to save about 200 to 300K$ per day, they had to gather data at the drilling post in real-time so that they could steer the drilling bit (yes, drilling bits can go horizontal). Some people at Sandia have devised a Disposable Fiber Optic Telemetry System but it does not seem to have gain any traction in that industry. Pulsed mud bit rate is equivalent to an astonishing 30 bits per second transmission rate last time I checked. My question to Andrew was: have you guys done better in the past few years ? and the answer looked like a big maybe. He mentioned a new technology that uses some type of radio transmitter between each of the drilling rods but it did not seem to be a system that was yet currently used in the field. The mud communication system is an amazing piece of inventivness and the communication aspect of it is one of the most interesting problem to work on. Because of the very harsh constraints on the system (pressure, temperature,...) I am barely surprised that there isn't a better solution but I also think they should think outside the box on this one. My take would probably include using compressed sensing so that the amount of power generated in the measuring bit can be decreased tremendously. Heat generation (by the computers/electronics of the measuring bit) is non-trivial as there is little in the way of cooling when producing heat in these depths (the soil surrounding the bit is already warmer than the inside). Because of the high temperature environment, one also has to develop some better electronics to deal with these high temperature environment (see Sandia's presentation on electronics development and the need for new technology (SOI))

I then asked a question about the Canadian tar pits and the use of technology such as heat pipe to transfer energy from geothermal wells all the way up to the tar pits in order to warm them up so that they become liquid (i.e. less viscous and therefore more enconomical to retrieve from the ground). The answer looked like there is already have a program called "HTPT" that looks at that. HT may mean high temperature but I am sure what PT stands for.

And then I asked the "forward looking" question: if you wanted to differentiate yourself from your competitors in the next two or three years, where would you put your money in ? The answer was interesting because I was not expecting it. The way I interpreted what he said was: Data fusion, how do you combine the large amount of data produced in the field to have a clearer picture of your oil field (not just in three dimensions but also including time). When I went to talk to each of the engineers present at the different booth after the presentation, it did not seem that they had a view of what that entailed. One of the reasons mentioned was that most customers were not willing to put money into this type of analysis and so the company did not have a specific research team dedicated to that. The company itself is known to be dealing with very large amount of data and making sense of them for their customers. Yet summarizing that knowledge seems to be a difficult undertaking that most customers are only willing to do in-house. I am sure that an enterprising person with views on this issue could help them out. There is no reason to believe that developments in dimensionality reduction in the past few years should not be considered for those gigantic datasets.

Data fusion is also some kind of buzzword, so it may be productive to define what that means. In the measuring bit, there are different kinds of instruments, including neutron generators, radiation detectors, NMR and electromagnetic. Some of the current work seems to have been able to correlate seismic and flow measurements in order to provide a better assessment of the borehole condition. Therefore, a data fusion scheme would be aimed at correlating all the measurements from several types of sensors in order to provide additional information about either the location of the measuring bit and the time dependent geological conditions around that bit.

In order to do that, one has to compare measurements with computations. One of current generic concern is the ability to do inversion with Monte-Carlo codes such as MCNP (This is a very difficult problem because the solving of this inverse problem requires several many runs of forward computation by MCNP) or faster but coarser deterministic methods. You have many different parameters that you change (sensitivity studies) in order to figure out the distribution of parameters for the situation of interest.

Since MCNP or deterministic codes have many different parameters and are running in a finite time, one needs to have tools that provide a way of "interpolating" between parameters family you have not explored computationally. In the end, this problem is not unlike the problem faced in nuclear engineering when one runs a complex thermal hydraulics code: The Experimental Probabilistic Hypersurface tries to help in that respect.

And you thought your day was bad

In September of last year, I was mentionning the issue of a perfect storm compounding high interest rates, oil platforms, hurricanes and high oil prices. Well, it is not getting any better:

- First, the Saudis warn of shortfalls as oil hits $61

- The, we learn that Dennis just tilted a one billion dollar oil platform

The Saxton Plutonium Program

Back in the early 60's, the U.S. considered using plutonium in nuclear power plants in order to achieve a closed fuel cycle. This program was led by the Atomic Energy Commission (the old name for the current Department of Energy) and consisted in having the national labs and industry in reprocessing some of the plutonium that had been produced in nuclear power plants for use as new  fuel as trials in various nuclear power plants. In 1976, Jimmy Carter decided to not continue this program and reprocessing was never used in the nuclear fuel cycle in the U.S. ever since.

