Sudden water inrush has been a deadly killer in underground engineering for decades. Currently, especially in developing countries, frequent water inrush accidents still kill a large number of miners every year. In this study, an approach for predicting the probability of fault-induced water inrush in underground engineering using the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) was developed. Six parameters related to the aquifer, the water-resisting properties of the aquifuge and the mining-induced stresses were extracted as the major parameters to construct the ANFIS model. The constructed ANFIS was trained with twenty reported real fault-induced water inrush cases, and another five new cases were used to test the prediction performance of the trained ANFIS. The final results showed that the prediction results of the five cases were completely consistent with the actual situations. This indicates that the ANFIS is highly accurate in the prediction of fault-induced water inrush and suggests that quantitative assessment of fault-induced water inrush using the ANFIS is possible.

Mining has been embedded in the public consciousness as a dirty, non-innovative, outdated and environmentally harmful industry. Proper education, especially the academic one, becomes crucial to successfully change this image. This article depicts the initial assumptions of the international project Master in Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology Integration in Mining (MEITIM), co-financed by EIT Raw Materials, that aims to diagnose the current state of Polish higher education in the field of mining at, among others, the Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (WUST), concerning the experience of the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) and Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT). The MEITIM project allowed identifying the directions of necessary changes in the didactic process as an indispensable set of skills and knowledge for a future mining graduate. Such activities are dictated by many guidelines and arrangements, among others, at the level of the European Commission or key industry institutions such as the International Council on Mining and Metals. These are key competencies that require significant changes in university curricula supporting sustainable development goals in innovative mining. The authors show that there is a link between the condition of the mining industry in Poland, its reputation, and the number of people who want to study mining.