@mastersthesis {louboutin2020THmfi,
	title = {Modeling for inversion in exploration geophysics},
	year = {2020},
	note = {(PhD)},
	month = {03},
	school = {Georgia Institute of Technology},
	type = {phd},
	address = {Atlanta},
	abstract = {Seismic inversion, and more generally geophysical exploration, aims at better understanding the earth{\textquoteright}s subsurface, which is one of today{\textquoteright}s most important challenges. Firstly, it contains natural resources that are critical to our technologies such as water, minerals and oil and gas. Secondly, monitoring the subsurface in the context of CO2 sequestration, earthquake detection and global seismology are of major interests with regard to safety and the environment hazards. However, the technologies to monitor the subsurface or find resources are scientifically extremely challenging. Seismic inversion can be formulated as a mathematical optimization problem that minimizes the difference between field recorded data and numerically modeled synthetic data. The process of solving this optimization problem then requires to numerically model, thousands of times, wave-propagation in large three-dimensional representations of part of the earth subsurface. The mathematical and computational complexity of this problem, therefore, calls for software design that abstracts these requirements and facilitates algorithm and software development. My thesis addresses some of the challenges that arise from these problems; mainly the computational cost and access to the right software for research and development. In the first part, I will discuss a performance metric that improves the current runtime-only benchmarks in exploration geophysics. This metric, the roofline model, first provides insight at the hardware level of the performance of a given implementation relative to the maximum achievable performance. Second, this study demonstrates that the choice of numerical discretization has a major impact on the achievable performance depending on the hardware at hand and shows that a flexible framework with respect to the discretization parameters is necessary. In the second part, I will introduce and describe Devito, a symbolic finite-difference DSL that provides a high-level interface to the definition of partial differential equations (PDE) such as the wave equation. Devito, from the symbolic definition of PDEs, then generates and compiles highly optimized C code on-the-fly to compute the solution of the PDE. The combination of the high-level abstractions and the just-in-time compiler enable research for geophysical exploration and PDE-constrainted optimization based on the paradigm of separation of concerns. This allows researchers to concentrate on their respective field of study while having access to computationally performant solvers with a flexible and easy to use interface to successfully implement complex representations of the physics. The second part of my thesis will be split into two sub-parts; first describing the symbolic application programming interface (API), before describing and benchmarking the just-in-time compiler. I will end my thesis with concluding remarks, the latest developments and a brief description of projects that were enabled by Devito.},
	keywords = {finite-differences, FWI, HPC, Imaging, inversion, Modeling, performance, PhD, RTM},
	url = {https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Thesis/2020/louboutin2020THmfi/louboutin2020THmfi.pdf},
	presentation = {https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Thesis/2020/louboutin2020THmfi/louboutin2020THmfi_pres.pdf},
	author = {Mathias Louboutin}
}
@mastersthesis {lin2015THpes,
	title = {Primary estimation with sparsity-promoting bi-convex optimization},
	year = {2015},
	note = {(PhD)},
	month = {10},
	school = {The University of British Columbia},
	type = {phd},
	address = {Vancouver},
	abstract = {This thesis establishes a novel inversion methodology for the surface-related primaries from a given recorded seismic wavefield, called the Robust Estimation of Primaries by Sparse Inversion (Robust EPSI, or REPSI). Surface-related multiples are a major source of coherent noise in seismic data, and inferring fine geological structures from active-source seismic recordings typically first necessitates its removal or mitigation. For this task, current practice calls for data-driven approaches which produce only approximate multiple models that must be non-linearly subtracted from the data, often distorting weak primary events in the process. A recently proposed method called Estimation of Primaries by Sparse Inversion (EPSI) avoids this adaptive subtraction by directly inverting for a discrete representation of the underlying multiple-free subsurface impulse response as a set of band-limited spikes. However, in its original form, the EPSI algorithm exhibits a few notable shortcomings that impede adoption. Although it was shown that the correct impulse response can be obtained through a sparsest solution criteria, the current EPSI algorithm is not designed to take advantage of this finding, but instead approximates a sparse solution in an ad-hoc manner that requires practitioners to decide on a multitude of inversion parameters. The Robust EPSI method introduced in this thesis reformulates the original EPSI problem as a formal bi-convex optimization problem that makes obtaining the sparsest solution an explicit goal, while also reliably admit satisfactory solutions using contemporary self-tuning gradient methods commonly seen in large-scale machine learning communities. I show that the Robust EPSI algorithm is able to operate successfully on a variety of datasets with minimal user input, while also producing a more accurate model of the subsurface impulse response when compared to the original algorithm. Furthermore, this thesis makes several contributions that improves the capability and practicality of EPSI: a novel scattering-based multiple prediction model that allows Robust EPSI to deal with wider near-offset receiver gaps than previously demonstrated for EPSI, as well as a multigrid-inspired continuation strategy that significantly reduces the computation time needed to solve EPSI-type problems. These additions are enabled by and built upon the formalism of the Robust EPSI as developed in this thesis.},
	keywords = {biconvex, EPSI, inversion, multiples, Optimization, PhD, sparsity},
	url = {https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Thesis/2015/lin2015THpes/lin2015THpes.pdf},
