Enders Anthony Robinson

Digital Signal Processing Part B Enders Anthony Robinson

On MIT's 150th anniversary in 2011, The Boston Globe newspaper published a special magazine recognizing 150 of MIT's most valuable contributions. Number 32 was "Drill, baby, drill. Back in the day, the techniques for finding new oil deposits were simple: Drill hole. If you didn't find anything, move over and repeat. MIT researchers were among the first to apply modern scientific analysis to reports of seismic activity to create a chance above a "shot in the dark" in hitting pay dirt. Formalized as the Geophysical Analysis Group in 1952, the collaboration spurred the 'digital revolution' in oil prospecting."In 1950 most of the earth's sedimentary basins, including essentially all water-covered regions, yielded uninterpretable seismograms. In such areas the signal-generated noise overwhelmed the primary reflections. As a result, the primary reflections could not be picked visually. Such areas of the world could only be explored for oil in a direct way by drilling, but not by the remote detection method of reflection seismology. As a research assistant in the MIT Mathematics Department in 1950 Robinson was assigned the task of finding a way of making uninterpretable seismograms interpretable. In order to do so, he devised methods of digital signal processing using the MIT Whirlwind digital computer. In the years 1952 to 1954, almost every major oil company joined the MIT Geophysical Analysis Group to use the digital computer to process uninterpretable seismograms. The conversion of the seismic exploration industry to digital was called the digital revolution. From the 1960s on, the discovery of essentially all new oil fields in the world was the result of digital signal processing.