Mining Conference Research Articles

Oilfield Technology Leads the Way in Pursuit of Undersea Metals Vital to Energy Transition

A carbon-free world and green economy have a lot riding on the future of electricity generation and storage. As the world moves away from hydrocarbons and toward electricity to power everything from cars to the factories that make them and beyond, there is yet another crucial hurdle to clear. To meet the expected electric future for vehicles alone, it will take more manganese, cobalt, nickel, copper, and lithium than we as a planet are currently producing. These elements are the building blocks for the batteries that power the electrified future—and they are finite. Supply concerns have already hit automakers as more and more look to grow their electric vehicle (EV) footprints. Representatives from Tesla, Ford, and Mercedes-Benz were among the delegates at a recent metals and mining conference in Florida—a gathering usually attended by metals producers. The auto managers were in attendance to learn more about potential obstacles to their supply chains when it comes to lithium, nickel, and cobalt, all critical battery components. An answer to the supply conundrum may lie in a most curious place—the ocean floor. Specifically, in deposits of polymetallic nodules—black lumps of mineral matter about the size of a potato that are strewn throughout certain areas of the Earth’s seabeds. These nodules are present in deposits across the globe, but mostly in the Pacific and Indian oceans. The existence of these nodules has been known for decades. In fact, it would be the idea of deep-sea mining for manganese nodules that would act as cover for a Cold War expedition known as Project Azorian, a CIA-led mission in the Pacific Ocean that would use a converted drilling rig—the Glomar Explorer—to retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine in the early 1970s. The mission was a partial success as only a portion of the crippled vessel was retrieved. In the North Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico, there is an area called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) that is estimated to hold a field comprised of 21 billion dry tons of nodules at water depths ranging from 4 to 6 km. The CCZ is broken up into licenses, much like what is common for offshore oil and gas exploration. “The amount of metals in the nodules themselves surpasses anything on land—far more nickel, far more cobalt, far more manganese, and a fair amount of copper as well,” said Rory Usher with The Metals Company, a deep-sea miner with licenses in the CCZ. “In the face of massive resource demand and constrained supply, we think this abundant and potentially lower-impact alternative is something that absolutely has to be responsibly considered. And through our extensive deep-sea science program to provide definitive answers as to the impacts, that’s exactly what’s been done.”

Preface

The 5th Polish Mining Congress was successfully held between 6th and 7th September 2022 at the International Fair EXPO Katowice (Poland). This event is one of the largest mining conferences organized every two-three years to gather industry, academia and policy-makers together. This year’s congress was held under the slogan:Mining industry of the 21st century—how to extract and process mineral and energy resources while protecting the climate and the environment?For the first time, the congress was accompanying International Fair EXPO KATOWICE The Mining, Energy and Metallurgy Industry Fair. The meeting was a place of exchange of ideas and views on the future of coal industry in Poland. Over 200 delegates were present at 8 scientific sessions with the total number of 49 presentations. Thematic sessions were focused on the future development of the mining industry, electrification and automation in mining industry, new trends in underground construction, transport and mechanization, Coalbed Methane as a resource and threat, mine ventilation and safety in mining, environmental protection and rehabilitation of mining areas as well as circular economy in mining.The main partner of the conference was KGHM Polska Miedź SA – leader in copper and silver production. Other important industrial partners were: CARBOSPEC, FAMUR SA. FASING SA, Research and Supervisory Centre of Underground Mining, CEZ Group, DAMEL, Central Mine Rescue Station in Bytom and CTL Maczki-Bór S.A.The conference series is a result of selection of the most important articles. All articles were peer reviewed through process administrated by the Editors.List of Organizing committee, Scientific Committee are available in this Pdf.

Guest Editorial: Tech Mining for Engineering Management: An Introduction

The papers in this special section focus on the concept of "tech mining." Here, this term refers to the application of text mining tools to science and technology information, informed by the understanding of technological innovation processes. Since the 1st Global Tech Mining (GTM) Conference in 2010, the GTM community has established great connections between tech mining and a broad range of research domains, particularly bibliometrics, text mining, and technology management. Endeavours of the community touch on benefits of the big data boom, the artificial intelligence (AI) age, advanced analytical and visualization tools, novel philosophical concepts, and reshaped managerial models.

