Felix successfully defended his thesis

The picture with the PhD supervisors and the committee after the defense, from left to right: Committee: Dr. Matt Hall (Equinor) Prof. Artur Klepaczko (Lodz University of Technology) and Dr. Mina Farmanbar (UiS); Dr Felix Pacis (DigiWells); Supervisors: Prof. Tomasz Wiktorski (UiS) and Dr. Sergey Alyaev (NORCE); Dr. Tom Ryen (UiS). Credit: Ståle Freyer/UiS

On Monday, April 7, Felix James Pacis defended a thesis with the title Applied Transfer Learning in Drilling Engineering at the University of Stavanger (UiS). He is the second PhD alumni from DigiWells.

Some quotes from the committee report:

At the defense Felix “offered a comprehensive and well-structured overview of the motivation behind his research, clearly articulating the research problems, objectives, and key findings.”

“…the original contributions of this research include the well-executed and relatively novel application of transfer learning to a regression task specifically, predicting the rate of penetration from drilling parameters. Additionally, the thesis presents a documented exploration of the retrieval-augmented generation pattern for artificial intelligence systems in the drilling domain, further contributing to the field’s innovation. Another significant contribution is the author’s commitment to open science, demonstrated through the development and sharing of code and data in an open-source AI system that effectively showcases the research in a novel and practical way.”

“The committee was pleased with his ability to answer questions and respond thoughtfully to the comments and critiques raised by the opponents” throughout the presentation and the oral defense.

This is the second successful PhD defense from SFI DigiWell. Only 12 left!

Reference

Pacis F.J. "Applied Transfer Learning in Drilling Engineering" PhD Thesis, University of Stavnger. URI: https://uis.brage.unit.no/uis-xmlui/handle/11250/3185007