AWS Collaborates With the National Science Foundation to Foster Innovation

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Amazon Web Services and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are collaborating to foster innovation in big data research. Under the AWS Research Initiative (ARI) program, AWS and NSF will respectively support innovative research in the field of Big Data. With the advancements of techniques and technologies such as cloud-based Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data analytics and High-Performance Computing, ARI BIGDATA grants will help researchers maximize the value of their NSF grants to accelerate the pace of innovation. A total of $26.5 million from the NSF, in addition to $3M in cloud credits from AWS, will be awarded to between 27 and 35 projects, for a span of 3 to 4 years, subject to availability of funding.

Research in foundational and innovative applications can benefit from AWS’s latest services including deep learning tools, frameworks for both supervised and unsupervised learning, natural language understanding, automatic speech recognition, visual search and image recognition, text-to-speech (TTS), and various other machine learning (ML) technologies. AWS’s latest FPGA processors, Amazon EC2 F1 instances, can be extremely useful in streaming and resident big data analytics, by providing processing speeds by order(s) in magnitude in comparison with traditional computational and/or graphics processors.

Researchers in universities and colleges, nonprofits, non-academic organizations, and state and local government can apply. Requests for AWS cloud credits must adhere to a 70-30 split in funding between the requested NSF funds and the requested cloud services, respectively. The submission window for applications is March 15 – 22, 2017.

To learn how to apply, see the NSF’s submission page. Researchers may submit applications via the NSF FastLane System or Grants.gov.