	presentation = {https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Thesis/2015/lin2015THpes/lin2015THpes_pres.pdf},
	author = {Tim T.Y. Lin}
}
@mastersthesis {li2015THsps,
	title = {Sparsity promoting seismic imaging and full-waveform inversion},
	year = {2015},
	note = {(PhD)},
	month = {07},
	school = {The University of British Columbia},
	type = {phd},
	address = {Vancouver},
	abstract = {This thesis will address the large computational costs of solving least-squares migration and full-waveform inversion problems. Least-squares seismic imaging and full-waveform inversion are seismic inversion techniques that require iterative minimizations of large least-squares misfit functions. Each iteration requires an evaluation of the Jacobian operator and its adjoint, both of which require two wave-equation solves for all sources, creating prohibitive computational costs. In order to reduce costs, we utilize randomized dimensionality reduction techniques, reducing the number of sources used during inversion. The randomized dimensionality reduction techniques create subsampling related artifacts, which we mitigate by using curvelet-domain sparsity-promoting inversion techniques. Our method conducts least-squares imaging at the approximate cost of one reverse-time migration with all sources, and computes the Gauss-Newton full-waveform inversion update at roughly the cost of one gradient update with all sources. Finally, during our research of the full-waveform inversion problem, we discovered that we can utilize our method as an alternative approach to add sparse constraints on the entire velocity model by imposing sparsity constraints on each model update separately, rather than regularizing the total velocity model as typically practiced. We also observed this alternative approach yields a faster decay of the residual and model error as a function of iterations. We provided empirical arguments why and when imposing sparsity on the updates can lead to improved full-waveform inversion results.},
	keywords = {Full-waveform inversion, Gauss-Newton method, least-squares imaging, seismic imaging, sparsity promoting},
	url = {https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Thesis/2015/li2015THsps/li2015THsps.pdf},
	presentation = {https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Thesis/2015/li2015THsps/li2015THsps_pres.pdf},
	author = {Xiang Li}
}
@mastersthesis {li2015THwmd,
	title = {A weighted $\ell_1$-minimization for distributed compressive sensing},
	year = {2015},
	note = {(MSc)},
	month = {09},
	school = {The University of British Columbia},
	type = {masters},
	address = {Vancouver},
	abstract = {Distributed Compressive Sensing (DCS) studies the recovery of jointly sparse signals. Compared to separate recovery, the joint recovery algorithms in DCS are usually more effective as they make use of the joint sparsity. In this thesis, we study a weighted l1-minimization algorithm for the joint sparsity model JSM-1 proposed by Baron et al. Our analysis gives a sufficient null space property for the joint sparse recovery. Furthermore, this property can be extended to stable and robust settings. We also presents some numerical experiments for this algorithm.},
	keywords = {distributed compressive sensing, MSc, thesis, weighted $\ell_1$},
	url = {https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Thesis/2015/li2015THwmd/li2015THwmd.pdf},
	author = {Xiaowei Li}
}
@mastersthesis {lin08THccl,
	title = {Compressed computation of large-scale wavefield extrapolation in inhomogeneous medium},
	year = {2008},
	month = {04},
	school = {University of British Columbia},
	type = {mastersmasters},
	abstract = {In this work an explicit algorithm for the extrapolation of one-way wavefields is proposed which combines recent developments in information theory and theoretical signal processing with the physics of wave propagation. Because of excessive memory requirements, explicit formulations for wave propagation have proven to be a challenge in 3-D. By using ideas from {\textquoteleft}{\textquoteleft}compressed sensing{\textquoteright}{\textquoteright}, we are able to formulate the (inverse) wavefield extrapolation problem on small subsets of the data volume, thereby reducing the size of the operators. Compressed sensing entails a new paradigm for signal recovery that provides conditions under which signals can be recovered from incomplete samplings by \emphnonlinear recovery methods that promote sparsity of the to-be-recovered signal. According to this theory, signals can successfully be recovered when the measurement basis is \emphincoherent with the representation in which the wavefield is sparse. In this new approach, the eigenfunctions of the Helmholtz operator are recognized as a basis that is incoherent with sparsity transforms that are known to compress seismic wavefields. By casting the wavefield extrapolation problem in this framework, wavefields can successfully be extrapolated in the modal domain, despite evanescent wave modes. The degree to which the wavefield can be recovered depends on the number of missing (evanescent) wave modes and on the complexity of the wavefield. A proof of principle for the {\textquoteleft}{\textquoteleft}compressed sensing{\textquoteright}{\textquoteright} method is given for inverse wavefield extrapolation in 2-D. The results show that our method is stable, has reduced dip limitations and handles evanescent waves in inverse extrapolation.},
	keywords = {BSc, SLIM},
	url = {https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Thesis/2008/lin08THccl.pdf},
	author = {Tim T.Y. Lin}
}
@mastersthesis {lebed08THssr,
	title = {Sparse signal recovery in a transform domain},
	year = {2008},
	note = {(MSc)},
	month = {08},
	school = {The University of British Columbia},
	type = {masters},
	address = {Vancouver},
	abstract = {The ability to efficiently and sparsely represent seismic data is becoming an increasingly important problem in geophysics. Over the last thirty years many transforms such as wavelets, curvelets, contourlets, surfacelets, shearlets, and many other types of x-lets have been developed. Such transform were leveraged to resolve this issue of sparse representations. In this work we compare the properties of four of these commonly used transforms, namely the shift-invariant wavelets, complex wavelets, curvelets and surfacelets. We also explore the performance of these transforms for the problem of recovering seismic wavefields from incomplete measurements.},
	keywords = {MSc},
	url = {https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Thesis/2008/lebed08THssr.pdf},
	author = {Evgeniy Lebed}
}
