Here at WADSIH we are committed to building data science capability in WA and supporting the organisations that are shaping the data science landscape.
We’re excited to bring you this blog from Russell Menezes and Teryne Yong, founders of RadiXplore, as they highlight their innovative AI company that has the potential to improve efficiency and outcomes within the resources industry.
This is the first blog in our Startup Spotlight series and we can’t wait to share more from the data science startup community.
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RadiXplore – Let No Data Go to Waste
Australia has one of the best repositories of data for the resources industry in the world. Yet, over 80% of this data goes unused due to the fact that it is unstructured, existing in the form of PDFs, images and text files.
Russell Menezes, CEO of RadiXplore, worked as an exploration geologist after he graduated. At one of his jobs, he was given 20,000 pages of reports. His task was to read, understand the content and find leads for Copper and Nickel deposits within a week! He could barely read through a thousand pages and the company was forced to make an executive decision based on that limited information. That was when it occurred to him that there had to be a better, faster and automated way to get a computer to read through all these reports, just like a geologist would, but a million times faster. A few years later, Russell collaborated with his co-founder Teryne Yong to build RadiXplore.
RadiXplore is an AI that understands language and context. When paired with a subject matter expert, users can search for ideas within documents and make correlations with other documents as accurately as they would have done without the app. Now thanks to the AI’s super speed, they can read through millions of pages of documents and extract meaningful concepts in a few seconds.
Mineral explorers are required to report annually on their exploration projects under Australian legislation. After a period of confidentiality, the exploration reports and data are made available to the public. These are referred to as open-file reports. Mineral exploration open-file reports are stored at various state government repositories – WAMEX (WA), SARIG (SA), DIGS (NSW), GSQ (QLD), GEMIS (NT), GSV (VIC). Australia is estimated to have around 100 million pages of exploration reports, spanning across 150 years.
These reports contain qualitative information contributed by thousands of explorers. Such information is generally split into two categories: minerals which were reported as by-products and not economical to mine at the time and mineral signatures which were not recognised in the past.
RadiXplore has ingested all of this qualitative information into one unified database. Using our geological AI, explorers can now find these unrecognised mineral deposits. More recently, mining companies are using RadiXplore to find critical minerals, which are the building materials required by the world’s economies for a sustainable energy transition.
RadiXplore also has a twin database which has ingested petroleum data. Oil and gas companies not only use RadiXplore to help find the next billion dollar oil well, but also use it to help their transition to net zero by finding sources of natural hydrogen and helium and carbon storage within historic petroleum datasets.
Resource companies have vast amounts of internal data sitting within cold storage or other systems like sharepoint making it impossible to pinpoint required information. Similar to the open-file data, RadiXplore can extend its capabilities to these private repositories as well.
Searching, analysing and extracting meaningful information from unstructured data has been the plight of explorers since the dawn of these industries. Due to the labour involved, the potential living within this data often gets overlooked.
Through RadiXplore, our company can now fulfil its mission of “letting no data go to waste”.
