AWS Public Sector Blog
Author: Angela Wu
Angela is the content manager on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) worldwide public sector grants team. She loves telling stories about how technology connects communities and inspires social change.
Analyzing climate risk models on AWS to prevent future food insecurity in Nigeria
The Climate Risk Research Foundation is a nonprofit that supports data-driven climate research. Their goal is to help decision-makers identify the potential impact and magnitude of climate-related risks and develop possible mitigation strategies. We chatted with the organization’s chairman, Brendan Reilly, to learn how its Sustainable Africa Initiative (SAI) is empowering agricultural experts in Nigeria to analyze climate risk models on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to prevent future food insecurity in their local communities.
National Numeracy uses the cloud to help UK adults build confidence with everyday math
The United Kingdom (UK) government’s 2011 Skills for Life survey estimated that about 49% of UK adults had levels of numeracy—the ability to understand and use math in real-life situations—on par with primary school children. In response, National Numeracy, a nonprofit to help UK adults increase numeracy, was founded in 2012. Leveraging AWS, National Numeracy established a digital-first approach to engage UK communities with educational resources that help improve real-world math skills that can help them better manage their finances, find new job opportunities, assist their children in math, and more.
Mysteries of the universe: Training neural networks to estimate parameters of synthetic black hole images
Before the Event Horizon Telescope project released the first-ever picture of a black hole in 2019, nobody had ever seen one. Black holes are a region of space with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing—not even light—can escape them. The cloud is helping accelerate research into black holes.
A new key to unlocking drug discovery
Be it aspirin for headache, or statin for cholesterol, or amoxicillin as an antibiotic, there are small molecules that we refer to as drugs that can offer therapeutic remedy. Given the range of possible molecule to protein combinations, finding the right small molecule that is able to bind strongly to a certain target site and inhibit its function is a time-intensive and challenging feat. Enter VirtualFlow, a new open-source software that performs screens, essentially matchmaking between molecules and proteins. Harvard Medical School researchers developed the VirtualFlow platform that tests compounds through computer simulations. Using AWS and an AWS Cloud Credit for Research grant, the researchers demonstrated that VirtualFlow is able to run on the cloud.