Mining Goes Digital

Christoph Mueller, Winfred Assibey-Bonsu, Ernest Baafi, Christoph Dauber, Chris Doran

The abbreviation ?APCOM? stands for ?Applications for Computers and Operations Research in the Minerals Industry?. When the conference started in 1964, it was an informal meeting of scientists from different universities in the USA together with the ?Society of Mining Engineers? (SME) of the United States. During the years the APCOM conference was performed in a mostly bi-annual rhythm. Up to today APCOM maintained its original logo formed around a punch card clearly remembering the historic origin of the conference from the times prior to the revolution caused by the era of semiconductors. In the beginning, APCOM focused on the optimization of geostatistics and resource estimation and a number of methods used in these fields were initially presented and discussed on APCOM conferences. This field still today is an important part of any APCOM. During the years, information...