Perth resources hackathon attracts crowd of innovators

acQuire proudly supported Unearthed Perth, a resources hackathon event held at the CORE Innovation Hub over the weekend 19-21 May.

In its fourth year, the innovation event continued to attract a big crowd of students and professionals from science, engineering, business software development and entrepreneurial backgrounds. Over 90 participants making up 17 teams vied for the cash prizes.

Image credit: Unearthed

Real industry challenges were provided by resources companies, Newcrest Mining and South32 with Unearthed providing the final challenge. Teams only had 54 hours to tackle the problems, coming up with inventive ideas and prototypes ready to present to judges on the Sunday evening.

Newcrest Mining challenged teams to find a way to increase gold production by improving efficiency of the ore crushing circuit. South32 put teams to the test with their isolation design challenge. It’s goal was to guarantee workers remained free from harm by improving isolation design. The third challenge, provided by Unearthed, tested participants to see if sound data could be used to gain insights into performance, maintenance, failures and more on project sites.

Zane Prickett, Director of Unearthed, launched the hackathon on Friday evening, noting Australia is ripe for creating start-ups, particularly in the resources sector.

“We think Australia is the best place to build resources start-ups in the world”, he stated.

With falling market prices over the last couple of years, resources companies have been forced to improve performance. This is where disruptor events like Unearthed fit in. There are real opportunities for companies to automate and streamline their processes for greater efficiencies.

After a big weekend of ideas, the teams pitched their ideas in front of a panel of judges. First prize was taken out by Team Murdoch, a group of engineers from Murdoch University who developed a new safety isolation smart lock that integrates with an SAP visualiser in response to South32’s Isolation Design Challenge.

Second prize was awarded to Chute to Kill who a proposed solution to Newcrest’s challenge to increase gold production, using live monitoring to predict and eliminate unplanned outages of the ore crusher chutes.

The Young Innovator Award went to Team AMI which tackled Unearthed’s challenge and the People’s Choice Award went to Soundscape who also took on Unearthed’s sound challenge.

Congratulations to the winners of Unearthed Perth and all teams who participated in the weekend.

More details about past hackathons and upcoming hackathons are available via Unearthed.