Mine Alliance: Reinventing a Sustainable Future for Arizona’s Mining Industry with AI 🚀

An innovative, AI-driven application designed to unite stakeholders across Arizona's mining industry, promoting responsible and sustainable practices.

Demo Links

Live Demo: Youtube
Wireframe: Figma
Vercel Deployment: Static Deployment

Inspiration ✨

We were inspired to act when we learned that the majority of mining sites were located on Indigenous lands, often sacred. Local communities frequently have no power to raise objections or access critical information about the mines impacting their area. Our goal is to empower these communities with access to free information and a platform where their voices are equal to those of mining companies and government regulators. By facilitating collaboration, we can ensure sustainable practices in mineral extraction that are essential to society.

What It Does ⛏️

Mine Alliance offers a platform for three key stakeholders:

Community Members: Can view detailed information about nearby active mines, including tenure, environmental impact (water, soil, air), and socioeconomic effects. They can also raise issues, like ecological concerns or disruptions to sacred lands.
Government Regulators: Can submit new site-specific regulations.
Mining Site Representatives: Can respond to community feedback and post announcements.

The platform uses geospatial data and AI to provide critical insights into the impact of mining operations.

How We Built It 👷

Front-End:

NextJS: Server-side rendering and SEO optimization.
TailwindCSS: For utility-first CSS styling.
Shadcn: UI components and design system.
Framer Motion: Smooth animations.
Leaflet: Interactive maps and geospatial visualizations.
Vercel: For seamless deployment and hosting.
Lucide: For modern icons.

Back-End & DevOps:

Flask: API development and handling HTTP requests.
SQLAlchemy: Database management.
AWS EC2: Scalable cloud infrastructure.
Amazon SageMaker Studio: Geology-focused AI model development.
ChatGPT-4 API: For advanced NLP integrations.

Challenges We Ran Into 🚒

Data Scarcity: Many mining datasets are confidential, making data collection challenging.
Team Communication: This was our first hackathon together, and it took time to establish a productive workflow.
AWS Credit Limits: We couldn’t fully fine-tune our AI model due to time constraints imposed by AWS credits.
Cross-Origin Hosting Issues: Deploying both client and server on AWS EC2 led to CORS issues, which we resolved after troubleshooting NextJS environment variables.

Accomplishments We’re Proud Of 👍

We dedicated significant time to researching and determining the most relevant and impactful information to display for stakeholders. Creating a platform that unifies these perspectives is something we’re very proud of.

What We Learned 🎓

We learned a great deal about the mining industry's impact on local communities, environmental health, and Indigenous lands. Building an AI-driven solution that offers transparency and fosters collaboration required not just technical skills but also an understanding of complex stakeholder dynamics.

What's Next for Mine Alliance 🔮

Improving AI Models: With more resources, we plan to fine-tune AI models to better analyze geological and environmental data.
Expanding to Other Regions: After proving success in Arizona, we hope to expand to other mining-heavy areas.
Increasing Community Engagement: Adding more features to enable deeper engagement between stakeholders and incorporating real-time data on mine activities.