Jianwei Ma
Jianwei Ma received the Ph.D. degree in solid mechanic in 2002 from Tsinghua University, Beijing. From 2006 to 2010, he was an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor with the School of Aerospace, Tsinghua University. From 2010 to 2011, he was a Scientist with Florida State University. He served as a Postdoctoral Researcher and had visiting experiences with the University of Cambridge, the University of Grenoble, the University of Goettingen, EPFL, the Ecole des Mines de Paris, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at Los Angeles, etc. Since 2011, he has been promoted as a Professor with the Department of Mathematics, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin. Starting from 2020, he serves as a Professor with the School of Earth and Space Sciences, Director of Center for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Geoscience, and Director of Center for Habitable Intelligent Planet at Institute for AI, Peking University, Beijing.
His main research interests include geophysical data processing, inverse problems, compressed sensing, sparse transform, and artificial intelligence. He is the Principal Investigator for the National Key Research and Development Program of China, NSFC Distinguished Young Scholars, NSFC key project, and NSFC joint fund integration project. He is also involved in professional oranizations, serving as the Director of the Intelligent Geophysics committee of the Chinese Geophysical Society, and associate editor for IEEE TGRS. He published papers in Reviews of Geophysics, PNAS, Nature Computational Sciences, Nature Communications, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Geophysics, etc. The published papers have been cited more than 9000 in Google Scholar.
2026 SEG South and East Asia Honorary Lecturer
From Dictionary Learning to Deep Learning in Geophysical Technology
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming exploration geophysics by enabling new ways to learn from complex, high-dimensional seismic data beyond traditional model-driven approaches. This Honorary Lecture presents recent advances in AI-enabled geophysics, focusing on deep learning–based seismic data processing and inversion, together with emerging developments in geophysical foundation models.
Professor Jianwei Ma’s research integrates modern AI architectures from dictionary learning to deep learning with geophysical principles to address long-standing challenges in seismic data analysis. His work demonstrates how advanced dictionary learning and deep learning algorithms enable robust seismic data processing under complex noise conditions and sparse acquisition geometries, and introduces AI-based inversion paradigms built on data–model–driven approaches to improve the stability and resolution of ill-posed inverse problems.
Through representative case studies, the lecture illustrates how AI is reshaping geophysical workflows by improving efficiency, scalability, and reliability. Designed to empower and inspire, this session provides insights into practical AI applications, emerging methodologies, and future directions for innovation in subsurface characterization and exploration