Resource estimation is a key focus at Seequent, with our most recent offering Leapfrog EDGE hitting the market in 2017. Applications like Leapfrog EDGE are underpinned by complex geostatistical methods that function in the already complex world of 3D data. An important way for us to ensure our development teams have the tools they need, is to tap into the collective expertise of groups like the Centre for Computational Geostatistics (the CCG).
The CCG is a research group at the University of Alberta. Launched in 1998 with the vision of becoming a leader in the education of geostatisticians and the delivery of geostatistical tools for modeling heterogeneity and uncertainty, they focus on supporting the needs of both industry and academia.
Their dual function is critical to companies like us, whose technology development needs to keep up with the most current research trends and standards in the industry. And for the CCG, connections to industry help ensure that their researchers focus on the most relevant problems and challenges.
Attendance at the CCG Annual Meeting
Recently, Rob Ferguson, Director of Mining & Minerals at Seequent, attended the CCG Annual Meeting in Edmonton, Canada. The Annual Meeting is open to consortium members, which includes mining industry giants like Teck, Newmont, Cameco and Anglo American, as well as technology developers like us.
Rob explains why we are so heavily involved. “We want to make sure we’re on the leading edge of understanding where the industry is going, both from research and industry perspectives. We’re increasingly involved in the estimation space… so we need to stay on top of the advances in techniques, including simulation and kriging, and that’s what our CCG consortium membership helps us do.”
Advantages of membership
Membership gives us access to hundreds of specialised geostatistical software programs, thousands of technical papers, as well as presentations, course material and many other resources. We also have access to the geostatistical software source code, meaning we can adapt and integrate this code in our products and see the algorithms at work.
Dr. Clayton Deutsch is the current director of the CCG and is well-known in the geostatistics space. “His research is top-notch and fully respected across mining, minerals and oil and gas,” Rob says. “He produces at least 20 masters and PhD students in this space every year. Many people from around the world attend his geostatistical citation course, which is an intensive geostatistical program for the mining and minerals industry.”
Dr. Deutsch is very familiar with our software, and some of his graduate students use Leapfrog products in their work to visualise their geological data.
Access to the GSLIB
Dr. Deutsch wrote parts of the Geostatistical Library (GSLIB) as a student at Stanford. Today, the GSLIB is developed and maintained by the CCG. It contains programs for geostatistical workflows like kriging, stochastic simulation and variograms.
Wesley Banfield, one of our research engineers, says that “access to these programs and data enabled us to validate our kriging algorithms and ensure that our applications meet the CCG and industry standards.”
Dr Deutsch will be at Lyceum 2018 in Vancouver
We are especially pleased to announce that Dr. Deutsch is a keynote speaker at this year’s Vancouver Lyceum 2018 event. He’s a world-leader in his field and his research group at the CCG is critical to the future development of our Leapfrog visualisation and estimation software.
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Registration for Seequent Lyceum 2018 is now closed.
Seequent Lyceum 2018 is a unique knowledge and networking event designed to bring Leapfrog technology partners, peers and users together to discuss innovations, challenges and best practices in the resource sector. Our theme this year is Data Complexity to Decision Clarity.