Category: Education

We’ve helped multiple nonprofit research organizations advance their COVID-19 research through our AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative, first launched in March 2020. The next round of funding opens today. As we launch the next phase, we are excited to broaden the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative’s scope and distribute the remaining $12 million this year. We will accept applications through the end of the year, with priority consideration given to applications received before July 31. Check out a few examples of the nonprofit research projects supported by the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative.

I recently had the opportunity to record the keynote for this year’s AWS Public Sector Summit Online. This year’s keynote theme is “Inspiration Everywhere,” and I can’t wait to share a number of inspiring stories and examples from our customers with you when the keynote airs on April 15. What unites all of the stories is a commitment to achieving mission outcomes with AWS and cloud computing. And while we’ll spend some time talking about the technology, I’ll also share with you the organizational changes that mission owners can drive, today, to move fast, be responsive, and maximize the impact of limited resources.

In Europe, government agencies and policy makers see the value in using new technology to unlock digital transformation and deliver better, more innovative citizen services. Using data for statistics initiatives, including open data, can help researchers produce innovative products and tools, including visualisation, to inform government officials ahead of making policy decisions that impact their citizens. When it comes to big data, policy makers need to collaborate with researchers to address issues and challenges in using these new data sources. To work toward this goal, Eurostat, the statistical office of the EU, hosted its bi-annual European Big Data Hackathon.

One of the biggest scientific achievements of the twenty-first century was the completion of the Human Genome Project and the publication of a draft human genome. The project took over 13 years to complete and remains one of the largest private-public international collaborations ever. Advances since in sequencing technologies, computational hardware, and novel algorithms reduced the time it takes to produce a human genome assembly to only a few days, at a fraction of the cost. This made using the human genome draft for precision and personalized medicine more achievable. In this blog, we demonstrate how to do a genome assembly in the cloud in a cost-efficient manner using ARM-based AWS Graviton2 instances.

At AWS, we place a high priority on innovation. And innovation is best served by a diverse team, which is why we support organizations like Girls in Tech, a global nonprofit of more than 70,000 members, that advocates for diversity, equality, and inclusion in the technology industry. A report from NCWIT found that women earned 57% of all bachelor’s degrees in 2019, yet only 21% of computer and information sciences bachelor’s degrees. And while women hold 57% of all professional occupations in the US workforce, they hold only 26% of all computing occupations. And, the numbers of women in STEM drop down to the low single digits when you look at BIPOC women. It is clear—the time for change is now.

In the spring of 2019, environmental modelers at the Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium (LADCO) had a new problem to solve. Emerging research on air pollution along the shores of the Great Lakes in the United States showed that to properly simulate the pollution episodes in the region we needed to apply our models at a finer spatial granularity than the computational capacity of our in-house HPC cluster could handle. The LADCO modelers turned to AWS ParallelCluster to access the HPC resources needed to do this modeling faster and scale for our member states.

In Indonesia, educational institutions like EdTechs and universities are using the cloud to transform education. By migrating to AWS, these organizations are able to deliver learning resources to millions of users, innovate at scale, and take advantage of the no-cost AWS education programs like AWS Educate and AWS Activate to enhance their curriculums.

The era of the cloud has simply accelerated the push to microservices as organizations want to adopt new, distributed models for building applications to drive agility, innovation, and efficiency. The AWS portfolio of purpose-built databases can help with this movement. AWS offers a broad and deep portfolio of purpose-built databases that support diverse data models and allow customers to build data driven, highly scalable, distributed applications. This allows you to pick the best database to solve a specific problem and break away from restrictive commercial databases to focus on building applications to meet the needs of their organization.

Join us at the upcoming AWS Public Sector Summit Online (April 15-16, 2021) where attendees will have the opportunity to test their knowledge and learn new skills in the AWS Jam Lounge and virtual workshops. Put your skills to the test in the AWS Jam Lounge (Sponsored by Intel and Fortinet) and learn something new by attending virtual workshops

RONIN is an AWS Partner solution that empowers researchers with a simple interface to create and control computing resources, set and monitor budgets, and forecast spend. RONIN is designed and architected to advance research institutions’ missions, by providing a research platform that manages the most common research use cases, and is also compatible with advanced cloud computing services from AWS. Learn what powers RONIN underneath the user-friendly interface.