In 1994, five years after the end of the Cold War, there was a sentiment expressed collectively by the National Academy of Sciences to the effect that

....With the end of the Cold War, some 50 tons of excess plutonium resulting from the dismantlement of many thousands of nuclear weapons present "a clear and present danger" to international security that must be dealt with promptly?

Not only the U.S. considered their unused weapons plutonium stockpile to be pretty large but they were also "guessing" that Russia had a similar if not larger sotckpile. The "clear and present danger" reflects in part that most people felt that the Russian stockpile was unprotected. and needed to be protected and destroy. An interaction between the two countries ensued at the technical level whereby it was decided to look into the different ways both countries could destroy this excess weapons plutonium in a way that was acceptable by both countries.

Some of the work I was involved in, was in support of this weapons plutonium disposition issue. We went back to the long list of old government reports on some of the 1960's plutonium programs (in particular the Saxton Plutonium Program) and extracted information that would allow us to benchmark the different computational neutronics codes with these past experiments. With Naeem Abdurrahman and Georgeta Radulescu, we eventually published "Benchmark Calculations of the Saxton Plutonium Program Critical Experiments" in Nuclear Technology ( Vol. 127, (3) pp. 315-331, September 1999).

No new power plant for five days of cold.

In this interview, we are being told, it is OK not not have electricity during one of the coldest season on record on the island because the power generated on the island is made out of renewables. And then we are being told that France signed off with the EU to increase its dependence on renewables in the future. This is crazy.

The pollution that blinds you

We already knew of the pollution induced smog, a hazy condition produced by particle pollution. We also knew of light pollution due to the atmosphere scattering of city lights and radio FM signals. It used to be that only astronomers were disturbed by this phenomena, but now the RF apectrum is so overwhelmed with new RF sources (cell phones, 802.11...) that it now has an ability to pollute the readings made by meteorology satellites who have intruments that can detect only a few frequency bands.

Weather patterns influenced by wind farms

With all the talk about renewable energy not affecting the environment, here is one article that seems to say otherwise. Evidently, it would be easier to go after the real polluters than the ones directly warming the atmosphere, right ?

Weapons plutonium disposition will take place

It looks like after years of thinking about it, part of the U.S. Weapons plutonium stockpile will be initially processed in France. This is good news because it reduces the danger of proliferation of this material in the future. What annoys me in these types of articles is the assymmetry of experts and stories. The anti-nukes side is always overepresented because the pro-nukes are generally the people who are working in that field and they generally work for the government. For instance, in this article, when Tom Clements says that

It is the height of arrogance to carry out a shipment like this while demanding that other nations refrain from proliferating nuclear weapons’ materials and technologies

he basically shows a lack of knowledge of what proliferation means. When you ship special nuclear materials (SNM) from a nuclear weapons state to another nuclear weapons state, you do not proliferate. But then again what would you expect from a spokesperson from Greenpeace international. When Edwin Lyman, from the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC states that

the undertaking is ill-conceived, poorly executed and inadequately secured.

I would like to know if he knows something that everybody else does not. How ill-conceived is a plan that is the final solution to a process that has lasted at least eight years and lived through two different administrations of opposite end on the political spectrum. When he says

It would be safer to choose the “plutonium immobilisation” option

Mr. Lyman does not tell the other side of the story: i.e. that the reason this solution to plutonium disposition is chosen is because it is the mirror process that involves the Russians. See, the Russians have double the amount of weapons plutonium and will not ever think of plutonium as trash. They put a lot of lives/money/effort in producing it, it is a national treasure to them. The response from guys like Mr. Lyman looks like the lessons given by the super rich to the poor, some sort of a nuclear equivalent to "let them eat cake." The Russians always told the U.S. that immobilization amounted to storage. Storage means that plutonium can be retrieved "easily." This situation is unacceptable to both parties eventually because it would mean that it is not disarmament. The situation is even hilarious if it were not for this serious subject. When Mr. Lyman talks about the immobilization option by mixing

manageable plutonium with highly radioactive waste – making it hugely dangerous to anyone attempting to misuse it – before encasing it in glass and disposing of it.

It is the type of thinking of another age; before 9/11 to be exact. Before 9/11, nobody thought that people would hijack a plane and ram it into buildings. The same goes for this "immobilization disposition" solution: to think that nobody would get this glass casing, blow it up, pick up the pieces and try to assemble a weapon out of it is a sure sign that the Union of Concerned Scientists has not evolved since 9/11. The tragedies of 9/11 or Beslan tells us that you will find people who will do this and die doing it (because of radiation exposure) but will eventually get that job done. Matt Bunn, whom I respect, underestimates the French when it comes to nuclear issues. France has 50 nuclear power plants and a mature fuel recycling program, the U.S. has 100 nuclear power plants and stores all their waste at every plant, who is more vulnerable, Matt?