Progress stories and the contested making of minerals in Greenland and northern Québec

The aim of this article is to go beyond progress stories presented in and about the North by industry and governmental bodies. By pursuing event ethnography and public policy analysis, progress stories are analyzed and contextualized, drawing on recent insights from participant-observations at mining conferences and conventions (e.g. PDAC), field visits (organized by REXSAC and the MinErAL Network) to Greenland and Quebec. Quebec has a long history of mining, and in Greenland substantial profit from mining has also been possible (before the Greenland Self-Government authorities took over the responsibility for the mineral resource area). Northern communities are in many ways co-investors of mining projects and promised to benefit from the extractive activities. However, with a (2014) mining strategy preparing Greenland for something that never really happened. Mining in Greenland is still carried out, but the making of minerals there is contested. Around the same time, Québec launched Plan Nord and initiatives mostly aimed at fostering mining investment and development in Northern Québec. The analysis illustrates that development of the mining industry in praxis is much more modest than envisioned, but still the progress stories do have an impact on local politics, the understanding of history, and relationships between North and South.

Identification of data mining research frontier based on conference papers

Purpose Identifying the frontiers of a specific research field is one of the most basic tasks in bibliometrics and research published in leading conferences is crucial to the data mining research community, whereas few research studies have focused on it. The purpose of this study is to detect the intellectual structure of data mining based on conference papers. Design/methodology/approach This study takes the authoritative conference papers of the ranking 9 in the data mining field provided by Google Scholar Metrics as a sample. According to paper amount, this paper first detects the annual situation of the published documents and the distribution of the published conferences. Furthermore, from the research perspective of keywords, CiteSpace was used to dig into the conference papers to identify the frontiers of data mining, which focus on keywords term frequency, keywords betweenness centrality, keywords clustering and burst keywords. Findings Research showed that the research heat of data mining had experienced a linear upward trend during 2007 and 2016. The frontier identification based on the conference papers showed that there were five research hotspots in data mining, including clustering, classification, recommendation, social network analysis and community detection. The research contents embodied in the conference papers were also very rich. Originality/value This study detected the research frontier from leading data mining conference papers. Based on the keyword co-occurrence network, from four dimensions of keyword term frequency, betweeness centrality, clustering analysis and burst analysis, this paper identified and analyzed the research frontiers of data mining discipline from 2007 to 2016.

Regulating Space Mining: Use A System That Works Conference Paper 5Th International Future Mining Conference 2021

Regulating Space Mining: Use A System That Works Conference Paper 5Th International Future Mining Conference 2021

Modeling knowledge and functional intent for context-aware pragmatic analysis

Nikhita Vedula is an Applied Scientist at Amazon Alexa Science. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the Ohio State University in August 2020, advised by Professor Srinivasan Parthasarathy. She received her bachelor's degree from the National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India in 2015. Her research interests are at the intersection of data mining, natural language processing and social computing. Over the course of her PhD, her research involved designing efficient and novel machine learning and computational linguistic techniques that extract, interpret and transform the vast, unstructured digital content into structured knowledge representations in diverse contexts. She has worked with researchers from interdisciplinary fields such as emergency response, marketing, sociology and psychology. She performed research internships at Nokia Bell Laboratories, Adobe Research and Amazon Alexa AI. Her work has been published at several top data mining conferences such as the Web Conference, SIGIR, WSDM and ICDM. Her work on detecting user intentions from their natural language interactions won the Best paper award at the Web Conference 2020. She was a recipient of a Graduate Research Award (2020), a Presidential Fellowship (2019) and a University Graduate Fellowship (2015) at the Ohio State University. She was also selected as a Rising Star in EECS (2019).

Automation and Robotization of Underground Mining in Poland

The article concerns the condition of automation and robotization of underground mining in Poland. Attention has been focused on the specific character of the mining industry. This limits the possibility of using robotization, and sometimes even the mechanization of certain processes. In recent years, robotic and automated machines and machine system solutions have been developed and applied in Poland. They are autonomous to a various degree, depending on the branch. The type of automation and artificial intelligence depends on the specific use. Some examples presently being used include the MIKRUS automated longwall system and autonomous device(s) for breaking rocks or mining rescue work. In Poland, fully automated plow systems produced by foreign companies are also used. Companies in Poland and international research centers are also actively engaged in the development of underwater and space mining. where robotization is of key importance. Research is also being undertaken by Robotics in Mining, euRobotics and PERASPERA as well as Space Mining Conference.

