Digital Journey–Lessons captured to invoke the next frontier of innovation

Joshua Adler

Joshua Adler is the Founding Chief Executive of Sourcewater (www.sourcewater.com), the technology leader in holistic energy intelligence. Sourcewater gathers, analyzes and visualizes omnichannel data to show upstream energy and water activity earlier, more completely and more accurately than other sources. Its data science innovations combining satellite imagery, mobile GPS, geoscience and regulatory big data analytics have earned 11 U.S. patents with 12 more pending. Sourcewater has been honored by IHS CERAWeek as an Energy Innovation Pioneer, by Frost & Sullivan as Supply Chain Enabling Technology of the Year, by the Oil & Gas Awards as New Technology of the Year, and by TPH as an Energy Disruptor. Clients include some of the largest U.S. E&P, infrastructure and service companies.

Josh previously served as Chief Speechwriter to the U.S. Treasury Secretary under President George W. Bush and co-founded medical device company iLife Systems, robotics company MegaBots, LaKritz Adler Development and Amour.com, the first online matchmaking company. He sits on advisory boards of several AI companies including ZyloTech and Cortex Automation. He is a graduate of Yale and MIT, where he was a Sloan Fellow for Innovation and Global Leadership in Energy Ventures. He has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Economist and Wired. He is the sole inventor on nine U.S. patents covering AI, machine learning and computer vision methods in satellite imagery analytics. Josh lives in Houston, Texas.

Subrata Bhowmik

Subrata Bhowmik is a Subsea digitalization & automation specialist and Senior Data Scientist in McDermott. He has a Masters and PhD from ETH Zurich and the Technical University of Denmark in Control Systems and Intelligent Control. Subrata also has an MSc in Business Analytics from University of Bath, UK. He has more than 15 years of experience in various organizations like GE, NOV, EMPA, Petrofac, INEOS and McDermott. Subrata is a Chartered Engineer and the Fellow of IMarEST. He has contributed extensively in Control Systems Design, Asset Integrity Management, Digital Twin, Structure Health Monitoring and Predictive Maintenance Strategy for various projects.

John Bradford

John Bradford received dual BS degrees in Physics and Engineering Physics with a concentration in Chemical Engineering from the University of Kansas in 1994. He received his PhD in Geophysics from Rice University in 1999. In 2001 he joined the Center for Geophysical Investigation of the Shallow Subsurface at Boise State University, where he served as director from 2006 - 2009. In 2017 he moved to the Colorado School of Mines where he served as the Geophysics Department Head until 2019, Vice Provost and Dean from 2019 – 2020, and is currently Vice President for Global Initiatives and heads the Office of Global Initiatives and Business Development. He remains active in research and is focused on developing methodologies for quantitative analysis of near-surface seismic and ground-penetrating radar data with emphasis on using these tools to solve interdisciplinary science and engineering problems. He has published on a diverse array of topics that include hydrocarbon detection as both resource and environmental contaminant, geothermal characterization, hydrogeophysics, glaciology, and archaeology. In 2015/2016 he served as the President of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists.

Dingzhou Cao

Dingzhou Cao is currently the data science manager in WPX Energy Inc. In this role, he focuses on building the real-time analytics systems within WPX, which include the drilling, completion and production. Prior to joining WPX, he worked for Anadarko Petroleum Corporation as a data science manager, BP America Inc. as a reliability specialist, ReliaSoft Corporation as a research scientist (the solo person in charge of the simulation engine development), and Ford Motor Company as a machine learning researcher. His background is on machine learning, operation research, optimization, and real-time stream analytics. With his past roles at Anadarko, he first led a team to work with drilling engineers to build Anadarko’s real-time drilling analytics from scratch, and later he led the data science efforts in the real-time drilling and real-time completion domains. He got his PhD in Industrial Engineering from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and his bachelor degree in Applied Math from Jinan University, Guangzhou, China.

Birol Dindoruk

Birol Dindoruk is a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Houston. He is recently retired after 23 years of a career with Shell International E&P Inc. as a chief scientist and a principal technical expert in reservoir engineering. In this position, he had many opportunities in working worldwide projects and project teams and as well as provided expert advice on numerous projects, especially in the areas of advanced recovery processes, complex phase behavior, Gas Injection and CO2 Sequestration, and lifecycle data handling and standards and data analytics. He also serves a consulting professor at Stanford University. He holds PhD degree in petroleum engineering and mathematics from Stanford University, and an MBA degree from the University of Houston. He is a recipient of SPE’s Cedric K. Ferguson Medal and Lester C. Uren Awards and is a member of National Academy of Engineering. He has also served as co-executive editor of SPE, editor-in-chief for JPSE and currently for JNGSE. Dindoruk is a member of the SPE board and is currently serving as the technical director of Data Science and Engineering Analytics (DSEA).

