https://www.miningweekly.com

Hackathon fast-tracks development

4th March 2016

By: Kimberley Smuts

Creamer Media Reporter

  

Font size: - +

Technology implementation costs time and money – two critical resources that the mining sector currently requires to reinvent itself, says Anglo American Technology and Innovation head Jeannette McGill.

“The Unearthed hackathon is the perfect platform to fast-track innovation and short-circuit this process,” she emphasises on the back of Unearthed Cape Town, a competition focused on advancing mining technology.

Unearthed is a global hackathon presenting challenges aimed at facilitating the brainstorming and prototyping of new technological solutions that address problems facing some of the world’s largest mining companies, including Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, Anglo American and Gold Fields.

Global resources companies Anglo American and De Beers Group presented challenges during the Cape Town event, which was held in South Africa for the first time last month. Team Middebosch, comprising software engineers Pieter Holtzhausen and Albert Swart, took top honours for its visualisation of offshore diamond mining analytics for diamond miner De Beers.

The team won R10 000 and had the opportunity to present its solution on stage at this year’s Investing in African Mining Indaba held from February 8 to 11 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.

“Various role-players are involved in oceanic diamond mining. We identify their needs and develop a user interface to visualise machine learning results that help improve the performance of mining operators. We also identify gravel type and gravel depth and extract a mining efficiency factor for managers and executives,” says Holtzhausen.

Unearthed national community manager Mikey Kailis tells Mining Weekly that the Investing in African Mining Indaba was one of the main reasons for bringing the event to Cape Town. The event was held in five major Australian cities last year, starting in Perth in 2014.

Codeswop, the runners-up, comprising Tiaan Hendriks, Dean Harber and Regardt Nel, addressed the end-of-mine sound analysis challenge presented by De Beers.

“The prototype analyses the sound data from the hydrophone and gives drill operators immediate visual feedback on their current mining phase. Using this, a drilling operator can save an average of 6 min/h. This adds up to 380 extra drilling cycles a year or about 8 700 m2 of additional surface area mined per vessel,” notes Nel.

The Young Innovator Award went to team #MakingWavelets who also took a novel approach to the end-of-mine sound analysis challenge. #MakingWavelets contestant Zander Horn states: “Using support vector machine learning, we developed a classifier to identify different mining states based on auto correlated audio features from the mining process.”

The hackathon was held on February 5 to 7 at Workshop 17 – a coworking space at the V&A Waterfront, in Cape Town. Seventeen teams, comprising university students, innovators and entrepreneurs from South Africa, could select one of five challenges from the resources industry.

Each team spent more than 54 hours attempting to solve one of the challenges and developed a diverse range of solutions. These involved robotics, mobile applications and algorithms that can predict future trends based on the data provided by De Beers and Anglo American, as well as support provided by mentors from these mining companies.

The challenges presented to the 100 participants included smart nanomining and truck load measurements from Anglo American; and the classification of mined material, the detection of the end of mining based on sound, small-particle density measurement and particle segmentation on X-ray telescope belt images from De Beers.

Kailis notes that the winning teams were chosen by four judges after a rigorous judging process to determine each solution’s level of innovation. Additional factors included how the team’s solution improves efficiency, the various skills that team members displayed in solving problems during the challenge, whether questions posed to teams were answered properly and the long-term vision viability of each solution.

Meanwhile, proving the viability of its solution, the winning team from the first Unearthed event in 2014, held in Perth, has taken its vision further and continued the development of its solution by forming mining industry vibration analysis company Newton Labs, based in Western Australia. The start-up created a prototype that detects oversized boulders in hard-rock mining operations.

Last year, Newton Lab cofounders Simon Vincent and Michael Del Borrello and their team built a rough proto-type of a device that can be attached to a mining truck to measure vibration levels during loading and travel. The prototype was an iPhone strapped to a toy truck on top of a yoga ball. They currently have a professional, mine-safe product, which is in its final stages of testing.

Edited by Tracy Hancock
Creamer Media Contributing Editor

Comments

The content you are trying to access is only available to subscribers.

If you are already a subscriber, you can Login Here.

If you are not a subscriber, you can subscribe now, by selecting one of the below options.

For more information or assistance, please contact us at subscriptions@creamermedia.co.za.

Option 1 (equivalent of R125 a month):

Receive a weekly copy of Creamer Media's Engineering News & Mining Weekly magazine
(print copy for those in South Africa and e-magazine for those outside of South Africa)
Receive daily email newsletters
Access to full search results
Access archive of magazine back copies
Access to Projects in Progress
Access to ONE Research Report of your choice in PDF format

Option 2 (equivalent of R375 a month):

All benefits from Option 1
PLUS
Access to Creamer Media's Research Channel Africa for ALL Research Reports, in PDF format, on various industrial and mining sectors including Electricity; Water; Energy Transition; Hydrogen; Roads, Rail and Ports; Coal; Gold; Platinum; Battery Metals; etc.

Already a subscriber?

Forgotten your password?

MAGAZINE & ONLINE

SUBSCRIBE

RESEARCH CHANNEL AFRICA

SUBSCRIBE

CORPORATE PACKAGES

CLICK FOR A QUOTATION