Unearthed Perth happened this last weekend (March 20-22nd), once again bringing the startup scene’s powers of innovation to bear on the resources industry.
The sponsors from the resources industry posed some challenges for the teams to address. These are things that the sponsors have identified as areas worth addressing, that the industry would be interested in seeing solutions to.
- Iluka Resources – Machine Learning Exploration; How can we quickly identify promising locations for exploration? 4 teams tackled this issue, and the winner identified a completely new approach to solving this problem.
- acQuire – Solving Real-time Geochemistry QA/QC; How can we rapidly categorise and communicate sampling errors? What are the relevant factors? 4 teams tackled this challenge, the second place winner addressed it with a dashboard, and the “young innovators” prize-winning team addressed it by improving the workflow around sampling.
- MRIWA / CSIRO – Laterite geochemical data-set of SW WA; What insights can we gain from this large resources data set? 1 team used this data to tackle the Iluka exploration problem.
- Unearthed IMARC Challenge – Geofencing in the Resources Industry; How can we make use of geofencing and geotagging technology? 6 teams tackled this problem, with the Best Hardware Hack team among them
- Unearthed IMARC Challenge – Augmented Reality in the Resources Industry; How can we make use of augmented reality? – no teams tried this problem.
There were 15 teams in the final, each team had 5 minutes to present their project. The winners were:
- 1st Prize: Team “J Bay” for their innovative approach to using signal processing and analysis to identify promising exploration opportunities in mineral sands. Team “J Bay” consists of Merrick Cloete, Dylan Johnston, Ilyas Ridhuan, and Corne Fourie.
- 2nd Prize: Team “Nanocore” for their real-time QA/QC process management tool.
- “Iluka Open Innovate” Prize: Team “Big Data 6” for their solution, “Jaywatch”. Jaywatch detects coastal features that are associated mineral sands deposits using fractal geometry and machine learning.
- “Young Innovators” Prize: Ashwin D’Cruz, Callum Webb, and Yuki Osada (all under 25 yrs old) of team “Anomalies” for their work to improve QA/QC in mineral sampling.
- Best hardware hack: Team ” Qubed” for their flashing, beeping, wrist-worn hazard communications device.
Interesting because the results from last year (which we covered here) were flooded with dashboards, none of which placed anywhere. This year a dashboard won second place, voted up because it was extremely focused on one set of users and provided unique insight into the data.
However, same as last year, the winner took a completely new approach to the problem. Last year’s “detecting large rocks” problem came with lots of video which the winning team completely ignored. This year the winning team ignored all the conventional approaches to detecting geographical features and ran a signal processing algorithm on the set of co-ordinates that make up a contour line.
And again, there’s a strong bias to hardware projects. The team that produced the flashy watch display performed well, with an amazing demo, and placed in the awards.
According to the Unearthed guys, 8 of the 15 teams have been asked to make follow-up presentations of their solutions to companies who were at the event, which is a fantastic result. With the Unearthed accelerator able to invest in the teams to get them over the line, hopefully we’ll see this event as the start of a new wave of resource startups in Perth.
Congratulations to everyone who took part, and especially Zane, Justin and Paul for organising another huge success.
