A passion for sharing

At the evening dinner of the Dig X Subsurface conference, Matt Hall, Scientific Programmer at Equinor, was given the Digital Trailblazer 2024 award.

Matt Hall’s enthusiasm and unwavering support of open science have greatly benefited the subsurface community and the progress within the field for a long time. We consider him a great communicator who has managed to engage the geoscience community not only in Norway but on a global scale.

 Hall was among the first to run cross-industry hackathons where organizational boundaries were erased and focus on collaboration came first. Matt Hall’s contributions to enabling more data sharing across the industry make him a worthy winner of the award.

Hall graduated with a PhD in Geology from the University of Manchester and joined Statoil as a Geoscientist in 1997. Since then, Hall has held various positions in the industry and founded/co-founded several companies and communities.

One of these was Software Underground which he co-founded in 2014. This community is a non-profit organization promoting productive conversation and collaboration among digital subsurface scientists. Over the years, many like-minded people have found together, made connections, and delivered value for themselves and their employing entities through this community.

While working at Canada-based Agile (Founder and CEO), Hall helped ConocoPhillips and the FORCE consortium host the first geo-flavored hackathon at the Norwegian Offshore Directorate’s premises in 2018. By then, he had already been involved in hosting several other similar events elsewhere in Europe and USA.

A hackathon is a social, often lasting no more than 24 -48 hours, coding event that brings together experienced computer programmers, domain experts, and other interested people to improve upon or build entirely new software to solve certain challenges.

The Stavanger hackathons have been held several times, and have led to a wide range of new subsurface software solutions in oil and gas, utilizing machine learning, advanced analytics, and language models.

The 2018 hackathon brought 50 geoscientists and engineers together, and in addition to generating hundreds of new relationships, the two-day event also resulted in the creation of seven new open-source tools, all related to the subsurface.

Hall re-joined Equinor in 2022 as a Scientific Programmer but is still a Director at Software Underground. In his role at Equinor, Matt works on various open-source tools for scientists and engineers, many of which are available at Equinor’s Github spot.

It has been an Equinor policy since 2015 to make all in-house developed software open source, and their number of repositories (official projects) has grown exponentially in the last few years, currently counting 617 which is a ten-fold increase since 2018.

A digital trailblazer paves the way for others, creating a substantial impact and serving as a precursor to further digital innovation and value creation in the subsurface geoscience community. At Dig X Subsurface, we recognize and celebrate these exceptional individuals who dare to push boundaries, think outside the box, and lead the way for their peers as trailblazers driving the subsurface geoscience community into a digital future.

The previous winner was Robert B. Williams, Senior Biostratigrapher at NOD.