Mark Gamble

Mark is a passionate product marketer with a technical and solution consulting background and 20+ years of experience in Enterprise and Open Source technology. He has launched several database and analytic solutions throughout his career, and has worked with customers across a wide variety of industries including Financial Services, Automotive, Hospitality, High-Tech and Healthcare. With an expertise in analytics and AI, Mark loves all things data, and is an emphatic supporter of data-for-good initiatives.

Elena Rodriguez

Dr. Elena Rodriguez holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Universidad de Oviedo in Spain (2003) and both a M.S. (2006) and PhD (2010) in Petroleum Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. She is currently working as a petroleum engineer for Chevron, where she has worked in the areas of Enhanced Oil Recovery, Waterflood Optimization, Data Analytics and Unconventional Resources for the last 10 years.

Ken Hester

Ken Hester is a global Solution Architect Manager for NVIDIA supporting the Energy industry in HPC, AI Deep Learning and Machine Learning, and CUDA GPU compute. He is based out of Houston Texas, and has been with NVIDIA for almost 7 years. Prior to NVIDIA, Ken worked in Energy for 15+ years as an industry expert in data science, software architecture, software design and development.

Silviu Livescu

Silviu Livescu is the chief scientist in Baker Hughes’ Pressure Pumping Coiled Tubing Research and Engineering in Calgary, Canada, with innovation, intellectual property, research and technology development, management, and commercialization experience applied to several petroleum engineering and clean energy technical disciplines, with focus on well engineering. Livescu is the 2020-2023 SPE Data Science and Engineering Analytics Technical Director, an SPE distinguished member, an executive editor for the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, and serves on various SPE committees. He holds a PhD degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Delaware, USA.

Rick Jacobs

Rick Jacobs is the technical product marketing manager at Couchbase. His varied background includes experience at many of the world’s leading organizations such as Computer Sciences Corporation, IBM, Cloudera, etc. He comes with more than 15 years of general technology experience garnered from serving in development, consulting, data science, sales engineering, and technical marketing roles. He holds several academic degrees including an MS in Computational Science from George Mason University.

Vikram Jayaram

Dr. Vikram Jayaram is the head of data science and Advanced Analytics group at Pioneer Natural Resources, catering to the business intelligence, digital strategy, and innovation essentials of Pioneer's upstream operations. His team leads the technology research and analytics product development. Vikram’s interests and R&D efforts are in utilizing applied/derived machine learning, artificial intelligence, and optimization concepts, in drilling, completions, geosciences, ESG, and next generation reservoir monitoring systems. Building strategic business intelligence solutions pertaining to real time operations, ML driven hydrocarbon production forecasting, design of controlled experiments leading to actionable insights, are Vikram’s team prime focus avenues. He has also worked in the development of solutions utilizing IoT, HPC, and Edge Computing solutions for upstream E&P applications. Vikram has more than 15 years of varied industry academic experience including past faculty/research tenures at University of Texas (El Paso) and Oklahoma. Vikram is an Associate Editor of Interpretation, an SEG/AAPG journal, and has more than 40 international peer-reviewed publications. He also secured multi-million dollars in research funding from DoE, NSF, NASA, NIH, and corporate funding during his academic and research tenures.

Raj Malpani

Raj has worked on numerous integrated projects spanning from asset evaluations to full-field development in multiple active and upcoming unconventional reservoirs over the past 15 years. He holds an M. S. in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M University. His interests include hydraulic fracture treatment design and evaluation, geomechanics, restimulation, time-lapse development optimization, production data analysis, reservoir simulation, asset evaluation, and field development planning. Malpani has published many articles, has given several presentations, and is an active volunteer.

Sid Misra

Prof. Siddharth Misra is an Associate Professor in Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M University. Misra holds a Ph.D. in Petroleum Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to that, from 2007 to 2010, he worked as a Wireline Field Engineer in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and USA with Halliburton. He received his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India, in 2007. Recently, he was awarded the prestigious Department of Energy Early Career Award, American Chemical Society New Investigator Award, and SPE Mid-Continent Formation Evaluation Award. His research interest include subsurface characterization, machine learning, sensing and sensors, and inverse problems.

