INNOVATION Centennial Collectors Edition January-February 2020

L eft previous and current page : Resource companies must face a range of risks, but they’re gathering more data than ever to help manage them. LlamaZOO Interactive helps them tackle complex planning, approval, and operational processes through a number of digital products that makes the most of big data. MineLife can integrate and visualize almost any kind of data, and OCC 3D provides a real-time monitoring through a “digital twin” visualization. P hoto : L lama ZOO I nteractive

experience and tribal knowledge,” “janitorial data manipulation,” and a “purgatory of data grinding”—he also believes this type of work is shifting towards interpretation, modelling strategies, and knowledge guidance. To Fell, engineering and geoscience work will involve less manual manipulation of datasets, and more guidance about how to strategically approach the work.

work of engineers and geoscientists. The advent these technologies could bring about bigger changes than any other technological development in history. ( To learn more about the impact of big data on the mining industry, see the January/February 2019 edition of Innovation , at egbc.ca/ innovation.) To Robin Fell, Senior Director, Strategic Technology Solutions at Newmont (formerly Newmont Goldcorp), these three areas are changing both the “how” and the “what” of the work of engineers and geoscientists. “A lot of the [exploration] techniques weren’t even feasible five years ago,” said Fell. “Technologies like machine vision, predictive algorithms, querying in 3-D [means that we can] take drilling data, look at assay results, and then work backwards to predict what the future results will be with different inputs. There is no reason why datasets in the exploration world can’t be combined using previous data, LiDAR, geophysics, reports and other unstructured documents,” he said. Fell says that a computer can be assigned to quickly scan and link all these datasets—“massive datasets…petabytes of data”—and artificial intelligence and machine learning can “reveal something that [humans] haven’t seen.” Data, he says, is becoming an asset. Fell thinks that technology is also changing engineering design. “In the golf industry, Callaway used AI to simulate all kinds of different driver heads, and last year they released a driver that was designed by AI,” he said. “This means that a computer can do all that work—tens of thousands of simulations with various inputs to arrive at a particular result.” But while Fell believes that the work of engineers and geoscientists is moving away from what he calls “human

CONGRATULATIONS ENGINEERS AND GEOSCIENTISTS BC

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to 100 years! Here’s to celebrating 100 years – advancing the professions and shaping our communities.

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