The PESGB has a long history with the other societies who occupy a similar space within the energy (particularly petroleum) sector, and we work together on a regular basis. All these societies have Special Interest Groups, SIGs or something similar, but did you know that SIGs are a regular feature of most professional society/association? Every role you can think of in any industry will be represented at some level by a professional association.

A chance conversation with the Machine Learning SIG organisers set the PESGB team thinking, could there be opportunities to work with SIGs who look at similar topics but apply them in other ways or in different industries. This resulted in a flurry of emails to the Royal Society of Statisticians. We asked if they would be interested in doing some collaboration with the PESGB Machine Learning SIG and three of their SIGs responded.

We had an enthusiastic response from Quality Improvement, Computational Statistics and Machine Learning Section, and the Business and Industrial Section of the RSS. The initial suggestion is that for the February, March and April meetings of the PESGB Machine Learning SIG, that we choose a topic that can transcend more than one industry. The PESGB and RSS will provide a speaker each to offer different perspectives. Open to both societies, this promises to be an interesting experiment. The date and topics have yet to be confirmed but if you have any suggestions for topics or PESGB speakers then please get in touch with Gerald Stein, David Psaila or Alberto Mendoza through the Machine Learning SIG page on the PESGB website: https://www.ges-gb.org.uk/membership/special-interest-groups/machine-learning-in-geoscience/. They will be pleased with any input and if this is a success, we will be looking at other opportunities to broaden the education range for our SIGs through further collaborations.