happen. In our program, we have four technical themes: Productivity, Environment, Energy, and Digital Technology. Our mission is to advance technology that is either pre-commercial or demonstrationready.And we like to advance technologies that have some momentum. On those four technical themes, we have funded 50 projects from across the country that really have commercialization potential. We look at mining across the different mineral/metal types – coal, uranium, potash, gas – and across the whole value chain and supply chain. And we’ve been able to leverage the $40 million that we got from the government to $160 million through provincial and private/public partnerships. Our collaboration with Sask Polytech is allowing us to find technologies that are hidden in Saskatchewan, and I want to share them with the rest of the country.” ALL THINGS DIGITAL Terry Peckham is Director for Sask Polytech’s Digital Integration Centre of Excellence (DICE), Saskatchewan’s first Technology Access Centre (TAC) funded by NSERC and Innovation Saskatchewan. DICE performs applied research in a diversity of sectors, including mining. “I focus on the digital aspects,” he says, “anything with Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning and digital systems.” One of DICE’s applied research partners is Cameco, one of the world’s largest publicly traded uranium companies, with headquarters in Saskatoon. Utilities around the world rely on Cameco to provide global nuclear fuel solutions for the generation of safe, reliable, carbonfree nuclear power. “For Cameco, we developed some AI systems that they have put into production that involve modifying the commands given to their jet boring mining machines to more accurately drill out a cavity so that they’re able to mine more uranium,” Peckham reports. “It has sped up the amount of time it takes them to do the planning, where they’re going to dig, and how they’re going to dig next. And we’ve been able to decrease the waste coming out the other end as well. This AI project has turned out to be a really good investment for Cameco.” Other projects from Peckham’s area include work on hyperspectral imaging, which enhances the identification of objects and materials by analyzing 7 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 11, ISSUE 10 SASKATCHEWAN POLYTECHNIC
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