AWS Public Sector Blog
Author: Ana Pinheiro Privette
Dr. Ana Pinheiro Privette is the Head for Sustainability for AWS Impact Computing, and the Global Lead for the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI). ASDI seeks to accelerate sustainability research and innovation by minimizing the cost and time required to acquire and analyze large sustainability datasets. Ana was trained as an environmental engineer and as an earth scientist at the New University of Lisbon (Portugal) and at MIT. She spent most of her career as a research scientist at NASA and NOAA. Later, Ana worked on the US National Climate Assessment (NCA) focusing on bringing more transparency and traceability of the data sources supporting this climate report, and led projects for the White House climate portfolio, including the Obama Climate Data Initiative (CDI) and the Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness (PREP).
Announcing the winners of the 2022 Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) Global Hackathon
Earlier this year, AWS launched the 2022 Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) Global Hackathon, part of a new collaboration with the International Research Centre in Artificial Intelligence, under the auspices of UNESCO. Participants were asked to use their creativity, intelligence, and technical skills to build sustainability solutions using data from ASDI on Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab, or any AWS Cloud services, to build solutions that support one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the United Nations (UN). Learn more about the winning projects.
AWS announces simpler access to sustainability data and launches hackathon to accelerate innovation for sustainability
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are critical tools being used in healthcare research, autonomous applications, predictive maintenance, and also a key tool used to advance sustainability solutions. However, to use AI and ML to solve sustainability problems, innovators need specific datasets that are prepared for analysis and training of the models. To help create and accelerate sustainability solutions, the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) today announced easier identification of sustainability datasets with integration in AWS Data Exchange and the launch of a sustainability hackathon.
How African leaders use open data to fight deforestation and illegal mining
In Africa, scientific data is critical to helping the nation’s leaders tackle issues like water scarcity and climate change. A collaboration between nonprofit Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) and the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) is helping them access the data they need. DE Africa operates a free and user-friendly Earth observation (EO) data service that provides African policymakers with insights into a range of challenges, from natural resource management to the impacts of climate change. The service has already helped Ghanaian officials identify and tackle illegal mining, and provided decision-ready insights on flooding and drought in Tanzania and Nigeria.
How the cloud is helping us better understand and manage the oceans
The world’s waters are largely unknown, with vast areas still unmapped. To protect and preserve the oceans, we need to extensively understand its systems, and data is at the core of that process. The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) is committed to enabling better access to the foundational data that can help researchers, businesses, and policy-makers better monitor and manage the ocean’s valuable resources.
How the cloud is helping remove barriers to addressing climate change
What if we were to democratize access to data and compute so that anyone, anywhere in the world could contribute to climate science? The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) seeks to accelerate sustainability research and innovation by minimizing the cost and time required to acquire and analyze large sustainability datasets. ASDI supports innovators and researchers with the data, tools, and technical expertise they need to advance sustainability initiatives. ASDI is committed to making climate-relevant data easier to access and analyze. ASDI’s growing data catalog comprises petabytes of open data.