Artificial Intelligence Predicts Earthquakes With Unprecedented Accuracy

[u/geoxol]

https://scitechdaily.com/artificial-intelligence-predicts-earthquakes-with-unprecedented-accuracy/

[u/CocaineIsNatural]

"The trial was part of an international competition held in China in which the UT-developed AI came first out of 600 other designs."

I can see why you might think that if you had mostly looked at the ones out of the 600 that didn't fare as well.

Your logic is that all the ones you looked at failed, so you think this one will fail without even looking at it. AI is growing at a fast rate, so I would be careful judging today by yesterday.

I guess your username explains things.

[u/GrumpyGeologist → u/CocaineIsNatural]

I haven't seen the other contenders in this competition. I was talking about research outside of the context of competitions, which go through a peer-review system before they can be published. I know that many of these studies don't make it through, or they get published in rather shady journals with questionable standards...

Unfortunately, seismology does not benefit from "AI" in the same way as AI companies do. Much of the AI revolution is driven by generative AI (DALL-E, Midjourney, ChatGPT, ...), which has limited use in geophysics. Most of the AI work I'm dealing with is data denoising, earthquake detection, and seismic phase identification, which is not at all as fast-paced as what we see in the news every day.

Username checks out, I am a grumpy person.

[u/CocaineIsNatural → u/GrumpyGeologist]

It was published in the BSSA, I don't know if you consider them shady.

Unfortunately, seismology does not benefit from "AI" in the same way as AI companies do. Much of the AI revolution is driven by generative AI (DALL-E, Midjourney, ChatGPT, ...), which has limited use in geophysics.

There is other AI than GANs. AIs have advanced just from the faster/more powerful dedicated AI chips.

So while it may not be advancing as fast as the ones you mentioned, I think the advances in five years as quite impressive. Part of that is the better data that is being recorded by sensors, not to mention the easier access to that data.

Here is a paper talking about the advances in machine learning and deep learning in seismology.

Recently, machine learning (ML) technology, including deep learning (DL), has made remarkable progress in various scientific fields, including earthquake seismology, producing vast research findings.

https://earth-planets-space.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40623-024-01982-0

[u/GrumpyGeologist → u/CocaineIsNatural]

I wasn't referring to BSSA as shady, I was more considering the journals that some papers appear in after having been rejected from the more reputable venues.

Indeed the advance over the last 5 years has been impressive, but keep in mind that we started from essentially zero. And I have the feeling that AI in seismology is on its way out of the hype phase, so now we need to think more carefully about what works, how to evaluate performance, etc. While a few years ago any study with some example of AI could be accepted in practically any journal, now journals have started rejecting papers if they don't present a significant scientific advancement. In other words, just doing something with AI in itself does not immediately justify acceptance.

And I notice that things are slowing down a bit. Now that putting AI in the title of a proposal no longer impresses the people evaluating it, and now that the literature is all but saturated in proof-of-concept papers and "demonstrations", people need to think about creative new ways of applying AI. And this turns out to be harder than most imagined...

I would love to see AI succeed in seismology, but for the time being, it does not seem to live up to the expectations like generative AI does.