Geoscience Frontiers 11 (2020) 739–744

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Focus Paper

Artificial intelligence in seismology: Advent, performance and future trends

Pengcheng Jiao a, Amir H. Alavi b, *
a
Ocean College, Zhejiang University, Zhoushan, Zhejiang 316021, China
b
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15261, USA

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Handling Editor: M. Santosh Realistically predicting earthquake is critical for seismic risk assessment, prevention and safe design of major
structures. Due to the complex nature of seismic events, it is challengeable to efficiently identify the earthquake
Keywords: response and extract indicative features from the continuously detected seismic data. These challenges severely
Seismology impact the performance of traditional seismic prediction models and obstacle the development of seismology in
Artificial intelligence
general. Taking their advantages in data analysis, artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have been utilized as
Machine learning
powerful statistical tools to tackle these issues. This typically involves processing massive detected data with severe
Deep learning
Internet-of-Things noise to enhance the seismic performance of structures. From extracting meaningful sensing data to unveiling seismic
events that are below the detection level, AI assists in identifying unknown features to more accurately predicting the
earthquake activities. In this focus paper, we provide an overview of the recent AI studies in seismology and evaluate
the performance of the major AI techniques including machine learning and deep learning in seismic data analysis.
Furthermore, we envision the future direction of the AI methods in earthquake engineering which will involve deep
learning-enhanced seismology in an internet-of-things (IoT) platform.

1. Introduction useful information to make reliable predictions and decisions in seis-

Seismology studies earthquake at the multiscale using enormous
measuring data with particular focus on assessing the impact of the natural
disaster on civil infrastructure systems (Beroza, 2018). Fig. 1a demon-
strates the characteristics of earthquake and seismic events happened
during 1900–2013 with respect to the amplitude and depth (USGS, 2019).
Typically, studies in seismology are conducted with four objectives: (1)
actions to reduce long-term the disaster of earthquake, (2) disaster prep-
aration or adjustment, (3) disaster response strategies, and (4)
post-disaster recovery planning, which are known as the strategies of
mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, respectively (Nabian
and Meidani, 2018). Dissatisfying the ideality of detecting every earth-
quake event in seismogenic process, the capability and accuracy of
continuously monitoring earthquakes are critically affected by the facts
that: (1) many earthquake events are undetected and (2) huge amount of
noisy data in seismic record (Perol et al., 2018). Recent progresses of the
sensing, processing and analyzing techniques ensure the rapid develop-
ment of seismology, which is particularly resulted in the enhancement of
computational power over massive seismic data. Whereas earlier research
mainly used traditional data mining methods, more recently, artificial
intelligence (AI) provides efficient tools to address those data and extract
mology. Consequently, AI-enhanced seismology significantly relies on
how to use AI approaches (e.g., machine learning (ML) or deep learning
(DL)) to obtain effective detecting data among noise and detect earth-
quake events that are at or below the noise level, as indicated in Fig. 1b.
In recent years, seismology has dedicated the majority of its efforts to
improving the phase detection sensitivity while addressing massive
amount of real-time sensing data. Due to the inefficiency of visually
examining recording data from different phases by seismic experts, it is of
desire to predict earthquake using real-time accumulate data in a rational
and reliable manner (Lary et al., 2015). The short (long)-term average
(STA/LTA) prediction algorithms were developed and later replaced by
phase association methods due to the lack of the former in distinguishing
impulsive transient seismic signals. The latter was evolved to group
seismic phases together to decide whether earthquake happens (Shahin,
2016). However, those traditional approaches become inadequate to
detect small seismic events that occur more frequently. Consequently, the
AI tools are applied to tackle the complicated scenarios in earthquake
prediction. AI plays an important role in modern seismic detection systems
as it increases the detection efficiency and reduces the influence of noisy
data. Fig. 2 shows an illustration of the interrelation between AI and data
science techniques in seismology. Comparing different AI algorithms in

