From sessions to strategy: Revealing long-term and emerging innovation trends in data analytics, intelligent systems and automation - ME Feature Article

The Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration (SME) MINEXCHANGE SME Annual Conference & Expo hosts innovationrelated content across division sessions each year. The development and integration of automation, robotic systems, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), internet of things (IoT), digital twins, drones, remote monitoring and other intelligent systems have regularly been showcased as advancements that can be used to improve safety, efficiency and sustainability across the industry. Although the presence of these conference topics is evident, it is unclear if they are just an expressed interest of industry visionaries and experts or if they may be early indicators of emerging trends. To date, there has not been a systematic analysis of the presence, fluctuation and focus of conference topics over the years. Some sources support the analysis of conference data to help identify emerging trends, opportunities and interests. For example, the International Technology and Engineering Educators Association (ITEEA) completed an analysis of conference programs from 1978 to 2014 to highlight historical milestones and emerging trends within their profession — an effort that assisted with future conferencing planning and other professional events (Reed and LaPorte, 2015). These authors identified several topics that appeared prevalent in the peer and gray literature that were not as prominent in conference offerings. They also indicated that the conference theme had minimal influences on the submission topics (Reed and LaPorte, 2015). In another effort, creators made links between tweets that used conference title hashtags during the Association of College and Research Libraries conferences from 2011 to 2019 as a form of trend analysis (Hennesy et al., 2021). Finally, related efforts have occurred in the text mining of journal article titles to identify latent topics and unique terms in the scientific literature (Ravikumar et al., 2023). Analyzing paper and conference titles has received attention in recent years to help propose and predict research topics (Wang et al., 2022). For example, Wang and colleagues (2022) indicated that trends revealed in paper titles can be useful for proposing more authoritative sessions at major conferences to align with industry trends. Consequently, an abbreviated activity was undertaken by SME’s Industry Innovation Strategic Committee in 2025. The goal was to (1) reveal stable and shifting priorities around innovation, (2) inform respective division planning for subsequent conference sessions and (3) ascertain whether the association is meeting members’ expectations around innovation-related content throughout the year. SME’s Industry Innovation Strategic Committee focused on the identification and dissemination of these tools in the field, and reviewed technical session titles from annual conference programs from 2016 to 2026. Using keyword frequency, theme clustering and division-specific tagging, the committee identified themes that seemed to be gaining traction, fading, remaining consistent, or changing in detail and scope regarding emerging technologies. This short article serves as both a retrospective view and possible planning tool for shaping future conference programming and, if applicable, inform impactful and relevant initiatives.