BHP and Caterpillar reap rewards of first Unearthed hackathon in San Francisco

Unearthed hosted its first hackathon in San Francisco from 23 – 25 September at Galvanize. The open innovation event took place in the lead up to MINExpo in Las Vegas; North America's largest mining conference, which occurs once every four years.

With cornerstone support from Caterpillar and BHP Billiton, developers and data scientists were given access to two different industry challenges and data sets over the course of the weekend (54 hours). Participants were motivated by the access to real data from one of the world's largest industries, as well as the chance to gain career opportunities and significant prizes.

One of those prizes entailed the winning solution to Caterpillar's challenge having video footage of their project being shown on stage at MINExpo in front of tens of thousands of observers.

Team Hermes with their awards and prized (yet strangely uneaten) piece of Vegemite toast

Team Hermes, who built a machine learning algorithm to gamify Caterpillar's trucking data, won this prize as well as the People's Choice Award, which was more of a humorous gesture in the form of a piece of Vegemite toast, supplied by the Australians at Unearthed. Caterpillar will also invite the team to visit their proving grounds in Arizona.

“It was really exciting to see these teams come together, and with no mining knowledge they came up with some really good solutions. Data is an important piece (of the puzzle), but putting it together with operational experience will be the best of both worlds”, explained Michael Young, Director of Caterpillar Ventures.

First prize winners Mine Mining at Unearthed San Francisco

First prize was taken out by Mine Miners, who developed a predictive track maintenance solution in response to BHP Billiton’s heavy haul railway optimisation challenge. Team members Vaibhav Bhandari, Mark Weiss and Logan Suguitan decided to focus on events around track maintenance, using spark cluster enabled analysis of the entire data set, which provides variance information and correlation problem sections for the BHP maintenance team to prioritise.

“Everyone says that the next place is the next Silicon Valley, and what I wanted to do is really come to the Silicon Valley, give this challenge and see how smart these people are, what their innovation, what their thoughts and processes are. How they approach things, how they ask questions, and really try to learn from the innovation centre itself”, said Kieran McCluskey, Manager, Business Application Development Hub, BHP Billiton.

Young Innovator Award Winners – Great Mines Think Alike

Winners of the Young Innovator Award, Great Mines Think Alike, took on Caterpillar’s operator performance optimisation challenge, by creating a predictive real-time feedback system to warn operators about the risks of upcoming events. The system also generates logs of operator performance and gives managers insights into trends and operator rankings.

Additional highlights over the course of the weekend included a team of three high school students participating at the event. Their solution involved predicting delays in BHP’s train network using machine learning. Team Hot Bananas, comprised of individuals aged 13 – 14, are to be commended for their confidence and strategic thinking in tackling the challenge.

Team Hot Bananas at Unearthed San Francisco

Another milestone was achieved at Unearthed San Francisco: our first dog playing mascot at the Hermes team pitch. Yes that's right!

Overall, Unearthed San Francisco was a thoroughly productive weekend that delivered valuable results for both BHP Billiton and Caterpillar. It was exciting to offer the opportunity for Silicon Valley innovators and global resource heavyweights to come together and produce solutions to real industry challenges.

Michael Young, Director of Caterpillar Ventures said that he was amazed by the participants’ dedication. “We had a great turnout and some really good solutions. Caterpillar Ventures is here in San Francisco, but innovation happens everywhere in the world. Having these events be more global is a great benefit to us and we certainly appreciate Unearthed for putting on these events.”

View all the results, prototype solutions (projects), challenges and more at the Unearthed Portal

Details on Unearthed and its events can be found here.