Chris Justiniano

August 22nd, 2022

This post is kind of late...but still, with good news from my internship. Everything that defined this journey was amazing (e.g. orientation week, research with my advisor, workshops). Around twenty days ago, I submitted my first abstract ever to AGU Fall Meeting 2022. My poster for this research is in the works for the main presentation. It's interesting the fact that even though you have your research, some other stuff went going on that were also part of this great summer experience.

I could get to know better and learn from other faculty professors and students from a different scientific perspective, and learn to apply programming skills in the geoscience context; I feel like I could accomplish this last goal with success. Getting to work in your first research experience and accomplishing this milestone is so special. The internship also helped me to be more aware and open-minded about research opportunities, to have a certain confidence about the research you will be looking for. Currently, I'm in this process of searching for research opportunities either in my campus and off-campus, and I can say that the internship experience (and also this type of learning process during research) aided me to gain this confidence.

I think that the greatest obstacle from all the summer was EQTransformer in the early stages of my research. However, I also think that probably since I wasn't doing so much work on research in the past, I couldn't find a way to apply my programming skills on scientific work. Therefore, it was quite challenging that my lack of practice in programming was present at certain points in my research experience. Of course, this was mostly during the early stages and mid-stage of my summer, but after that, everything came by with ease and with a better workflow. It's not the same to say that "you know" about a subject, and "you experienced the problems of the subject...and learned from it". Regarding EQTransformer, the best way my advisor and I could understand the tool was not only through papers that explained about the subject, but also "peer reviews" from other people that know other special "tricks" or "pitfalls" that they experienced with the deep learning tool in past research. Also, some graduate students from my research team also learned how certain details worked on EQTransformer, and I learned from that to apply the skills in my research.

In overall, my research at SMU was great. The research also has the potential to be extended in a near future, since the work from this summer has a qualitative and quantitative analysis approach of the seismic sequence using deep learning for the first time (in that particular Azle-Reno region). Definitely, this internship was a life changer, either in the academic, professional, and personal sense. If I had the chance to repeat this experience, I would definitely do it for sure.

Hope to see the other interns at AGU!! And good luck with your academic semesters!!

July 13th, 2022

Today is July 13th, and I can't still believe all the different things that happened this summer that, in a certain way, had some influence not just on me, but also on my family relatives in Puerto Rico, since I'm far away from home and they miss me so much. For those who know me well so far (and also with other interns whom I talked with in the orientation week), I had never been in USA before (except in New York once, when I was a child). However, since I don't have so much memories about that, I consider myself as never feeling that kind of experience; specially being outside for so longer...but I embraced this new experience with total confidence and full determination. And this is one of the special inherent skills that allowed me to keep on in my research. During my stay here in Dallas, a lot of things changed in the way I see my surroundings and how I interact with the people from here. There is a lot of diversity in this place, and people who come from other countries live here as well (there's also a Puerto Rican community that I have to look for before leaving my internship site 😊 ).

In the SMU campus, faculty members and students are very nice people and casually I got to know some of them during the Croquet games. When I first arrived at campus, I met with my advisor and the other students of my team in the first day. Some of the particular challenges I faced during the first week was to familiarize myself with the main working directory and the associated folders that help to work in my working directory, which are important when it comes to debugging or find other associated folders that are needed to run a particular process.....ufffff....looks like a mess, right? However, I had always been organized in different aspects of my academic life, which I think that this skill helped me to better understand the branching system of my working directory for my selected data and how each is catalogued in just a matter of 1-2 weeks. The next thing I found surprising was the fact that I didn't know how much practice I needed to domain the command line, even though I had previous knowledge of using the terminal (self learning). Thanks to the SSBW 2022, I got to review some concepts that were easy to remember, and some others, new stuff. But at the end, it helped me so much to apply this knowledge in the process of filtering data search and command line operations (wildcards are the most awesome things that programming experience can give jajajaja). Last, but not least, patience with the data processing. This part was kind of not too difficult to overcome, but it required to have a time-scheduled plan to make sure that the data processing will finish with time and on time. EQTransformer by itself is also a challenge; understanding the parameters and what to choose specifically in order to do a specific pick or a certain time range was tedious, but in the end, a good learning experience.

