SME-NY OCTOBER 2014 MEETING

Modeling and Mitigating Social Risk
in Mineral Development
through Data Mining Social Media and Sustainability Indicators

Dr. Sean D. Dessureault,

Associate Professor, Director,
Mine Intelligence Research Group,
Department of Mining and Geological Engineering at
The University of Arizona

Mineral projects have traditionally been faced with geological, technical, and political risk. Mineral development companies have developed technology and sustainable development practices to mitigate these risks allowing for less uncertainty in these areas. However, a powerful force has emerged that is transforming how we communicate, the political process, dating, marketing, and even sparking revolutions and overthrowing governments. This new force is Social Media. Opponents of economic development are adept at using social media to quickly change the risk landscape for investments, targeting activities both in the locality of the deposit as well as the share price of the mineral investment. Traditional mineral economics, focusing largely on commodity value fluctuation is an insufficient instrument for modeling risk to investments. Due to the speed of social media’s impact firms must undertake a more reactive and proactive stance to mitigate this new form of social risk. Big Data offers a toolset that has considerably more analytical capabilities than traditional mineral economic techniques and can monitor the impact of mitigation activities allowing for a feedback loop so that the activities can be tweaked.

Examples of the use of Big Data approaches to develop a Sustainability Intelligence Suite using dozens of publically available data sources and a Stakeholder Listening and Analysis toolkit focused on social media data mining will be presented for: U.S. based coal, South American gold and copper projects, and a large copper project in Southern Arizona. All have had significant financial impacts.

Dr. Sean Dessureault is an associate professor at the University of Arizona, engaged in applied research related to the integration and effective use of modern mining information systems. He directs the Mining Intelligence Research Group (MIRG) laboratory having real-time and historical data warehouses from several mining companies, an integrated monitoring room for remote optimization of mines, and cloud as well as local servers to implement big-data research on industrial and sustainability/social media data sets. (www.mirg.arizona.edu).

He founded MISOM technologies Inc., a mine technology company that designs and implements integrated data solutions and mobile apps with consideration toward the people (cultural) and process (workflow) aspects of mine operations (www.misom.com). He is a recognized expert in both underground and surface mobile fleet mine automation, big-data in mining and data-driven sustainability. Dr. Dessureault was awarded the Foundation of the South West American Mining Hall of Fame Medal of Merit under 40 for his academic and entrepreneurial work supporting the technological transformation of mining.