UW SER Critical Minerals AI Proposal Selected to Build Wyoming-Idaho-Nevada Coalition

A collaborative team -- representing the University of Wyoming, the University of Nevada-Reno and the University of Idaho -- was selected for funding under the Intermountain Critical Minerals Research Launchpad (ICMRL) to advance technologies across the critical minerals supply chain by applying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

The partnership established the ICMRL to build on momentum generated at an AI and ML in critical materials workshop, which took place in March. The program provides seed funding to interdisciplinary teams whose work spans all three institutions and directly addresses the role of AI/ML in advancing technologies across the critical minerals supply chain.

The project, titled "Critical Mineral Intelligent Data Observatory (CM-IDO)," will build a federated knowledge base that performs optical character recognition, catalogs, extracts, structures, links and exhibits most available critical mineral documents and data from Idaho, Wyoming and Nevada in an AI-ready form.

Along with Tyler Brown, minerals program manager in the UW School of Energy Resources (SER), and Alathea Davies, a research scientist in the UW School of Computing, the team includes Luke Sheneman, director of research computing and data services at the University of Idaho; Simon Jowitt, state geologist and director of the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology; and Claudio Berti, director and state geologist at the Idaho Geological Survey.

"We identified a gap between the vast records held across our three states and institutions and our ability to integrate them into new AI/ML models," Brown says. "Together, our institutions bring complementary strengths across geoscience, process engineering, separation chemistry, sustainability assessment and machine learning to address that challenge."

Unlike standard databases, CM-IDO will serve as a continuously updated cyberinfrastructure engineered specifically to train and ground downstream AI/ML systems against a live corpus of regional geoscience data.

The yearlong project kicked off this month and is expected to stimulate additional competitive external proposals for enhancements and continued operation.

"No single institution can tackle the critical minerals supply chain challenge alone," says Scott Quillinan, acting executive director of SER. "Through the administrative support of UW's Office of Research and Economic Development, this multistate collaboration allows us to combine our technological and scientific strengths, laying the groundwork for long-term technological advancement."