29th of August 2016
Team ARNUT wins Inaugural Hunter Valley Hackathon
Over the weekend of 26th – 28th August the inaugural Hunter Valley Hackathon was held in Newcastle. Hackathon events are run by Unearthed, with this program starting in 2015 with 5 events nationwide, with the basic premise being to solve industry defined challenges over a 54 hour time period. This year, this successful program has been expanded and even includes three international locations. The focus of Unearthed can be described as “Accelerating innovation in the resources sector”. Our team (“ARNUT”), comprised of Dr Wei Chen, Dr Tim Donohue and Mr Jeremy Miller from TUNRA Bulk Solids, took on arguably the most difficult of the 3 challenges. Our challenge was to “Automate image analysis of Hylogger drill core data”, and after an intense weekend of development, we were very proud to be awarded first prize.
Our prototype is able to cross-correlate three-band RGB high resolution drill core images with hyperspectral line scanning, resulting a visual mineral mapping directly overlaying on top of the drill core image. The motivation for this work is to lead to more accurate, accelerated and efficient mineral mapping for large mineral deposit exploration, which has the potential to significantly increase the return of investment for the A$600 million exploration cost annually in Australia.
The event itself was really well run, and was both fun and challenging to be involved with. The mentorship provided with regard to the challenge and interpretation of data was outstanding, and the assistance and advice provided by the Unearthed team was excellent. The event is really a great place to test your skills, and we would encourage anyone else considering entering in the future to have a go!
Team “ARNUT” with judge and mentor Dr Chris Yeats (Chris is the Executive Director of Geological Survey NSW)
