Category: Education

Higher education leaders agree the coronavirus pandemic forced many institutions to adapt and innovate. Which strategies worked? Which tactics didn’t? What role did cloud technology play? The AWS education team recently convened a small group of university leaders for a roundtable discussion to learn about how higher education institutions innovated to support learning, teaching, health and administrative processes, campus culture, and physical infrastructure.

Computational biology is undergoing a revolution. However, the analysis of single cells is a hard problem to solve. Standard statistical techniques used in genomic analysis fail to capture the complexity present in single-cell datasets. Open Problems in Single-Cell Analysis is a community-driven effort using AWS to drive the development of novel methods that leverage the power of single-cell data.

Mediknit is an online academy marketplace for healthcare professionals to access on-demand, need-based upskilling programs and professional development programs created by verified educators across the globe. In collaboration with GEM Institute of Laparoscopy and Robotic Surgery, Mediknit provides live surgery streams via the GEM Televersity portal for the continuing medical education (CME) needs of surgeons. With AWS, Mediknit scaled to meet the demand to provide this streaming solution across the globe.

The College of Liberal Arts at University of Texas at Austin wanted to make it simple for students, faculty, and staff to contact support agents. This is how they built and scaled a contact center solution on AWS with Amazon Connect that reduced call wait time, cut costs, and more easily resolved technical issues — all while call volume more than quadrupled.

AWS and Howard University announced an initiative to upskill its students and build pathways to technical careers with cloud computing courses and training resources for educators. Learn more about how the collaboration will prepare students for the workforce with hands-on experiences, how Howard University is launching a master’s program with the support of AWS experts, and more.

In this challenging job market, many Texans who lost their jobs to COVID-19 lack the skills to quickly reenter the workforce to secure employment with employers with open roles. With support from the Texas State Legislature, the Texas Association of Community Colleges (TACC) and AWS announced a statewide collaboration committed to equipping Texas community colleges with professional development, technical training, and certification exams for those educators, instructors, and faculty who will begin implementing the AWS Academy program starting next fall.

This is a guest post by Maria Teleńczuk, research engineer at the Paris-Saclay Center for Data Science (CDS), and Alexandre Gramfort, senior research scientist at INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology. Maria and Alexandre explain how they adapted their open source data challenge platform RAMP to train the models submitted by student challenge participants using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot instances, and how they leveraged AWS to support three student challenges.

Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs) powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) aim to empower public sector organizations to quickly create and test new ideas using Amazon’s innovation methodology. With the CIC program, students and researchers, along with AWS teams, focus on solving real-life societal challenges facing the public sector. Learn more about some of the digital solutions on challenges the CIC team published over the last quarter such as working to prevent opioid overdose, discovering new coronaviruses, and using machine learning to monitor beehive health.

In 2020, AWS and Halcyon launched the Halcyon 2021 Bahrain Women’s Intensive, which aims to foster leadership and scale early-stage, women-run businesses based in Bahrain. The program seeks to inspire female tech entrepreneurs in Bahrain—one of the fastest growing ecosystems in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for impact-oriented business—and the broader region. One of the Intensive participants is Wafa Alobaidat, founder of Women Power Network, an organization that aims to accelerate the success of women founders and professionals through networking and live events including the Women Power Summit. Here are five key entrepreneurship lessons that Alobaidat has learned through her work.

OCEARCH is a data-centric organization built to help scientists collect previously unattainable data about the ocean. Their mission is to accelerate the ocean’s return to balance and abundance, through innovation in scientific research, education, outreach, and policy, using unique collaborations of individuals and organizations in the US and abroad. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), we invited Fernanda Ubatuba, president and COO at OCEARCH, to share how her organization is making strides in helping ocean conservation and how AWS is supporting her mission.