The energy transition requires critical minerals. Though the U.S. has plentiful resources of its own, the country has largely relied on foreign sources. That's in part because one major roadblock to accessing American critical mineral deposits is that they remain largely unmapped. That may be about to change, though. The Department of Defense and the U.S. Geological Survey have issued two separate challenges to explore using artificial intelligence and machine learning to expedite USGS' task of assessing the availability and mining potential of 50 critical minerals.

A trial of Maptek DomainMCF at an underground metals mine has concluded that machine learning will most likely become the preferred modelling …

Machine learning is kind of magic right? But is it the kind of magic that can make us rich? And I don't mean lucrative consulting gig rich, I mean digging valuable metals out of the ground rich. Also I'd been meaning to try out some transfer learning and looking around for a good topic to try it on. Transfer learning is where you take a pre-trained convolution (or other) network and use it for your task.