Category: Education

Cromwell is a workflow management system from Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research institute that leverages the power of genomics to help us understand biology as well as treat human disease. Cromwell aims to facilitate scientific workflows for genome analysis. It enables genomic researchers, scientists, developers, and analysts to efficiently run their experiments, without deep expertise in computing capabilities. And it’s now on AWS.

Last week, we hosted our fifth annual AWS Public Sector Summit in Canberra, Australia. More than 1,100 government, education, and nonprofit attendees from across the region attended the Summit, which featured 35 breakout sessions within seven tracks.
In this blog post, we recap the major themes coming from the event.

With Hurricane Florence heading for the east coast of the United States, home to many of our U.S. federal government customers, Jeff Barr is sharing some important reminders on how AWS takes extensive precautions to help ensure AWS will remain operational and what customers can do to be ready to weather the storm. From availability zones and contingency planning to data transfer and disaster response, learn about disaster preparedness in Jeff’s blog post.

Serverless architecture remains on the rise. From simple Alexa Skills to advanced web services, our customers’ use cases are innovative and diverse. Take Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)’s genomics research, for example. “AWS has become versatile and interoperable making it possible to set up complex research workflows as serverless web services,” says CSIRO’s Dr. Denis Bauer. Dr. Bauer and her team created a bioinformatics research tool, GT-Scan2, which Jeff Barr featured two years ago as one of the first examples of serverless architecture for compute-intensive tasks.

With the heat of summer came another hot month for the public sector blog. Here is a look at the top five posts from August.

Since going live in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has delivered groundbreaking images to broaden our understanding of the universe. Each image captured by the telescope is archived and made publicly available, free of cost, by NASA through the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). The Hubble images archive is used by a global community of astronomers, researchers, and engineers and has led to the discovery of distant galaxies and nebulae. “The legacy is a treasure trove of data that can be mined in the future,” Arfon Smith, head of data science at STScI, said.

AWS EdStart members are pushing the limits in education, creating products and solutions to improve teaching and learning. FilterEd, Kornukopia, and SchooLinks use AWS to revolutionize parent-school communication, assess school’s learning technology needs, provide a complete education management ecosystem, and prepare students for the careers of the future.

The rapidly changing job market and declining enrollment rates are forcing higher education leaders to rethink strategies for attracting students and helping them find jobs. At a private Amazon Web Services (AWS) Institute roundtable, 22 university and community college leaders agreed that they must adopt new models for success – including close collaboration with large employers, innovating beyond degrees with new certifications, and using technology to enhance students’ learning experiences.

Timed with the 2018 back-to-school season, nearly 600 students, educators, university presidents, college administrators, superintendents, and business leaders from 14 different countries met in Seattle, Washington, to discuss how the cloud can address challenges and opportunities facing education. The conference revolved around three core themes: innovation and transformation, the role of machine learning in education, and building the workforce of tomorrow.

The California Cloud Workforce Project (“CA Cloud”), a consortium of 19 LA County community colleges and their sister high schools, today announced they will offer a Cloud Computing Certificate beginning in the fall of 2018. The CA Cloud curriculum was designed collaboratively by faculty at Santa Monica College (SMC) and AWS Educate, with the support of subject matter experts from AWS and other LA-based tech companies to equip students with cloud skills needed for careers in the tech industry.