A slate of mining, technology and venture capital industry leaders will be judging contestants at the 2018 Disrupt Mining competition.
The judges, announced on the Disrupt Mining Twitter account Thursday, includes George Salamis, Rob McEwen, Blanca Treviño, Veronica Knott and Wal van Lierop.
Disrupt Mining is a crowd-sourcing challenge for mining innovation that was started in 2017 by Goldcorp and Integra Gold. The top five competitors face off in a “Shark Tank-style” live finale at PDAC, and the winner has an opportunity to negotiate an investment with Goldcorp.
Last year, Cementation Canada came away the big winner with $650,000 in funding and an invite to make a deal with Goldcorp for its injection hoisting technology.
Salamis is the CEO of Integra Resources, and was previously the chairman of Integra Gold, which put together a similar crowd sourcing campaign in 2016 with its Gold Rush Challenge. After Integra Gold was sold to Eldorado Gold in June, the management team founded Integra Resources in August and acquired Kinross Gold’s DeLamar mine in Idaho in September.
Salamis told CIM Magazine in October that while there was nothing firmly planned for innovation at DeLamar, the team was interested in applying new technology.
“Artificial intelligence and machine learning have advanced since the ‘old days’ of the Gold Rush Challenge,” he said. “Why wouldn’t we use them? They are great tools.”
McEwen is the chairman and chief owner of McEwen Mining, and the founder of Goldcorp. He was inducted into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame in 2017. He told CIM Magazine in November that he was watching with interest “the invasion in other industries by companies that suddenly appear,” such as Amazon, Airbnb and Uber, and wondered when mining would see the same.
“It’s more just seeing that our industry is lagging, so it’s overdue for the arrival of such an event,” he said. “The attitude within the industry needs to become more embracing of new technology, more experimental.”
Treviño is a director at Goldcorp and the president and CEO of Softtek, an information technology services company in Latin America. She regularly speaks on entrepreneurialism, IT and women in business, and has took part in forums at the World Bank, Harvard Business School and London Business School. She was named Mexico’s Woman of the Year by the National Women of the Year Foundation in 2014.
Knott is a mining engineering student at the University of British Columbia, and has served on UBC’s Board of Governors as a student member and as the president of the university’s Engineering Undergraduate Society. In the 2017 Canadian Mining Games she was the captain of UBC’s team. Knott was named the 2017 Engineers Canada Gold Medal Student and a Vancouver Board of Trade Woman to Watch.
Van Lierop is the founder, president and CEO of Chrysalix, a technology-focused venture capital company that has invested in technologies like 3D printing steel, fast-charging electric vehicle infrastructure and smart mining. He founded Chrysalix in 2001, and before that worked as an associate professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for nearly a decade, researching economics, econometrics and the environment.
Disrupt Mining will take place on March 4, 2018 during PDAC in Toronto.