The Watson Effect
-
August 08, 2016
After receiving her diploma, recent UT PGE graduate Katy Hanson went to work side-by-side with the world’s most recognized technology platform.
In 2011 IBM’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform, Watson, went up against the all-time most winning JEOPARDY! champion Ken Jennings. Within a few categories, Watson’s depth and breadth of knowledge surpassed the human brain providing Watson with the win. At that moment, Watson demonstrated to the world the powerful role AI will play in the 21st century. Watson hung up his game-show career, but has been incredibly busy over the past five years gaining vast amounts of insights on many fields, including oil and gas.
Industries took notice of the power of big data analysis to find solutions to a broad range of their pressing challenges. With massive amounts of information pouring in from sensors by the second, companies must process, analyze and find meaning in this data to fuel innovation and create opportunities. Hanson is at the forefront of this ever-evolving field. She had a full-time internship at IBM’s corporate research laboratory in New York, prior to returning to Austin to attend graduate school in petroleum engineering this fall.
Katy Hanson (BS PE '16)
IBM Watson is a technology platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data. The Watson team began programming the system for the oil and gas domain, which requires deep industry knowledge. Hanson had the unique experience of teaching Watson some of the important petroleum engineering information she acquired during her time as an undergraduate student at UT PGE.
“In the current oil and gas industry environment, Watson will be a huge asset,” said Hanson. “Having Watson pour through huge amounts of data will help companies save time, money and lower their exploration risk by helping them make better decisions about acquiring new leases or undiscovered areas.”
Watson has an uncanny ability to learn through repetition. Whether that is humans like Hanson repeatedly telling Watson what to look for in long geological assessment reports to improve efficiency or feeding Watson historical data to help Watson find indicators of exploration potential.
“Watson can take massive amounts of data, generally taking an engineer hours upon hours to go through, and use it to help people make a decision about something almost instantly,” said Hanson. “It is revolutionizing the speed and accuracy of our decision-making.”
While the main goal is for Hanson to teach Watson, Hanson learned a lot from the AI platform as well. She received a first-hand glimpse of where the industry is headed and potential opportunities that combine AI technology and petroleum engineering.
“By working with Watson, I now feel confident to work for Dr. Eric van Oort in the UT PGE drilling lab during graduate school as Watson helped me to see the important role automation will play in the industry,” said Hanson. “It is giving me ideas about where we can go from here - it is exciting that in a downturn you can see the value of significant changes coming to industry.”
