Category: Research

The cloud is changing the way we do research—accelerating the pace of innovation, democratizing access to data, and allowing researchers and scientists to scale, work collaboratively, and make new discoveries from which we may all benefit. Researchers from around the world look to the AWS Cloud for customer-focused, pioneering, and secure solutions for their toughest challenges. Discover how customers in Latin America and Canada use AWS for research.

In India, the Quantum Computing Applications Lab (QCAL), a collaboration between the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and AWS, announced that it will strengthen its scientific research and industry focus for its second cohort, through new support from the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India, as well as Indian advanced technology consultancies and AWS Partners Mphasis and Fractal. The MeitY QCAL will accept applications for the second cohort later this month.

On Wednesday, August 31, Max Peterson, vice president of worldwide public sector at AWS, delivered the keynote address at the AWS Summit Canberra. Max shared regional announcements and local stories of how public sector customers are using the cloud to transform citizen services, innovate in healthcare, improve sustainability, and more. Two customer speakers joined the stage to share how AWS helps their organizations support their mission success and reimagine what’s possible. What’d you miss at the AWS Summit Canberra keynote?

At the IMAGINE 2022 conference in Seattle, Washington, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the inaugural class of the AWS Education Champions community. The AWS Education Champions community is a new program to celebrate and support influential individuals whose work accelerates the digital transformation of education with the AWS Cloud. The 10 inaugural Champions are nationally recognized speakers and authors who inspire the next generation of educational leaders.

At the Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center (BCM HGSC), we aim to advance precision medicine and research in genomics. In that effort, we joined the ambitious All of Us Research Program funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to help deliver genomic data to over one million individuals across the United States. In early 2019, we estimated that processing whole genome samples for this megaproject would imply a scale-up of over four times the production workload of our center. We used AWS to support our new pipeline demands, which saved time, reduced costs, and created new opportunities for future development.

In 2017, the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF) founded the Childhood Cancer Data Lab (Data Lab) to address an important gap in the pediatric cancer field: vast amounts of accumulated data were not being put to use at scale. To address this gap, the Data Lab used AWS to build refine.bio, an openly available collection of normalized bulk gene expression data, to make public datasets interoperable and reusable.

The AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program makes high-value, cloud-optimized datasets publicly available on AWS. Our full list of publicly available datasets are on the Registry of Open Data on AWS and are now also discoverable on AWS Data Exchange. This quarter, we released 15 new or updated datasets including OpenFold, OpenAlex, and radar data from Capella Space. Check out some highlights from the new or updated datasets.

Security is priority number one at AWS. Data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is private by default. However, some datasets are made to be shared. In this blog post, we cover the no-cost mechanisms data providers can utilize to create access control policies for their highly distributed open datasets.

Can you see sounds? Using open data, you can. To celebrate this year’s World Oceans Day, an artist and sustainability application architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS), created an artwork titled Can You See the Sound of the Ocean. To create the art, she drew inspiration from the Pacific Ocean Sound Recordings from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), available through the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI). Learn more about the dataset and the art work.

Recently, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a new funding opportunity for any principal investigator (PI) with an active award from the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), for use of cloud services and technologies via CloudBank. PIs can submit requests for use of the AWS Cloud, on a rolling basis, with funding made available for the duration of one year. This is a first-of-its-kind opportunity for federally-funded researchers to explore the capabilities of the AWS Cloud, at no additional cost.