Felix Herrmann

Biography

Ph.D., Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands (1997) Visiting Scholar, Stanford (1998) Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT (1999-2002) Faculty Member, UBC (2002 -). Sabbatical Visitor, Delft University of Technology (2009) Sabbatical Visitor, Imperial College London (2016) Director, UBC Seismic Laboratory for Imaging and Modeling (SLIM) Felix J. Herrmann holds a PhD in Engineering Physics from the Delft University of Technology and completed postdoctoral studies at MIT and Stanford.  He is Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences.  He is Director of the UBC Seismic Laboratory for Imaging and Modeling, which he founded in 2003, as well as Director of the the SINBAD Joint Industry Project.  He is Deputy Editor of Geophysical Prospecting.  Dr. Herrmann serves on the advisory boards of the UBC Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences and the UBC Institute for Applied Mathematics.  His research interests include theoretical and applied aspects of exploration seismology, wave-equation based inversion, compressive sensing, and large-scale optimisation. He is a founding member of the International Inversion Initiative. Ph.D., Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands (1997) Visiting Scholar, Stanford (1998) Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT (1999-2002) Faculty Member, UBC (2002 -). Sabbatical Visitor, Delft University of Technology (2009) Sabbatical Visitor, Imperial College London (2016) Director, UBC Seismic Laboratory for Imaging and Modeling (SLIM) Felix J. Herrmann holds a PhD in Engineering Physics from the Delft University of Technology and completed postdoctoral studies at MIT and Stanford.  He is Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences.  He is Director of the UBC Seismic Laboratory for Imaging and Modeling, which he founded in 2003, as well as Director of the the SINBAD Joint Industry Project.  He is Deputy Editor of Geophysical Prospecting.  Dr. Herrmann serves on the advisory boards of the UBC Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences and the UBC Institute for Applied Mathematics.  His research interests include theoretical and applied aspects of exploration seismology, wave-equation based inversion, compressive sensing, and large-scale optimisation. He is a founding member of the International Inversion Initiative.

Research Interest

The Seismic Laboratory for Imaging and Modeling (link is external) (SLIM) conducts research in exploration seismology with support from the energy industry. The focus of SLIM is to apply insights from recent developments in compressive sensing— spanning mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering—towards the design and implementation of an imaging technology for severely sub-sampled data. The main outcome of this approach will be a new model for seismic imaging where the costs of acquisition and processing are no longer determined by overly pessimistic sampling criteria. Instead, costs will depend on transform-domain sparsity of the final image and will no longer grow uncontrollably with the dimensionality of the imaging problem. Our collaboration SINBAD (link is external) is an industry-supported research consortium that advances this research to push the envelope on seismic data acquisition, processing, and wave-equation based imaging and inversion by adapting recent developments from compressive sensing and machine learning. By incorporating ideas from these research areas into seismic workflows, we offer innovative sampling & inversion strategies where costs are no longer dominated by overly pessimistic sampling criteria and where the inversion results are less sensitive to initial models and parameter settings. By removing our insistence to collect and process all data, we are also in a better position for quality control and uncertainty analysis.