Below, I share a pic I took at myself, sitting in front of a Hyundai Grand Piano in an old-antique-stuff market in Richardson, TX (far North Dallas). I played it for around ~1hr or so, sharing some big performances to the public that visited the market. For those who didn't know...yes, I'm also a musician; played the piano for +10 years. As you can clearly see, during my free time (mostly weekends), I found some cool stuff to do (like this) when I'm not at research work. In case you become curious in the future about my music career, feel free to search me as Chris Matthew Music on FB and IG (along with my Spotify page inside these sites).

Facebook: @chris.matthew.music
Instagram: @chris.matthew.music

See you soon for further updates of my Fort Worth Azle Seismic Sequence Research!!

July 9th, 2022

Two stations ready…16 more to go! At least, that’s the latest update for this recent week. I feel like, at this point, seem to manage the data processing and planification of research more quickly and more independently than my first two weeks. My mentor, and some students from my team, are helping me a lot in this process, and so far it has been amazing. Everything got settled, and I'm learning a lot.

From all the good figures that EQT generated during this last month, I picked up this one. I’ll have a special emphasis on studying the local earthquakes from the Azle Seismic Sequence to better explain the induced seismicity of the area, so that's why I'm looking to select these type of events, as from the figure. The central paper that represents my summer research, so far, is “Casual Factors for Seismicity in Azle, Texas” (Hornbach et al. 2015). This is considered a controversial paper by the petroleum industry for it’s high scientific accuracy about the effects of groundwater injection in the subsurface. It explains in a lot of detail how the seismic-induced events altered the pore pressure of the strata, and some other rock properties.

Image 1. EQT output, showing a three-component seismogram of an AZE2 station event from April 2015.

July 9th, 2022

So far, the data processing is going well. My team and I managed to downsample the seismic data that didn’t process through EQT to 100 sps. Now that everything was at 100 sps, EQT could generate a statistical report of the seismic lectures and figures from each event per date (1-min window per event).

One of the challenges that were showed up during our workflow was the issue that came up when EQT crashes down. It was at some point frustrating, because even if you have available documentation from the original EQT authors to follow on, sometimes certain errors can not be explained. Precisely, this led me to ONE success; understanding how EQT takes everything and how behaves with the data. It helped me to better understand one specific error that I was dealing with during the entire summer, of which I figured out it’s origin; sometimes the file size matters a lot when talking about the data that comes collected through seismic stations. Some mseed files were incomplete, and that’s why EQT couldn’t catch up all the entire dataset (sometimes just because of one incomplete file).

I will work with a total of 18 stations from the ZW and NQ seismic networks that correspond to my area of study, which is the Azle Seismic Sequence. This was (and still is) one of the most active areas in seismic activity around the Texas region. I share here a simple map that I produced quickly in GMT showing the distribution of the stations around the sequence. I aim to keep working on this map. One of my new goals for this is to figure out how to generate topography along with the data points at the same time using GMT.

June 26th, 2022

There was a lot of cool stuff going on during this week. Everything seems to be OK in the research progress, and I feel that I'm completely set up with the dynamics of our work in the computer lab. During the second and third week, I got to generate through the EQT tool some cool images of seismograms, and a lot of them chose good P-wave and S-wave picks in their three components. Some of these got a little bit delayed (but still on time), because sometimes technical difficulties kept arising in the process of preprocessing the mseed files and passing them through the EQT analyzer. However, in the end, everything is going well as our expected plans. Although EQT shows a good performance in our tasks (even though it takes a lot of time the data downloading), it's weird at some point. For some reason, EQT has some difficulties downloading data at 200 samples per second. In the meantime, I kept working with another simple station as my team and I figure out how to get the data from the IRIS online database of these specific data, or use the local data from the campus' servers and make the downsampling locally before passing them to EQT.

Regarding to the "elevader" speech, I made this practice today to see how much I know about the research and what could be my short presentation in everyday aspects. To be honest, this exercise was kind of easy for me, but maybe I'll make some corrections in the future in the draft I have. Since english is my second language, it was a little bit unconfortable when I practiced by my own; sometimes you will think that maybe you didn't express your arguments as you thought they could be. But when I listened to the recording I made from this "drafted" speech, it actually sounded nice. I can apply this to anything, since it is like a short generalized presentation of what is your work, in a way that everyone understands your scientific statements; it will also be helpful for me at AGU (and probably SSA if the chance arises). I think that one must always know what to say in specific situations where science is involved, or if someone has to do a thesis defense either masters or PhD. These kind of things are excellent to practice; I think I will keep enjoying this as my script evolves throughout the summer (and throughout next semester).