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: alavi@pitt.edu (A.H. Alavi).
Peer-review under responsibility of China University of Geosciences (Beijing).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2019.10.004
Received 19 August 2019; Received in revised form 27 September 2019; Accepted 17 October 2019
Available online 6 November 2019
1674-9871/© 2019 China University of Geosciences (Beijing) and Peking University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the
CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
P. Jiao, A.H. Alavi
Fig. 1. (a) Characteristics of earthquake and seismic events occurred during 1900–2013 (USGS, 2019), and (b) AI-enhanced seismic analysis in detecting “small”
seismic events and addressing noisy data.
seismology, supervised and unsupervised ML approaches have attracted
considerable research attention (Sick et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2019; Woo,
2019). The ML algorithms (e.g., artificial neural networks (ANN), genetic
programming (GP), self-organizing map (SOM), support vector machines
(SVM), and decision tree (DT)) are used to train to find implicit de-
terminations for seismic events. As one of the cutting-edge algorithms in
the ML arena, deep learning uses the ANN concept to learn generalized
representations of data sets in different domains to define complex
nonlinear relationships between variables. The outstanding capabilities of
ML in sequential data sets lead it to be an optimal choice for the phase
association problem in seismology, which processes one element of a
sequence at a time and thus, suitable for phase association in a real-time
seismic network. Fig. 2b summarizes the published AI-based studies in
seismology during 1999–2019. As seen, ANNs are the most widely-used
ML methods in this domain. Moreover, there has been recently a
growing interest in deploying deep learning techniques in seismology.
2. The AI approaches in seismic analysis
Attempting to mimic human cognition capability, AI is a computa-
tional solution to address engineering problems that are difficult to solve
using conventional approaches (Alavi and Gandomi, 2012). In principal,
AI uses the given seismic training data to identify the relationship between
the inputs and corresponding outputs, as shown in Fig. 3a (Shahin, 2016).
Such essence of AI leads to its advances in seismology, especially consid-
ering the massive detected seismic data with heavy noise. Due to the in-
adequacy of physics-based models developed using the first principles to
define the underlying relationships between seismic data, AI has attracted
critical attention in recent years (Li et al., 2018). Taking an AI approach
toward data mining, processing and analyzing substantially increases the
accuracy and efficiency of earthquake detection, which offers exciting
opportunities to develop seismic networks for multipurpose. Some ex-
amples are detection and phase picking, early warning, ground-motion
prediction, tomography, geodesy, etc. Thanks to the capability of AI in
Fig. 2. Existing AI and data science studies in seismology. (a) Illustration of the interrelation between AI and data science techniques in seismology. (b) Summary of
the published AI-based studies in seismology during 1999–2019.
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Geoscience Frontiers 11 (2020) 739–744
capturing subtle functional relationships between variables without a
need to assume prior form of the relationship, complicated information
between factors in earthquake (e.g., time, location, magnitude, and
possible damages) can be extracted. On the contrary, almost all of the
traditional statistical methods can only provide the existing relationships
between seismic data when prior knowledge of the nonlinear nature of the
variables is known. Another advantage of AI over the traditional methods
is that it fosters increasing computational efficiency in making decisions
over earthquake while decreasing error rate (Azamathulla Md, 2013;
Karbasi and Md Azamathulla, 2017). On the other hand, a limitation of the
AI methods is that they are extremely parameter sensitive, especially when
dealing with complicated experimental datasets. A viable solution to
tackle this issue is to use robust optimization algorithms (e.g. genetic al-
gorithm, particle swarm optimization, Tabu search) for an optimized
control of the parameters of the AI method.
2.1. Machine learning
As a branch of AI, ML involves systems capable of automatically
learning from data, identifying patterns and making decisions. The
salient beauty of ML is that it enables computers to learn without being
explicitly programmed. Most of the ML-based methods are essentially
inspired by biological learning. In seismology, ML uses series of tech-
niques to find the inherent rules and dependences between data and then
classify or regress them. Also, ML is commonly used to categorize and
analyze unseen patterns or features in detected data since it, unlike
seismologists that analyze data using intuition and logics, discovers un-
considered features beyond human capability (Kong et al., 2019). Fig. 3b
displays the main components of ML, which can be grouped into super-
vised and unsupervised (Salehi and Burgueno, 2018). The former typi-
cally consists of regression and classification methods, and the latter
includes reduction and clustering techniques. There is also another
category called semi-supervised learning algorithms that can organize
the data as well as make predictions. However, characterizing into
P. Jiao, A.H. Alavi Geoscience Frontiers 11 (2020) 739–744