Quick-Erect Stopping System for Radiation Protection and Mine Rescue in Small-scale Mining

The Quick-Erect Stopping System (QESS) offers a new way of reducing the radon exposures of miners in Germany, especially during remediation work in old mines. The QESS is a light-weight, modular, and reusable construction kit of interlocking telescopic aluminum tubes, radon-proof foil, and expanding foam. It is designed to seal off radon-rich parts of galleries within only a few minutes. Originally, the QESS was developed to protect miners against radon exposures. Then, the QESS found the attention of several mine rescue teams at a German mining conference. The Student Mine Rescue of the Technical University Bergakademie Freiberg and the Wismut Mine Rescue carried out first mine rescue drills in Freiberg and Schlema. Additionally, a mine rescue drill was carried out by the Front Range Mine Rescue in the Edgar Experimental Mine of the Colorado School of Mines. These drills helped to improve the system and highlighted its potential for mine rescue operations. Now, the QESS is well-suited for small-scale mining. The QESS can be used to seal off galleries in only a few minutes to both protect miners from radon exposures and to support mine rescue operations. Moreover, the QESS was also successfully used in ventilation experiments.

An exploration of women's workplace experiences in the South African mining industry

SYNOPSIS Historically, the mining industry, on a global level, was male-dominated, as many governments had prohibited women from working at mines, particularly underground. In South Africa, the government introduced the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (No. 28 of 2002) (MPRDA) and the Broad-based Socio-economic Empowerment Charter to address the imbalances and rectify previous inequalities in the mining industry. Since the inception of MPRDA, women's representation in the South African mining industry has increased, from 3% in 2002 to 15% in 2018. Although government has good intentions, gender equality in the mining industry remains a challenge. Research on women employed in South African mines revealed that women still face barriers to some extent. This research explores women's current workplace experiences in the South African mining industry. A literature review and an empirical study were conducted. The study followed a positivistic research approach, and a quantitative research design was used. Self-administered questionnaires were distributed at the 8th Annual Women in Mining Conference in February 2017. Based on the data obtained, it became evident that several aspects must still be addressed to successfully accommodate women in the mining workplace. The study offers practical recommendations that can be implemented by mining organizations to improve women's workplace experiences in order to encourage and foster transformation in the mining industry. Keywords: gender, mining industry, mining legislation, South Africa, women in mining.

Mining in comparative perspective: Trends, transformations and theories

This article offers a brief introduction to a special issue based on a selection of papers originally presented at an international mining conference in Ghent (Belgium) in December 2017. The aim of the conference was to promote a comparative and multidisciplinary approach to a selective number of political, economic and socio-cultural aspects of mining in the Global South. The five papers included in the special issue have been grouped around three main themes: (1) mining elites, (2) the antagonism between artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) and large-scale mining (LSM), and (3) mining in a globalizing world.

The Lead Poisoning Control in Zamfara and Niger States, Nigeria: A 2010-2018 Review

The Lead Poisoning Control in Zamfara and Niger States, Nigeria: A 2010-2018 Review

Africa Focussed Mining Conferences: An Overview and Analysis

Despite the African continent having extensive mineral wealth much desired by industrialized nations it is also a region rife with poverty and under-development and there is little evidence that it has benefited from these resources. Beginning in the early the 2000s the price of major minerals, especially copper and gold, rose to new heights (with the exception of the 2008/2009 Global Financial Crisis slump). These price rises created greatly increased global interest in the continent's extensive mineral wealth and enabled many new mining activities in Africa to be initiated. While some corporate mining conferences had been held in earlier years their numbers increased concurrently with the greatly increased level of exploration and mining activities. They included national, regional and international events and also some with mineral specific foci. During the same period civil society-based movements concerned about the negative social impact of mining, and being part of a bigger global movement, also became increasingly active.

A comprehensive literature review reflecting fifteen years of debate regarding the representativity of reverse circulation vs blast hole drill sampling

Author Summary: Blast hole sampling is widely used for grade control by the mining industry all over the world, both in precious and base metal open pit mining. Blast hole (BH) samples are often regarded as inferior in comparison to “proper drill sampling” like reverse circulation (RC) and diamond (core) drilling (DD), and are accused of lacking representativity by the sampling community. The present paper aims at collecting all peer reviewed publications from 2000 onwards that concern open pit mine sampling performance of BH, RC and/or DD drill sampling. This will form a comprehensive literature review reflecting on the debate between the representativity of the different sampling methods. The literature review collected a total of 31 publications (two were more or less duplicates and one consisted of an abstract only). The main source for publications on RC and BH drill sampling were dedicated sampling conferences, other mining conferences and some publications were found in peer-reviewed journals. From the gathered publications, it is not possible to draw a general overall conclusion as to the superiority of one drill sampling method over another. Both RC and BH have advantages and disadvantages and the choice of system needs to be related to the ore type and to the mining conditions. The overall conclusion is that it is always necessary to evaluate the specific sampling system to be used in light of the Theory of Sampling (TOS) (and with respect to the characteristics of the ore to be mined). It is always necessary to ascertain that the specific drilling sampling system contemplated does not lead to hidden losses that could have been avoided or missed profits that could be gained with a more relevant and representative sampling system. It would appear that the mining industry is doomed to continue to follow local, often economy-driven objectives and sampling solutions even if these can be documented as inferior when seen in the light of the representativity imperative. A call is made for universal adherence to the principles laid down by TOS for representativity in the primary sampling stage, before economic, logistical or other (local) factors are allowed to intervene. What is the objective to analyse and to make decisions in the mining industry, based on samples that can be documented not to be representative?

