Interactive geoscience and entrepreneurship

Abstract¶

Over the last decade, I have been experimenting with interactive software tools in geology and geophysics to help explain and interact with concepts to ease collaboration in our interdisciplinary geoscience field. In this presentation, I will reflect on some lessons learned and motivations behind three projects: Visible Geology, SimPEG and 3point Science. In sharing stories, motivations and experiences behind these projects, I hope to inspire other students, entrepreneurs and researchers who are creating communities around their own scientific tools and ideas.

Visible Geology (https://app.visiblegeology.com), is an online educational tool for students to combine geologic events in any order to create their own geologic block models and ask ‘what-if’ questions. The tool has been used by over 400K geoscience students as well as in multiple studies at the University of Calgary and at the University of British Columbia.

SimPEG (https://simpeg.xyz), is an open-source, multi-university effort aimed at providing a generalized framework for solving forward and inverse problems in geophysics. SimPEG supports simulation and inversion of electromagnetics, vadose zone flow, and potential field data; all of which are written with a common interface and toolbox. The goal of SimPEG is to support a community of researchers with well-tested, extensible tools, and encourage transparency and reproducibility for the geoscientific research it is applied to.

3point Science Inc., founded in 2013, developed technical communication tools for the geosciences; specializing in online visualization tools for learning, training, and simulation. In 2016, 3point Science was sold to Seequent (https://www.seequent.com), a visual data science company that enable geoscientists to make better decisions about their earth, environment and energy challenges.

Bio¶

Rowan is interested in the intersection of education, entrepreneurship, and academia, and seeing what happens when you make powerful scientific modeling, visualization and collaboration tools accessible through the web. He started creating geoscience visualization software as an undergraduate at UCalgary when he saw many of his peers struggling with three dimensional intuition. Expanding on ideas from a UCalgary classroom, he has influenced the global geoscience education stage, catapulted these ideas into a business, and built a successful product that was sold to an international company for whom he is now driving a global cloud strategy. During this time he also completed his PhD in computational geophysics at the University of British Columbia, where he was a Vanier Scholar and a Killam Laureate. In 2018, Rowan received an early career achievement Arch Award from UCalgary for his leadership around Visible Geology, SimPEG and entrepreneurial work starting 3point Science.