Category: Higher education

For the first-ever Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Sector Summit in Mexico City, more than 1,400 people from government, education, and nonprofits registered for the event to discuss digital transformation in Latin America through investment in innovation, infrastructure, and talent. With content in both Spanish and English, AWS leaders and customers shared their news and success stories with the group. What’d you miss?

Universities around the world are using voice technology to bridge the gap between students and institutions and addressing key challenges for universities today including student retention and satisfaction. At the BETT Show 2020 in London in January—focused on future tech trends, innovation, and wellbeing—Alex Denley, Director of Innovation and Transformation at London South Bank University (LSBU), discussed how voice technology can help, including the Alexa skill Ellie.

Mahmoud Khaled, a PhD student at TUM and a research assistant at LMU, researches how to improve safety-critical systems that require large amounts of compute power. Using AWS, Khaled’s research project, pFaces, accelerates parallelized algorithms and controls computational complexity to speed the time to science. His project findings introduce a new way to design and deploy verified control software for safety-critical systems, such as autonomous vehicles.

Starting today, the AWS Educate Cloud Ambassador Program is now available to college students around the world. Now students can also apply to participate in the program to receive exclusive benefits and opportunities from Amazon Web Services (AWS). The AWS Educate Cloud Ambassador Program recognizes individuals for their innovation and contributions that prepare students for careers in the modern technology workforce.

Educational institutions are turning to cloud-based solutions to enable anywhere, anytime access from any device. By using secure desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solutions to provide consistent applications on every virtualized desktop, institutions can reduce variable costs, remove capital expenditures, and achieve mission objectives. Check out five DaaS trends in education.

Dr. Nicholas Chilton and his research group at The University of Manchester’s Department of Chemistry in the School of Natural Sciences investigate the magnetic properties of molecules for high-density storage, quantum computing, and applications like MRI contrast agents. He turned to the cloud when the university’s onsite HPC cluster couldn’t provide the high-throughput compute power needed to answer his research questions.

At the Education World Forum (EWF) in London, global leader for workforce and education at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Andrew Ko discussed the workforce shortage in cloud skills – and the importance of piloting initiatives that “cloudify” curriculum to skill-up, upskill, and reskill students, educators, the current workforce, and IT leaders.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 is now integrated with the Global Grid for Learning (GG4L) School Passport and available in the GG4L Catalyst Catalog. With the Amazon AppStream 2.0 integration, students can access the software applications they need for class through any computer anywhere, anytime via School Passport.

University Hospitals of North Midlands Trust’s Breast Care Unit approached Redmoor Health to discuss innovative ways to improve patient engagement. Turning to social media, the Health Innovation Campus at Lancaster University, Redmoor Health, and the National Health Service (NHS), began using Facebook to reach the at-risk demographic (women 49+ years old). Through this collaboration, they saw the number of patients attending vital breast screening appointments increase by 13% – among the best in the country.

Social information systems – how we share information – use both public systems such as social media and private systems internal to organizations such as internal blogs and wikis. The MUAS Digital Transformation Lab is experimenting with a number of theoretical concepts to create a research framework on social information systems. The goal is to reduce polarization in opinion-forming processes, help people avoid false news, and increase social cohesion by reducing social media “bubbles” and increasing the range of information sources.