supervised learning and unsupervised learning, ML in seismology is

developed using probability theory in five steps, including (1) collecting
and partitioning seismic data for training and testing, (2) preprocessing
to clean, format and remove/recover seismic data, (3) training model
uses numerical optimization algorithms to tune the seismic variables, (4)
evaluating model with respect to the prediction accuracy using the test
data, and (5) generating new data for prediction using an ML algorithm.
In general, ML can be categorized into three applications in seismology
including code accelerator tool to reduce the computational cost of
deterministic models, developing an empirical model if deterministic
model is not possible, and addressing classification problems (Lary et al.,
2015). Within the ML arena, ANNs have found many applications in
seismology (Azamathulla Md et al., 2005; Alavi and Gandomi, 2011a, b).
ANNs together with many other ML methods are considered as black-box
model generators since they are not able to develop practical prediction
equations. This limitation has been tackled by other ML methods such as
GP and Decision Tree (DT). In general, a neural network consists of
several processing components that are typically grouped in layers, e.g.,
an input layer, multi hidden layers, and an output layer (Salehi and
Burgueno, 2018). In seismology, an ANN model starts with the propa-
gation of information at the input layer. The network evaluates and ad-
justs the weights on the presentation of the training dataset and finds a
set of the weights using the learning techniques to produce the re-
lationships between the input and output data with smallest errors
(Giacinto et al., 1997). Through the process of training, the performance
of the ANN model can be validated using independent datasets. The main
steps of the ANN analysis in seismology, as well as the main methods used
in each step, are summarized in Fig. 3c.

3. Perspectives and future trends

3.1. Perspectives – from machine learning to deep learning

Traditional ML models are limited due to the lack of abilities to

address natural data in raw form. Developing an ML model typically
requires designing feature extractors for raw data transformations form.
For example, pixel values of images can be transformed to suitable
feature vectors or internal representations and thus, learning subsystems
can classify and detect patterns in the inputs (Schmidhuber, 2015;
DeVries et al., 2018). DL is a subset of ML that uses multiple layers to
extract higher level features from the raw data progressively. The most
well-known DL architectures are deep neural networks (DNN), con-
volutional neural networks (CNN), deep belief networks (DBN), and
recurrent neural networks (RNN). Essentially based on ANNs, DL consists
of critically deeper layers of neurons, which has been applied to solve
classification and segmentation problems in seismology. DL is a type of
representation learning method that allows to learn from raw data to
automatically discover the representations needed for classification or
detection (LeCun et al., 2015). Representations are transformed into
more abstract levels using simple modules, which are assembled to
structure multiple levels of representation. Taking the advantages of
increasing the amount of available computational data while requiring
little engineering by hand, DL has outperformed over other ML methods
(Nabian and Meidani, 2018). New DL learning architectures and algo-
rithms are likely to assist this progress (Huang et al., 2017). Earthquake
detection and characterization have recently been significantly improved
by the methodological advances in AI. DL has recently been used to
monitor and locate earthquakes, determining the arrival time of P-wave,
first motion polarities and other outputs (Ross et al., 2018, 2019).

3.2. Future trends

Fig. 3. AI in seismology. (a) Principle and objectives of AI systems in seis- Although previous ML-based seismic research has been mainly
mology. (b) Characteristics and (c) main calculation steps of machine learning- focused on deploying supervised learning methods, unsupervised
enabled seismic model. learning methods are likely to play a crucial role in seismology in near
future. The fact is that major learning mechanisms in human and animals