Report of the First International Workshop on Learning over Multiple Contexts (LMCE 2014)

The first international workshop on Learning over Multiple Contexts, devoted to generalization and reuse of machine learning models over multiple contexts, was held on September 19th, 2014, as part of the 7th European machine learning and data mining conference (ECML-PKDD 2014) in Nancy, France. This short report summarizes the presentations and discussions held during the LMCE 2014 workshop, as well as the workshop conclusions and nthe future agenda.

A conversation with the Chinese KDD leaders

In August 2012, the 18 Annual ACM SIGKDD Conference, KDD 2012, will be held in Beijing, China. This is the first time for this flagship knowledge discovery and data mining conference to be held in Asia, and the second time for it to be held outside North America. As before, the KDD 2012 conference will be a central place where researchers, practitioners and students from academia, business, government and industry converge to exchange the newest and most exciting ideas and results in the KDD area. Unlike previous KDD conferences, however, many new faces will be seen, new voices heard, and new perspectives discussed. This is particularly true because this KDD will be held in Beijing, the heartbeat of China’s universities, research institutes, industrial and governmental offices; the epicentre of the rapidly rising and opening China.

SubSift web services and workflows for profiling and comparing scientists and their published works

Scientific researchers, laboratories, organisations and research communities can be profiled and compared by analysing their published works, including documents ranging from academic papers to web sites, blog posts and Twitter feeds. This paper describes how the vector space model from information retrieval, more normally associated with full text search, has been employed in the open source SubSift software to support workflows to profile and compare such collections of documents. SubSift was originally designed to match submitted conference or journal papers to potential peer reviewers based on the similarity between the paper’s abstract and the reviewer’s publications as found in online bibliographic databases such as Google Scholar. The software is implemented as a family of RESTful web services that, composed into a re-useable workflow, have already been used to support several major data mining conferences. Alternative workflows and service compositions are now enabling other interesting applications, such as expert finding for the press and media, organisational profiling, and suggesting potential interdisciplinary research partners. This work is a useful generalisation and proof-of-concept realisation of an engineering solution to enable RESTful services to be assembled in workflows to analyse general content in a way that is not immediately available elsewhere. The challenges and lessons learned in the implementation and use of SubSift are discussed.

Integrating induction and deduction for noisy data mining

Data mining research has been drawing a lot of interest and attention from various fields since late 1980s. The rapid progress has been achieved from three aspects: the prosperity of data mining conferences, the significant number of data mining algorithms, and widely applied areas of data mining techniques. With the continuing growth of the data volumes in many domains, the need of employing data mining techniques provides not only new opportunities but also immense challenges. In this article, we present our study on a challenging topic – integrating induction and deduction for noisy data mining. In particular, we assume the mechanism that corrupts the input data is a set of structured knowledge in the form of Associative Corruption (AC) rules. We apply deductive reasoning to generate the noise corruption rules; make error corrections on the input data with the help of these rules; and perform inductive learning from the corrected input data. Our experimental results show that the proposed integration framework is effective.

Future of metal mining: Sixteen predictions

The world's metal mining industry faces a number of challenges which must be anticipated and managed wisely. The prevailing recession will force the industry to further rationalisations that require both new technologies and new organisational forms that supports both high productivity and good working conditions. Based on what was said at three international mining conferences, the authors of this paper present 16 predictions for the mining industry of the future. In one or another way the mining industry of today must address them all.

SNOMED CT - advances in concept mapping, retrieval, and ontological foundations. Selected contributions to the Semantic Mining Conference on SNOMED CT (SMCS 2006).

SNOMED CT - advances in concept mapping, retrieval, and ontological foundations. Selected contributions to the Semantic Mining Conference on SNOMED CT (SMCS 2006).