Exploration Insights December 2019/ January 2020 | Page 8

8 | Halliburton Landmark
Intern Experience —
Zhili Wei
As a Ph.D. student majoring in geophysics,
Halliburton is one of the top companies I would
want to work for. My dissertation project was
about machine learning (ML), so I wanted to find
an internship that combined geophysics with ML
technology. Fortunately, I found such an internship
at Halliburton Landmark in the summer of 2019.
For our internship project, my teammate and I
applied ML to facilitate salt body detection in
seismic processing workflows. We used data
from the Gulf of Mexico, where salt is the most
common geo-body. Traditionally, geoscientists
manually pick salt bodies from seismic images.
Our goal was to reduce the manual effort and cost
by automating this picking process using ML.
Our internship began with a welcoming reception,
followed by a 3-day training session. From the
first day, our mentors and colleagues were nice
and willing to share their knowledge with us. The
project involved using Landmark software, which
I had never used before. Our mentors were very
patient and taught us step-by-step, from installing
the software to successfully running a test case.
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Our manager set the goals of our project and
divided it into several smaller pieces. Before our
midterm and final presentations, he organized
several rehearsals for us to make sure that we
could successfully deliver our work.
In addition to our mentors in Houston, we
collaborated with domain experts working in
Abingdon (U.K.) and Denver (U.S.A.). Technical
experts provided us with an AWS cloud
machine and Seismic Engine, which were huge
enhancements to the research in terms of
hardware.
Besides the technical work, I also enjoyed the
activities organized for interns. These included
tours around campus, visiting drilling facilities,
relaxing on nights before each major presentation,
and volunteering at the Houston Food Bank to give
back to the community.
The Halliburton North Belt Campus is a great
working environment with many auxiliary facilities,
such as the cafeteria and gym. I particularly
enjoyed the 3-mile running trail around the
campus. It is a good place to embrace nature and
relax after a long day working.
For me, my summer 2019 internship was a very
pleasant and fruitful journey. It reached its peak
on the day of our final presentation, when we
successfully presented our results in front of the
senior VP, directors, and technical experts of
Landmark. We received both positive feedback and
helpful advice. Furthermore, we generated two
patent applications and at least two conference
paper submissions as a direct result of our project.
Intern Experience —
Mark Mlella
My summer 2019 internship experience was
full of learning opportunities. My project was to
help develop algorithms for automatic detection
of faults in seismic data, using machine learning
techniques. The project required the use of
modern computational tools, like graphics
processing units for faster computation, so I had to
use remote servers for better performance. In that
light, the project exposed me to cloud computing
and various machine learning techniques that can
assist a geoscientist in seismic data interpretation.
I benefited by being a part of a multidisciplinary
team with a common goal of solving a geophysical
problem using machine learning.
I found the working environment to be very
collaborative, which made it easy to learn about
the different Landmark software tools. When
quality checking the faults detected using the
machine learning algorithms we developed, we
leveraged the power of DecisionSpace ® to render
the outputs, and then compared them with faults
detected using deterministic methods or human
interpretation. This helped me to understand the
state-of-the-art tools within Landmark software,
and how to add new functionality to the existing
tools in order to make better software products.
I have gained an insight into what a career in
the oil and gas industry entails. I am grateful to
all the mentors that supported me during my
internship. Moreover, I am glad I went through
the process of taking on a project for which I had
no prior experience, building knowledge using
first principles, and finally integrating all that I had
learned in order to provide a software solution. The
internship provided me with first-hand experience
of building and testing software for seismic data
interpretation. That is, I got to develop a workflow
of flipping bits (making software) as an aid to
finding pores (reservoirs).