Over one hundred participants assembled at Toronto’s first truly international mining hackathon, Unearthed Toronto, which took place from 3-5 March at tech hub and skills accelerator GA Bitmaker. Barrick Gold headlined the event, providing two operational challenges and data sets.
Software developers, data scientists, UX designers, electromechanical engineers, mathematicians, and at least one astrophysicist were amongst the contenders who spent 54 hours coming up with creative solutions to Barrick’s real-world problems; the majority of whom had no previous mining experience.
“The presentations were amazing,” said Michelle Ash, Chief Innovation Officer at Barrick.
“We had some participants that had very limited information about the industry, yet they managed to create some great solutions. I couldn’t be more thrilled about the results of this hackathon".
“Take no offence to this, but I thought the mining industry were dinosaurs, and they weren’t capable of innovating. So, I was pleasantly surprised when I heard that Barrick Gold was participating in a hackathon like this. They are very open to new ideas, they are very cognizant of what’s going on in the industry, they know exactly what the problem is, and they’re open to taking suggestions to solve those problems”, said Garlam Won, an innovation consultant and hackathon participant.
Barrick Gold's Ed Humphries with Team BGC/Koan DesignsTop prize was taken out by BGC/Koan Designs, who developed an aggregated intelligence mining system to help mining analysts to pinpoint and de-risk investments in response to Barrick’s geo data tool challenge.
“Unlike the current process, which requires significant effort collecting and organising data, our System allows mining analysts to make quicker actionable decisions and generate greater wisdom”, said BGC/Koan team member Patrick Glover.
Second Prize winners SmartminerSmartminer won second place for bringing AI to mining with a Smart Miner Score (SMS) tool that uses public domain data to output a confidence score that will help companies in the mining industry make informed decisions. The tool leverages state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to convert noisy data from news articles, social networks, the stock exchange, government websites and google scholar into meaningful insights.
Cisco's Brad Bechtold with Young Innovator Award winners Team MangoThe young innovator award went to team Mango, whose next generation geological data tool MangoMine provides a holistic solution to the problem of combining data from a variety of sources, and Decelerate won the People’s choice award for their real-time driver feedback prototype.
Unearthed would like to thank their Toronto supporters: Barrick Gold, City of Toronto, Cisco and GA Bitmaker.
“Unearthed is building an innovation pathway within the resources space by working with great partners and great innovators to run these types of events that will deliver long-term value”- Zane Prickett, Director at Unearthed.