Fangyu Li
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SEG J. Clarence Karcher Award 2020
Fangyu Li is an assistant professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Kennesaw State University. He has authored or coauthored 12 papers in Interpretation, seven papers in Geophysics, and more than 30 expanded abstracts for presentations at SEG Annual Meetings. He holds three U.S. patents. His research interests include signal processing, streaming data analysis, seismic interpretation, seismic imaging, distributed computing, and IoT security. He has served as an associate editor for two journals. One of Li’s colleagues note that “Fangyu’s enthusiasm, talent, and ability in solving challenging geophysical problems unquestionably put him in the rank of young geophysicists with extraordinary ability.” Li has contributed in theory development, code implementation, and field data applications of seismic imaging, quantitative interpretation, and seismic attributes methods. Another of Li’s associates indicates that “Fangyu is one of the most promising young geoscientists in our profession. Throughout his short career, Fangyu has worked with a wide variety of collaborators and has contributed to the fields of seismic processing, imaging, and interpretation, to hazard identification and real-time processing, and to applications beyond exploration geophysics that build bridges to the civil engineering and public safety communities.”
Biography Citation for the J. Clarence Karcher Award
It is particularly gratifying that the award named after the developer of reflection seismology, J. Clarence Karcher, who earned an undergraduate degree at the University of Oklahoma (OU) and conducted his first field experiments in the state of Oklahoma be awarded to Fangyu Li, a graduate of OU. Fangyu is an exceptionally talented and hard-working young scientist, whom I have been fortunate to have as my doctoral student. Fangyu combines an understanding of theory and data quality to construct innovative algorithms to solve both theoretical and practical problems. Fangyu is a remarkably productive young scientist who is friendly and collaborative and who enjoys working with people with different expertise. His enthusiasm toward research and work impacts surrounding colleagues and collaborators. In addition to having an outstanding publication record, Fangyu is a leader, a popular mentor to students, and a contributor to the geophysics community at large. Fangyu has been active within SEG as a reviewer for Annual Meetings and technical journals, an associate editor for Interpretation, and a session chair of Annual Meetings.
Fangyu arrived at OU with a master’s degree from Tsinghua University. He was well prepared to work on seismic signal processing, seismic attributes, and interpretation. He quickly came up to speed evaluating algorithm implementation and shortcomings in some 20 years of previous algorithmic implementation and came up with significant improvements to coherence, spectral decomposition, signal decomposition, and attenuation algorithms. He applied these improvements to studies in reservoir characterization, seismic stratigraphy, shale resource plays, and geomorphology of clastic facies. At OU, Fangyu built on his MS work on RGB corenderings of coherence computed on spectral voice volumes, leading to the more robust multispectral coherence algorithm. In attenuation analysis, he developed a workflow based on impedance inversion to first remove the layering effect on the seismic spectrum, providing for more accurate estimates of Q.
Fangyu’s accomplishments are well documented by a long list of SEG abstracts and journal papers ranging from interpretation to theory to quantitative data analysis. He is the first author of the majority of his publications, which have received a large number of citations and have impacted the seismic interpretation community. Following graduation, Fangyu became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Georgia (UGA), where he extended his research to subsurface seismic imaging and interpretation, distributed computing, and ambient imaging.
During his days at UGA, Fangyu focused his talent on near-subsurface imaging through both theoretical laboratory studies and applied field work. He has taken a keen interest in shallowly buried infrastructure imaging and initiated work to more efficiently determine microseismic source locations using a distributed geophone network. The so-called “subsurface camera” is an ambitious project of great importance. Real-time imaging of shallow earth structures is essential to monitor the underground activities and assess the sustainability and potential hazards of geologic structures. Typically, a seismic imaging process takes months to collect data, process, and image in a processing center. Fangyu’s effort is to reduce this time- and labor-consuming task to “minutes” using emerging sensor network techniques.
Fangyu has the passion, perseverance, and fungibility to tackle the challenges facing the future geoscience community, whatever they may be. He has established himself as a leading scientist who works on seismic processing, interpretation, and distributed subsurface imaging. His boundless energy on research and his expanding range of collaborations in petroleum exploration and production as well as in near-surface seismology will lead to a bright future, either as an academic, a researcher, or both. On behalf of the community of researchers and collaborators who nominated him, it is a pleasure to write this citation. I am confident in saying Fangyu thoroughly deserves the J. Clarence Karcher Award.