Gautier Noiray

Gautier Noiray, Project Manager at McDermott, earned an MSc in mechanical engineering from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers and an MS in materials engineering from the University of Florida. He is applying his subsea engineering experience and his programming expertise to transform the way McDermott conceptualizes, plans, executes and documents subsea projects. Gautier is leading a digital initiative within McDermott’s Digital Projects & Innovation Group that is revolutionizing the company’s approach to subsea projects, bridging the gaps between disciplines and breaking down barriers to improve communication among project stakeholders.

Glen Parkes

Glen Parkes is the digital product management director at Baker Hughes. Glen Parkes has worked for Baker Hughes for more than 13 years in multiple roles and global locations. Four years ago, he established a technology startup within Baker Hughes focused on developing, incubating, and commercializing innovative digital technology, thus solving customers’ evolving needs. His drive to develop solutions that enable the adoption of the 4th industrial revolution not only include technology developments, but also focuses on innovative commercial and development partnerships and new ways of working to develop an ecosystem of relationships. Glen is based in Denver, Colorado.

Harsh Patel

Harsh Patel is a digital projects & innovation specialist at McDermott International. He is the technical lead for digitalization and automation efforts in flow assurance engineering. Harsh has more than 6 years of research experience in developing computational modelling and engineering tools in the oil & energy industry. He has authored over 30 peer-reviewed publications and has received 14 awards. Harsh holds PhD and MS degrees in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Oklahoma and a BTech degree in Petroleum Engineering from Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University (India).

Marc Spieler

Marc Spieler is responsible for Global Business Development/Strategy for the Energy industry at NVIDIA. He is actively engaged with major Energy companies and related research labs to conceive and realize Energy and Industrial AI enabled solutions. He is focused on developing business and ecosystem around real time deep learning training/inferencing platforms, architecture and related algorithms for Energy use cases spanning inspection, predictive maintenance, video analytics, logistics, automation and conversational AI.

Before joining NVIDIA, Marc spent 13 years with Halliburton, where he held leadership positions in Commercial and Strategic Alliances, Technology Operations, Customer Financial Services, and Corporate Development. Prior to Halliburton, Marc worked for Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) where he held a variety of sales and business development roles in the energy vertical. Marc holds an MBA from Rice University in Texas and a Master of Science in Professional Development and Leadership as well as Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Winona State University in Minnesota.

Kris Vedat

Kris Vedat joined P&O Maritime Logistics (POML) in September 2015 as head of IT. Kris joined POML with 16 years’ experience from United Arab Shipping Company (UASC) where he has led several regional teams in UAE, Europe, and West Africa. In his most recent role as the head of service operations, Kris had overall responsibility for the organization’s IT Services. During his time at POML, he has been driving the Company’s digital program with the implementation of the company’s first Maritime ERP system, executing a cloud-first strategy moving all core systems and infrastructure to Microsoft Azure, and connecting the fleet to bring them closer to shore and the deployment of IoT technology among the fleet to allow real-time data collection from the vessel.

Kainan Wang

Dr. Kainan Wang has years of experience in research and development of machine learning algorithms and products to facilitate data processing and decision making for upstream energy business. Before joining Chevron, Dr. Wang worked at Sanchez Oil and Gas Corporation as a data science lead, prior to which he worked at Halliburton Landmark for algorithm research and software development. Dr. Wang obtained his Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Sichuan University in China, and his PhD in applied mathematics from Texas A&M University at College Station.

Hannah Xue

Hannah is a Senior Reservoir Engineer, with 8 years’ experience in reservoir characterization and stimulation domain with Schlumberger. She focuses mainly on consulting work, providing integrated completion design and production optimization through reservoir simulation and 3D numerical modeling. She holds a B.S. and M.S. Texas A&M University, both in petroleum engineering.

Shuang Zhang

SHUANG ZHANG is a data scientist in the data science and advanced analytics group at Pioneer Natural Resources. Her responsibilities include developing advanced technology solutions for processing and interpreting distributed fiber optics sensing data and applying machine learning algorithms to solve geoscience and petrophysics problems. Shuang’s interests are in distributed fiber optics sensing, horizontal well downhole monitoring, machine learning, and advanced analytics. She holds a PhD in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M University. She has authored 13 publications and been a technical reviewer in international conferences and peer-reviewed journals.