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BHP's Olympic Dam mine is in the eastern section of South Australia's Gawler Craton. Launched last year, the unique global competition ExploreSA: The Gawler Challenge partnered with open innovation platform Unearthed in a global call for geologists and data scientists to uncover new exploration targets in the state’s Gawler Craton region.

BHP's Olympic Dam mine is in the eastern section of South Australia's Gawler Craton.

Launched last year, the unique global competition ExploreSA: The Gawler Challenge partnered with open innovation platform Unearthed in a global call for geologists and data scientists to uncover new exploration targets in the state’s Gawler Craton region.

The challenge has already attracted around 2000 competitors from across the globe to mine masses of the Geological Survey of South Australia’s geological and drilling data in a bid to pinpoint valuable new targets for miners.

Now four early round data preparation category winners are each receiving a $20,000 slice of the competition’s $250,000 prize pool.

The winners include a data analyst and owner of machine learning business Caldera Analytics in Melbourne, a team from data science startup Incerto, a geologist from New Gold in Canada and Australia, with a focus on machine learning, and a software engineer and geospatial developer.

South Australia Department of Energy and Mining chief executive Paul Heithersay said the Gawler Craton is one of the world’s greatest provinces in terms of mineralisation, especially in copper, but “the prizes there are hard to find”.

Heithersay was surprised by just how strong interest in Unearthed had been to date, with competitors coming from Canada, Brazil, India, the United States, Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, South Africa and Russia.

“Interest has well exceeded my expectations and the diversity of people involved, they are not only from the mining industry they are also coming from science or artificial intelligence or machine learning backgrounds, who haven’t used their expertise in this particular area,” he said.

He said the government was running the innovative data competition alongside a strong co-funding program approach to supporting mining in the state, through the $10 million Accelerated Discovery Initiative.

Early round data mining winners included Michael Rodda of Caldera Analytics in Melbourne and Jack Maughan, a geologist with New Gold in Canada and Australia, with a focus on big data and machine learning applications to the geosciences.

The Incerto Data startup team included Russell Menezes from Perth, founder and geo data science director of RadixGeo, and Ahmad Saleem from Perth, a research analysts and voice of Exploration Radio, plus Tyler Hall, who is completing a PhD in geoscience at Stanford University in the United States.

“As a team, our intention behind taking part in the Explore SA competition was to showcase ways of combining domain expertise in mineral exploration with proven data science techniques,” they said.

The other team included software engineer and geospatial developer Liang Chen and data scientist and business intelligence developer Ouyang Hua from Melbourne, Australia, and Liu Wei, a data scientist from China.

Using historical records, primary data and research, the competition combines geological expertise with new mathematical, machine learning and artificial intelligence to increase the number of potential drill targets across central South Australia.

South Australia’s resource sector is one pillar of the state’s economy, employing an estimated 26,000 local people and generating mining revenue of $2.4 billion over the past 12 years.