Genesis of ViaLogy —
"Seeking Signals in Noise"
CTO Introduction to QuantumRD »
Some of the hardest and most commercially rewarding problems in disciplines as diverse as defense, information security, surveillance, energy exploration, medicine and space science necessitate detection of signals and events that cannot be imaged or measured directly using sensors, or inferred using linear mathematical techniques. Throwing more servers and computational horsepower at the problem only takes one so far. The luxury of making multiple or repeat confirmatory measurements on such problems often does not exist. Notwithstanding the complexities of imaging these weak signals, these problems also place a high premium on missed detections, false alarms and lack of precision. Examples of such weak signals include search for underground labs or buried utility pipes in rugged terrain or using airborne ground penetrating radar. Solutions have to be thought about differently.
ViaLogy's core technology, Quantum Resonance Interferometry (QRI) has its genesis in fundamentally alternate thinking and expertise developed over decades within NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to solve a broad class of these hard problems in remote sensing, communications and radar imaging for deep space exploration. QRI resulted from lessons learned in advancing ultracomputing at JPL - synergistic exploitation of matured and well-published technology building blocks that include:
- nonlinearities in the data and sensing devices amplified using nonlinear signal processing;
- signal enhancement techniques based on addition of computer generated noise, such as stochastic resonance and quantum stochastic resonance;
- advances in digital simulation of complex distributed systems exhibiting quantum mechanical effects; and
- a large-scale effort to replicate behavior of complex nonlinear hardware devices such as SQUIDs, MASERS and NMR-complexes in software algorithms.
The technology building blocks summarized above provided the theoretical foundations for QRI, developed, demonstrated, patented and commercialized within ViaLogy. These have been known, experimented with and extensively published over the past three decades and known to offer promise in solving hard problems. But before QRI, they were like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with each piece only available in a different scientific community. Vialogy's development of QRI cemented these pieces together within the framework of Interferometry, turning them into usable computational procedures for solving hard problems.
QuantumRD is the application of QRI to hydrocarbon resource exploration and reservoir development. A previous consortium with the super majors had surfaced the limitations in using conventional seismic for accurately predicting rock and fluid properties (porosity, saturation, oil-water contact) away from the well bore. Low resolution resulting from conventional seismic processing was limited in de-risking carbonates, clastics and shale resource plays. QuantumRD was developed to extend the bandwidth of geophysical data to sense amplification changes at the formation scale. Today, it is applied as an “enabling workflow overlay” that builds upon the advances in geophysics accumulated over the past fifty years and several billions of R&D investment by many organizations.
Powered by QRI, ViaLogy QuantumRD today exploits normally disregarded noise variations induced by changes in porosity, fluid presence and permeability across the formation, and adding computer designed noise to the data, ViaLogy is able to amplify subtle noise variations to enhance areal and depth resolution in complex lithologies that are not achievable through conventional means. ViaLogy provides reservoir characterization, geophysical imaging and hydrocarbon sizing services to global oil and gas customers based on proprietary, patented active signal processing technology. ViaLogy's QuantumRD platform assists clients in de-risking prospects over a broad range of subsurface lithologies and complex stratigraphy to generate drilling targets, position offsets and enhance recovery.