Barrick Gold Corporation’s BattleBorn series brought together over 110 students, entrepreneurs, professionals and industry leaders to solve innovation challenges in the mining industry.
The BattleBorn competition was sponsored by Cisco, Switch and Unearthed, provided participants the chance to build skills, scale ventures and engage with talent via boot camps. It also included a hackathon and a startup exchange.
The judging panel was composedcomprised of Barrick chief innovation officer Michelle Ash, Cisco ventures manager Daniel Fischer, Arundo Analytics chief technology officer Jeff Jensen and Natilus chief executive officer and co-founder Aleksey Matyushev.
Hackathon winners were:
1st place ($10,000 cash prize): members of Modular Mining Systems in Tucson, Ariz., include Megan Pinela, Avinash Tiwari, Christopher Utter, Daniel Kapellusch and Marcelo Cabral.
2nd place ($5,000 cash prize): Students from the Colorado School of Mines, include Ethan Bond, Seth Jacob Asadi, Josh Rands and Matt Wojnoski.
Young Innovator Award ($2,500, plus opportunity to + present on stage at Mining & Exploration International Conference & Expo 2018, September 6-8 cash prize): Team members, comprised of students from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas include Saju Varghese, Julio Figueroa, Cristina Hernandez Castro and Maria Ramos Gonzalez.
Barrick BattleBorn Award ($2,500 cash prize): Team members were Sukriti Sharma, Saurabh Thakur and Bhavya Gulati.