Pulsing Mud Communication System

No we are not talking about the deliberate obfuscation of communication of the MUD people in Dilbert's cartoons.

When you are three thousand feet in the ground, the temperature is 200 C, the pressure is 20000 psi and you need to tell people what it is like to be down there. Well this is exactly the problem the folks in oil drilling face everyday. If you consider that drilling cost about 200 to 300 K$ a day, you want to have a better solution than just going ten feet with some pole, pulling it back out, check the soil it witnessed and iterate until you get to 3000 meters down. The solution was devised by Schlumberger as Logging While Drilling (LWD): in short they put a probe next to the drill and expect the probe to send info back up. The probe has nuclear materials, NMR capabilities and so on and it is pretty expensive.

So how do you send information back up from deep down ? Wi-Fi or RF Comms won't work because of the depth of the rock. Resistivity or something equivalent like sound along the poles ? It turns out most of these poles are crunched by the pressure once they are down, so the ideal measurements of conductivity you knew don't work deep into the ground: It is a very bad inverse problem. Schlumberger came up with an innovative means, use the water they send down to help the drill convey messages back to the communication station. When it comes back up, that water is mud. So the probe sends pulses through the water/mud and convey information back up. The data rate is astonishing too: 15 bits/second.

It's called FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt

- Saudi reserves are not as large as they say,

- Yukos has been allowed to use its frozen accounts but still owe big time the Russian state,

- the price of oil is above $ 40 a barrel,

Who's your friend ?

So the summer is just beginning and a heatwave already has already brought power cuts in Spain. But they have nuclear power plants there, so what happened ? Well I would not know, but could it have a relationship to the fact that they rely on these power plants for only 25% of their electricity needs ? Or could it somehow be related to the fact that the French CGT union decided to cut off a 400,000 Volts line from France to Spain yesterday yielding an unbalance in their power network "a la" 2003 Northeast blackout ? It must be an untenable position to be a politician in Spain, on the one hand you yield to your constituency and their misguided environmental decisions or you have to be dependent on ... the French, aargh.

Nature ain't fair


Found this in the news in France. In Dunkirk, a wind turbine fell victim to a 70 mph gust of wind. Wasn't wind supposed to give us free energy not knock us down ?

On Learned Helplessness

Malcolm Gladwell on why people would choose SUVs over other types of cars is insightful. It reminds me of the type of criticism used against the nuclear industry vs the coal and the oil industry.

But we're the FBI !

Back in 1989, Rocky Flats was the center of all the attention because its plant was allegedly not following federal regulations on health, environmental and safety standards. After a whistleblower went to the EPA, one branch of the U.S government (the EPA) decided to look into another (DOE).

Since the EPA is mostly a regulatory body, it needs the help of the FBI to investigate the matter further. One way to check the whistleblowers' account was to enter the facility. The FBI (Justice Department ) and the EPA then decided to set up joint task force and a raid was decided. Now, one needs to realize that entering a federal facility is one thing if you're an agency of the government, but it is somewhat a totally different thing if you're an agency of the government and want to enter a facility where nuclear weapons are built. It's a federal facility all right, but of a special kind. 

In to make the raid happen, the Secretary of Justice at the time asks the Undersecretary of Energy to come by their offices because "they need to talk". Once in the room, the undersecretary is surrounded by Justice department officials and abruptly learns that one of his facility is going to be raided by 150 agents the morning after. This is first time this has ever happened in the history of the Department of Energy (or the Atomic energy commission) in that one branch of the government is going to be raiding another branch of the government. This is stunner for him but he is also sworn to secrecy because nobody wants any leaks to reach the Rocky flats folks. After much dismay that one arm of the government would do that to another, the Department of Energy official inquires on how they are going to raid *that* facility. The following is an account of that discussion:

Justice Dept Rep: Well we have about 150 agents ready to show up tomorrow morning at 7:00, we'll say who we are, show our credentials and be on our merry way

DOE Rep: But surely you realize that these guys are a little army on their own, they train on scenarios like this where the bad guys say they work for the FBI/CIA and whatnot. I mean these people will not just not let you in, whoever the hell you think you are

JD Rep:  But we're the FBI!

DOE Rep: How are they going to know you're the FBI ?

....

After a long discussion, the facility was eventually raided the day after....