I have a neat workplace at SMU campus. It's interesting because it just happens that I'm the only boy in the teamwork group, which I think it is something good 😉 (either way or the other, still it is, honestly). Everyone is awesome, and we had good times in our lab and also took a day during this summer to visit the Perot Museum at downtown Dallas (it was cool btw....I LOVED THE MINERALS COLLECTION!!). Every Friday of the week, we have around ~1 hr break in the morning to play with my teamwork, some other students, and other professors from the general induced seismicity research group a game called Croquet in the main park of campus. Honestly, I have never played this game before, neither knew the rules beforehand. It was quite of funny because I made a team with a faculty professor during the game and we just got the third place IN MY FIRST EVER CROQUET GAME. LOL

Anyway, here are the photos.....PHOTO BOMB!

This is me in my workspace (a computer lab) 😊

This is a "winked eye" me in the workplace 😉

This is the downloading process of last week (since it is a lot of data, I decided to download them through multiple sessions before leaving the building at the end of this third week). I will check out next week to see how is it going.

This is the Croquet game in my first week at campus. We also had last Friday another croquet game.
Of course, I'm not in the photo because I took that one. 😊

June 18th, 2022

So far, the EQTransformer tool I've been using seems to work efficiently at the time of realizing picks of each type of wave. This algorithm works under ObsPy and it plots the three seismic components for each station measurement, along with some graph functions that relate seismicity distribution. EQT works well for the purposes of the research. I will be among the first students to be testing this new tool during the summer. The only pros and cons about EQTransformer is that the tool generate cool diagrams of the seismic waves from a specific location (in my case, AZDA and AZE2 stations from the Azle seismic sequence), and the cons is that data can be downloaded from any source, but no more than ~1 month of time per dataset all at once.

I think I will work with my skill of developing the critical analysis of figuring out the next step for research. This seems obvious in some way, because you start your research aroung 2 weeks ago, and at first, one doesn't have so clear how you could keep on going in the workflow. Performing my skill in the development of my research abilities, in overrall, is the most of which I have to work on during the summer (in addition that this is my first official undergraduate research experience). The only way to keep a better performance in this is through hard work, reading papers, and practicing continuously before the weekly presentation meetings that I'm assisting inside my teamwork.

I keep you updated for more news about the process of my summer research!

June 13th, 2022

There are different goals that I’m willing to accomplish based on my actual research during this summer internship. These will help me to be guided towards professional exposure and scientific communication as part of my career as a future geoscientist. However, I’ll talk first about the orientation week briefly, since this was an amazing experience that I’ll never forget.

The best thing I loved from the orientation week before the summer research was that I could connect through a personal and professional perspective with other students from different parts of the world, including one from my own campus. I am so glad to meet all of them and hopefully will be staying in touch in order to keep the follow up with our own research projects, learning from our experiences. The orientation week gave me the chance to make friends and visit different geologic sites of amazing greatness. As one of my fellow geologist friends would say, all of this was “geolgasmic” (“geolgásmico”).

So far, in terms of the beginning of the summer, I was getting acquainted with the tools I needed to start my research. I will be using EQTransformer algorithm to work on the data, and this last week was dedicated to have everything set up in my assigned PC. I received assistance from some students of my team with this task. Reading papers related to my research and with my data selection was also another of my tasks from last week. Hopefully, this second week that just started, I will work with the Azle seismic sequence data using EQTransformer. My research team consists of 5 members: one faculty member (mentor-SMU), one postdoc student (SMU), one master student (SMU), one undergrad student (SMU), and one undergrad intern (me-UPRM).

So right now, I have the following goals during the summer:

• For my first 2-3 weeks of the summer, I will expect to gain more confidence and be comfortable with the data I’ll be working on, along with the algorithm I’ll be using. This will leave me prepared with a good kickstart in the research project and perform my critical thinking at solving problems in the way.
• During the second third of the summer, I will expect working with the seismic data with more independency and start to generate results from this work. Also, I would be preparing at the end of this summer second third session the scientific abstract of the project.
• By the end of the summer, I’ll expect to discuss the work done with my team colleagues, along with my mentor, edit the abstract, and submit it before the deadline (August 3rd, 2022). I would also have every tool prepared to develop a good poster for the presentation and keep the follow up during next academic semester with both mentor and internship staff (in addition to the other IRIS interns).