US Announces AI Hackathons to Strengthen Critical Mineral Supply Chains

This week the White House announced a series of "AI hackathons to strengthen critical mineral supply chains," starting in February of 2024. There's 50 critical minerals are used in everything from electric motors and generators to the fuselage and wings of an airplane. So now the "Critical Mineral Assessments with AI Support" contest aims to "significantly speed up the assessment of the nation's critical mineral resources by automating key steps" using AI and machine learning tools, according to a DARPA announcement on X, pointing to details on a new DARPA web page: Clean energy infrastructure, along with many other next-generation technologies, consume more critical minerals than traditional energy sources, and expected demand for critical minerals used in clean energy will quadruple by 2040... The goal of this AI exploration effort is to transform the workflow from a serial, predominantly manual, intermittently updated approach, to a highly parallel, continuous AI-assisted capability that is comprehensive in scope, efficient in scale, and generalizable across an array of applications... The challenge is that critical mineral assessments are labor intensive and using traditional techniques, assessing all 50 critical minerals would proceed too slowly to address present-day supply chain needs. An AI-assisted workflow could enable the U.S. Geological Survey to accomplish its mission, produce high-quality derivative products from raw input data, and deliver timely assessments that reduce exploration risk and support decisions affecting the management of strategic domestic resources. While the primary focus will be critical minerals, it is expected that the resulting technologies and resulting data products will be valuable for a wide variety of U.S. government mission areas ranging from water resource management, to potential new clean energy sources. It all started back in 2022, when the resource-identifying U.S. Geological Survey acknowledged that "The U.S. is under-mapped." They'd hoped an online contest could close the gap - with a first prize of $10,000 (with $3,000 and $1,000 for the second- and third-place winner). Working with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the government-supporting research nonprofit MITRE, DARPA and the U.S. Geological Survey all teamed up for the big "AI for Critical Mineral Assessment" competition. Participants were given images of maps from somewhere in North America - along with a list of points without their latitude-longitude coordinates (just a pair of numbers indicating their position within that image). They'd have to find a way to automate the determination of real-world latitudes and longitudes. The contest recommended using other features on the map as reference points - like roads, streams, and elevation-indicating topographic lines, as well as government boundary lines (and the names of places on the map). And last December during the awards ceremony a DARPA official said they were "really really pleased at the response we got." The new 2024 AI hackathons are now intended to build on the challenges from that 2022 competition. One competitor had described it as a "well-organized competition, really engaging," adding "I think the complexity of the maps that were part of the data set just made it a really interesting and engaging kind of problem." They noted that in the past we've always indicated data with maps - but that now, we're trying to turn maps back into data...

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