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P. Jiao, A.H. Alavi
Fig. 4. Perspective and future trends of the AI-enhanced seismology from Ma-
chine Learning (ML) to Deep Learning (DL).
are unsupervised – discovering the world by observing it, rather than
being told on all the objects (Gentine et al., 2018). Fig. 4 illustrates the
perspective of the AI-based seismic analysis and envisioned DL as one of
the future trends for AI seismic prediction models.
Furthermore, the majority of the AI-related studies in seismology in the
last two decades have been dedicated to using conventional ML ap-
proaches such as ANNs, decision trees and SVMs (Bergen et al., 2019). On
the contrary, seismic systems developed using DL methods are still in their
infancy. Interestingly, the limited reported DL-based studies have already
demonstrated the sustainability and accuracy of addressing detecting data
comparing with others. Although DL has been used for earthquake
detection and analysis, new paradigms are still required to replace
rule-based manipulation of symbolic expressions by operations on large
vectors. For example, earthquake events might be linked to glaciers form
and melt in a mountainous region (Masih, 2018). However, lack of studies
has been reported on connecting AI-based climate changing models with
seismic activities. In the future, AI can be expanded to investigate the
relationship between global climate changes and seismic events.
Fig. 5. AI in Gartner’s Hype Cycle and vision for the future development of the DL-enhanced seismology in IoT platform.
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Eventually, it is of our belief that the major progress of the AI-enhanced
seismology is likely to be achieved by combining DL with complex
reasoning. The AI techniques have shown promising performance when
analyzing huge and complicated seismic data and extracting meaningful
findings in seismology. Future developments of the AI-enhanced seismic
analysis could be deployed in the following three aspects:
3.2.1. Data-driven seismic prediction systems
Performance of the AI-based seismic prediction models crucially de-
pends on the detected data. As a consequence, the durability and accuracy
of earthquake monitoring are of significance to the prediction systems.
Other than simply analyzing and monitoring seismic data, data-driven
prediction models aim to cover the techniques of earthquake monitoring
and data transferring as well. The AI-enabled seismic prediction models
are required to take into account not only how to extract meaningful results
from massive amount of detecting data (i.e., seismic noise), but also how to
ensure sustainable detection over a long time period. The AI techniques
can be deployed to eliminate the influence of seismic noise by setting self-
adjustable limit states. Limit states can be defined to avoid the impact of
small-amplitude seismic noise. Smart, data-driven seismic prediction
system can adjust the limit states with respect to time period, frequency of
happened events, detection precision, analyzing cost, etc. On the other
hand, it is important to improve the performance of seismic monitoring
sensors such as using self-powered seismic sensors that harvest energy
from the environment. The AI-enabled seismic prediction models are ex-
pected to reduce the energy dissipation of seismic sensors and improve the
data transformation for detection (Larose et al., 2015). Moreover, it is
important to take into account the influence of location and change
predication model accordingly. Obviously, an AI model trained by the
seismic data from North America will be different from the model devel-
oped based on the data from Middle East.
3.2.2. Deep learning seismic prediction systems
DL is recently a cutting-edge AI method in seismology capable of
interpreting enormous seismic data and identifying implicit features.
Different from conventional ML algorithms based on hand-crafted features
P. Jiao, A.H. Alavi
with relatively high computational cost, DL uses optimal features learned
by the network to improve the classification accuracy and computation-
ally efficiency. It is expected that DL will play a significant role in the next
generation of seismic prediction systems. Fig. 5 remarks AI techniques in
Gartner’s Hype Cycle 2018 (Garter’s hype cycle, 2019). It can be seen that
DL is at the peak of inflated expectations. Note that DL has been marked at
the peak since the year of 2015, suggesting as 2–5 years prior to the plateau
of productivity (Kotecki, 2018). Given the nature of 5–10 years delay of
deploying new techniques in engineering, we envision an extensive
application of DL in seismology in the next decade.
3.2.3. Deep learning-enhanced seismology in internet of things platform
IoT is defined as an internet-based platform that enables advanced
services by interconnecting things through interoperable information
and communication technologies (ICTs). This way, the IoT technology
allows devices to share information using different approaches (e.g., as
pervasive and ubiquitous computing, embedded devices, or sensor net-
works). It is expected that 50–100 billion devices will be connected to the
