Mansur Arief never imagined himself working in mining. As an artificial intelligence researcher finishing a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, he developed safety algorithms for self-driving cars. But then he took a postdoctoral position at Stanford University, where he met Jef Caers, the director of the new research program Mineral-X. Caers’ program seeks to reinvent mining for the clean energy economy by using advanced data science tools to help companies find and extract critical minerals like lithium in a more sustainable manner — and by developing protocols to engage local communities at the exploration phase, so they can decide whether or not new mining should be permitted on their land.
Arief was fascinated to discover that his skillset — developing AI algorithms that make complex decisions from real-world data — could be applied to…