S. Mostafa Mousavi
S. Mostafa Mousavi is a geophysicist whose research focuses on applying artificial intelligence to observational seismology. As a senior research scientist at Google, he works on the Android Earthquake Alerts System, a global earthquake early warning (EEW) system that uses accelerometers in smartphones to detect earthquakes and notify people ahead of arrival of destructive waves. His interests lie in precision earthquake seismology and pattern recognition in extensive sensor data. He has developed algorithms to address challenging seismological research problems. Some of these include: seismic signal processing/denoising, earthquake signal detection and characterization, statistical seismology, seismic hazard and risk assessment. He received his Ph.D. in geophysics from the University of Memphis in 2017. Following his Ph.D., he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University from 2017 to 2019. In 2021, he received the Charles F. Richter Early Career Award from the Seismological Society of America.
Authored Publications
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Gemini & Physical World: Large Language Models Can Estimate the Intensity of Earthquake Shaking from Multi-Modal Social Media Posts
Marc Stogaitis
Youngmin Cho
Richard Allen
Patrick Robertson
Robert Bosch
Nivetha Thiruverahan
Alexei Barski
Tajinder Gadh
Geophysical Journal International (2025), ggae436
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This paper presents a novel approach for estimating the ground shaking intensity using real-time social media data and CCTV footage. Employing the Gemini 1.5 Pro’s (Reid et al. 2024) model, a multi-modal language model, we demonstrate the ability to extract relevant information from unstructured data utilizing generative AI and natural language processing. The model’s output, in the form of Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) values, align well with independent observational data. Furthermore, our results suggest that beyond its advanced visual and auditory understanding abilities, Gemini appears to utilize additional sources of knowledge, including a simplified understanding of the general relationship between earthquake magnitude, distance, and MMI intensity, which it presumably acquired during its training, in its reasoning and decision-making processes. These findings raise intriguing questions about the extent of Gemini's general understanding of the physical world and its phenomena. Gemini’s ability to generate results consistent with established scientific knowledge highlights the potential of LLMs like Gemini in augmenting our understanding of complex physical phenomena such as earthquakes. More specifically, the results of this study highlight the potential of LLMs like Gemini to revolutionize citizen seismology by enabling rapid, effective, and flexible analysis of crowdsourced data from eyewitness accounts for assessing earthquake impact and providing crisis situational awareness. This approach holds a great promise for improving early warning systems, disaster response, and overall resilience in earthquake-prone regions. This study provides a significant step toward harnessing the power of social media and AI for earthquake disaster mitigation.
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Machine Learning in Earthquake Seismology
Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences , 51 (2023), pp. 105-129
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Machine learning (ML) is a collection of methods used to develop understanding and predictive capability by learning relationships embedded in data. ML methods are becoming the dominant approaches for many tasks in seismology. ML and data mining techniques can significantly improve our capability for seismic data processing. In this review we provide a comprehensive overview of ML applications in earthquake seismology, discuss progress and challenges, and offer suggestions for future work.
▪ Conceptual, algorithmic, and computational advances have enabled rapid progress in the development of machine learning approaches to earthquake seismology.
▪ The impact of that progress is most clearly evident in earthquake monitoring and is leading to a new generation of much more comprehensive earthquake catalogs.
▪ Application of unsupervised approaches for exploratory analysis of these high-dimensional catalogs may reveal new understanding of seismicity.
▪ Machine learning methods are proving to be effective across a broad range of other seismological tasks, but systematic benchmarking through open source frameworks and benchmark data sets are important to ensure continuing progress.
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Deep Learning Seismology
Science, 377 (2022), eabm4470
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Seismology is the study of seismic waves to understand their origin—most obviously, sudden fault slip in earthquakes, but also explosions, volcanic eruptions, glaciers, landslides, ocean waves, vehicular traffic, aircraft, trains, wind, air guns, and thunderstorms, for example. Seismology uses those same waves to infer the structure and properties of planetary interiors. Because sources can generate waves at any time, seismic ground motion is recorded continuously, at typical sampling rates of 100 points per second, for three components of motion, and on arrays that can include thousands of sensors. Although seismology is clearly a data-rich science, it often is a data-driven science as well, with new phenomena and unexpected behavior discovered with regularity. And for at least some tasks, the careful and painstaking work of seismic analysts over decades and around the world has also made seismology a data label–rich science. This facet makes it fertile ground for deep learning, which has entered almost every subfield of seismology and outperforms classical approaches, often dramatically, for many seismological tasks.
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