Chris Justiniano

June 26th, 2022

There was a lot of cool stuff going on during this week. Everything seems to be OK in the research progress, and I feel that I'm completely set up with the dynamics of our work in the computer lab. During the second and third week, I got to generate through the EQT tool some cool images of seismograms, and a lot of them chose good P-wave and S-wave picks in their three components. Some of these got a little bit delayed (but still on time), because sometimes technical difficulties kept arising in the process of preprocessing the mseed files and passing them through the EQT analyzer. However, in the end, everything is going well as our expected plans. Although EQT shows a good performance in our tasks (even though it takes a lot of time the data downloading), it's weird at some point. For some reason, EQT has some difficulties downloading data at 200 samples per second. In the meantime, I kept working with another simple station as my team and I figure out how to get the data from the IRIS online database of these specific data, or use the local data from the campus' servers and make the downsampling locally before passing them to EQT.

Regarding to the "elevader" speech, I made this practice today to see how much I know about the research and what could be my short presentation in everyday aspects. To be honest, this exercise was kind of easy for me, but maybe I'll make some corrections in the future in the draft I have. Since english is my second language, it was a little bit unconfortable when I practiced by my own; sometimes you will think that maybe you didn't express your arguments as you thought they could be. But when I listened to the recording I made from this "drafted" speech, it actually sounded nice. I can apply this to anything, since it is like a short generalized presentation of what is your work, in a way that everyone understands your scientific statements; it will also be helpful for me at AGU (and probably SSA if the chance arises). I think that one must always know what to say in specific situations where science is involved, or if someone has to do a thesis defense either masters or PhD. These kind of things are excellent to practice; I think I will keep enjoying this as my script evolves throughout the summer (and throughout next semester).

I have a neat workplace at SMU campus. It's interesting because it just happens that I'm the only boy in the teamwork group, which I think it is something good 😉 (either way or the other, still it is, honestly). Everyone is awesome, and we had good times in our lab and also took a day during this summer to visit the Perot Museum at downtown Dallas (it was cool btw....I LOVED THE MINERALS COLLECTION!!). Every Friday of the week, we have around ~1 hr break in the morning to play with my teamwork, some other students, and other professors from the general induced seismicity research group a game called Croquet in the main park of campus. Honestly, I have never played this game before, neither knew the rules beforehand. It was quite of funny because I made a team with a faculty professor during the game and we just got the third place IN MY FIRST EVER CROQUET GAME. LOL

Anyway, here are the photos.....PHOTO BOMB!

This is me in my workspace (a computer lab) 😊

This is a "winked eye" me in the workplace 😉

This is the downloading process of last week (since it is a lot of data, I decided to download them through multiple sessions before leaving the building at the end of this third week). I will check out next week to see how is it going.

This is the Croquet game in my first week at campus. We also had last Friday another croquet game.
Of course, I'm not in the photo because I took that one. 😊

June 18th, 2022

So far, the EQTransformer tool I've been using seems to work efficiently at the time of realizing picks of each type of wave. This algorithm works under ObsPy and it plots the three seismic components for each station measurement, along with some graph functions that relate seismicity distribution. EQT works well for the purposes of the research. I will be among the first students to be testing this new tool during the summer. The only pros and cons about EQTransformer is that the tool generate cool diagrams of the seismic waves from a specific location (in my case, AZDA and AZE2 stations from the Azle seismic sequence), and the cons is that data can be downloaded from any source, but no more than ~1 month of time per dataset all at once.

I think I will work with my skill of developing the critical analysis of figuring out the next step for research. This seems obvious in some way, because you start your research aroung 2 weeks ago, and at first, one doesn't have so clear how you could keep on going in the workflow. Performing my skill in the development of my research abilities, in overrall, is the most of which I have to work on during the summer (in addition that this is my first official undergraduate research experience). The only way to keep a better performance in this is through hard work, reading papers, and practicing continuously before the weekly presentation meetings that I'm assisting inside my teamwork.

I keep you updated for more news about the process of my summer research!

June 13th, 2022

There are different goals that I’m willing to accomplish based on my actual research during this summer internship. These will help me to be guided towards professional exposure and scientific communication as part of my career as a future geoscientist. However, I’ll talk first about the orientation week briefly, since this was an amazing experience that I’ll never forget.

The best thing I loved from the orientation week before the summer research was that I could connect through a personal and professional perspective with other students from different parts of the world, including one from my own campus. I am so glad to meet all of them and hopefully will be staying in touch in order to keep the follow up with our own research projects, learning from our experiences. The orientation week gave me the chance to make friends and visit different geologic sites of amazing greatness. As one of my fellow geologist friends would say, all of this was “geolgasmic” (“geolgásmico”).

So far, in terms of the beginning of the summer, I was getting acquainted with the tools I needed to start my research. I will be using EQTransformer algorithm to work on the data, and this last week was dedicated to have everything set up in my assigned PC. I received assistance from some students of my team with this task. Reading papers related to my research and with my data selection was also another of my tasks from last week. Hopefully, this second week that just started, I will work with the Azle seismic sequence data using EQTransformer. My research team consists of 5 members: one faculty member (mentor-SMU), one postdoc student (SMU), one master student (SMU), one undergrad student (SMU), and one undergrad intern (me-UPRM).

So right now, I have the following goals during the summer:

• For my first 2-3 weeks of the summer, I will expect to gain more confidence and be comfortable with the data I’ll be working on, along with the algorithm I’ll be using. This will leave me prepared with a good kickstart in the research project and perform my critical thinking at solving problems in the way.
• During the second third of the summer, I will expect working with the seismic data with more independency and start to generate results from this work. Also, I would be preparing at the end of this summer second third session the scientific abstract of the project.
• By the end of the summer, I’ll expect to discuss the work done with my team colleagues, along with my mentor, edit the abstract, and submit it before the deadline (August 3rd, 2022). I would also have every tool prepared to develop a good poster for the presentation and keep the follow up during next academic semester with both mentor and internship staff (in addition to the other IRIS interns).