Internet via IoT by the end of 2020 (Alavi et al., 2018). In seismology, IoT
refers to the platforms where monitoring devices are equipped with local
computers and intelligent software to increase the machine-to-machine
communications in local monitoring networks. This will eventually
lead to developing a smart and connected global seismic monitoring
network. In this new paradigm, DL-enhanced monitoring devices are be
used to collect data locally, and cloud computing techniques are applied
to transmit and process seismic data in real-time (DeVries et al., 2018).
Fig. 5 envisions the future development of the DL-enhanced seismology
in an IoT platform. Taking the advantages of the rapid development of
IoT, DL seismic models can readily be functionalized in the IoT platform
to enable an advance real-time seismic monitoring system.
4. Conclusions
Earthquake prediction is of significance to risk assessment, prevention
and safe design of major structures. However, it is typically challengeable
to characterize earthquake response and unveil features from continu-
ously detected, massive noisy data. To address those severe challenges in
seismology, the AI techniques have been used as powerful statistical tools
to address the data-related issues. Along the way, AI has demonstrated
advantages for mass adoption, which is emerged into seismology to open a
promising direction for AI-enhanced seismic analysis. This is in contrast to
the traditional approaches dominated in the field of earthquake until now.
The exciting debut of ML and its robust branches such as DL in the last
decade, combining with the advents of cluster computing environment
and more powerful personal computers, immediately offers a potential
solution to the fields requested to address massive seismology data.
Aiming at developing seismic prediction models that identify seismic
response from noisy data (i.e., effective seismic data) while reveal unseen
patterns and features from detected seismic data (i.e., undetected earth-
quake), preliminary efforts have been dedicated to deploying DL to
earthquake analysis. Here, we move a step forward to envision the future
development trends of the DL-enhanced seismology in IoT platform. Other
than the fact that DL seismic analysis is still in its infancy, IoT has just
reached the peak at the Gartner’s hype cycle. Integrating the cutting-edge
technologies of DL and IoT techniques and applying them to seismic data
can lead us to the great-leap-forward development of seismology.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
A.H. Alavi acknowledges the startup fund from the Swanson School of
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Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh.
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P. Jiao, A.H. Alavi
Pengcheng Jiao earned his MSc and PhD degrees in Civil En-
gineering from West Virginia University and Michigan State
University in 2012 and 2017, respectively. Prior to joining the
Ocean College at Zhejiang University as a Research Professor in
2018, Dr. Jiao was working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow
in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied
Mechanics at University of Pennsylvania, USA. Dr. Jiao’s
research interests include advanced metastructures, mechanical
metamaterials, multiscale structural stability analysis, artificial
intelligence in engineering, structural health monitoring and
energy harvesting. Particular interests are focused on: (1) con-
ceptual development and investigation of structural compo-
nents and systems to expand advanced features; (2) micro/
nanoscale fabrication and testing of mechanical metamaterials;
(3) applications of artificial intelligence algorithms in design
and optimization of structures; and (4) deployment of meta-
structures for multifunctional applications.
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Geoscience Frontiers 11 (2020) 739–744
Amir H. Alavi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Civil and Environmental Engineering, and holds a courtesy
appointment in the Department of Bioengineering at the Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining the University of Pitts-
burgh, he was an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the
University of Missouri. Dr. Alavi’s research interests include
structural health monitoring, smart civil infrastructure systems,
deployment of advanced sensors, energy harvesting, and engi-
neering information systems. At the University of Pittsburgh,
his Intelligent Structural Monitoring and Response Testing
(iSMaRT) Lab focuses on advancing the knowledge and tech-
nology required to create self-sustained and multifunctional
sensing and monitoring systems that are enhanced by engi-
neering system informatics. Dr. Alavi has authored five books
and over 170 publications in archival journals, book chapters,
and conference proceedings. He has received a number of
award certificates for his journal articles. Dr. Alavi is among the
Google Scholar 200 Most Cited Authors in Civil Engineering, as
well as Web of Science ESI’s Top 1% of Scientific Minds in the
World. Dr. Alavi received his Ph.D. degree in Civil Engineering
from Michigan State University.