RadiXplore director Russell Menezes has a niche knowledge of geology and software development – an unusual combination of qualifications – and by combining both he has been able to establish a unique offering to the mining, and oil and gas industries with broader application in the finance and investment sector as well.

“Most artificial intelligence people wouldn’t want to work in geology, and most geologists aren’t programmers,” said Mr Menezes. “I have knowledge about geology, programming and data sciences. My cross-domain knowledge in these fields helps me do what I do.”

From his experience as a geologist, Russell knew first-hand how complex it was to search for information relating to mining data, including mineral tenement reports. There has never been an easy way to access the more than 20 million pages of documents lodged nationwide, stored in PDF format and dating back to the early 1930s.  

If a geologist wanted to find out if other companies over the decades had found traces of a particular rock with a particular feature in a particular region in Australia – with the potential for further exploration – it was virtually impossible.

“As a geologist by education and years of working as an explorationist, I found it difficult and complicated to find out what I needed,” he said. “About 80 percent of your time is spent finding information in reports, taking it out and putting it into databases, so you only spend 20 percent doing what you are supposed to do.”

Combining his expertise in geology, the study of machine learning and three redundancies later, Mr Menezes came up with a new opportunity – creating a search engine using artificial intelligence for unstructured data in the mining industry. RadiXplore was born, giving geologists and researchers access to relevant exploration data quickly and easily. 

Other than in geological fields, RadiXplore has applications in the investment and finance sectors. If investors wanted to undertake due diligence on an exploration opportunity, they could use RadiXplore to draw a box around the area of interest, add in the key words for the commodity in question, and search its history as to whether it has been found before, in what volumes and whether it would be viable to undertake further exploration.  

Mr Menezes has taken his technology to eight businesses, who have been overwhelmingly supportive and very keen to use the technology. 

“I tell people you’ve been using an abacus and I’m giving you a calculator, tell me how you want to use it. I’ve been told it could be used alongside Bloomberg, S&P Global and other business intelligence databases.”