Tag: Amazon S3

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the National Science Foundation. It engages in large-scale Earth system science research projects in collaboration with the broader university community. NCAR hosts visitors from around the world, develops community models including the Community Earth System Model and the Weather Research and Forecasting Model, and maintains supercomputers, observational systems, and aircraft to support further study on the how the planet works. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, we invited Dr. David John Gagne, machine learning (ML) scientist at NCAR, to share how open data and machine learning on AWS are impacting the way we predict and understand extreme weather.

Data lakes can help hospitals and healthcare organizations turn data into insights and maintain business continuity, while preserving patient privacy. A data lake is a centralized, curated, and secured repository that stores all your data, both in its original form and prepared for analysis. A data lake enables you to break down data silos and combine different types of analytics to gain insights and guide better business decisions. In my previous post, “Getting started with a healthcare data lake,” I shared how to get started using data lakes in managing healthcare data and what a good “first sprint” architecture might look like. Here, I walk through building your first solution on AWS using a healthcare data lake as our example workload.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare organizations around the world are focusing on improving and speeding up testing and diagnostics. Digital health companies Smart Reporting in Germany and Thirona in the Netherlands have been working to create a CT-based imaging solution to support COVID-19 diagnosis, enabled by the cloud and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Diagnostic Development Initiative. The AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative provides support to organizations for innovation in rapid and accurate patient testing for 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and other diagnostic solutions to mitigate future outbreaks.

Working with a network of 100 biodiversity information centers and 1,000 conservation scientists, NatureServe identifies and understands the most important places to prevent species extinction and ecosystem loss. They provide land use decision-makers in federal and state agencies, industry, academics, and nonprofits with information to meet both regulatory and biodiversity conservation needs. NatureServe and its network collect and maintain data on the conservation status and location of threatened and endangered species, developed over decades of field data collection. But these data have been underutilized in environmental review decision-making processes due to challenges surrounding awareness, access, and reliable or seamless integration with other systems. To address these challenges, they developed an online spatially explicit tool on AWS.

AWS and the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) announced the creation of the Coronavirus Genome Sequence Dataset to support COVID-19 research. The dataset is hosted by the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program and accessible on the Registry of Open Data on AWS, providing researchers quick and easy access to coronavirus sequence data at no cost for use in their COVID-19 research.

The COVID-19 pandemic magnified the health and financial strain in communities across the country. Before the pandemic hit, Wildfire, a state association for Community Action Agencies, was working with Prefix, an AWS Partner Network Technology Partner, to develop a cloud-based solution for utility and rental assistance. When the City of Phoenix requested they support the distribution of $20 million CARES Act funds, they shifted their resources and existing infrastructure and, in a matter of weeks, stood up a repeatable public-facing solution.

The impact of COVID-19 has K12 and higher education institutions working hard to prepare for students to return to learning that will be anything but typical. The 2020-2021 academic year will include various teaching and learning modalities—virtual, hybrid, and face-to-face—and most expect a shift from one to another throughout the year. Globally, EdTechs are working with AWS to accelerate features and solutions to better support students and educators in teaching and learning, physical and mental wellness, and health and safety.

As government agencies and public sector organizations modernize their IT and migrate to the AWS Cloud, the ability to gain a full, clear view of the security of their environments is a primary challenge they experience. This lack of visibility leads to blind spots and gaps in their security posture, leaving opportunity for security issues to arise. As a result, AWS developed a new open source Self-Service Security Assessment (with ransomware analysis modules) tool that provides customers with a point-in-time assessment to quickly gain valuable insights into the security posture of their AWS account.

Earlier today, NASA launched its Mars 2020 rover—Perseverance. Operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), the Perseverance rover will explore Mars for past signs of ancient life and collect rock and soil samples for return by a future mission. The images taken from the Mars 2020 rover will be available on NASA JPL’s public website, and will be shared with people around the world. All images returned from the mission will be hosted on the AWS Cloud.

Boolean Girl is educating girls to code, build, invent, and animate. It provides enrichment classes, all-girl camps, special events, and partnerships, preparing girls everywhere to explore computer programming and engineering. Boolean Girl hosts its website on the cloud and is core to everything it does: telling its story, registering students and taking payment for camps and after-school clubs, processing donations, organizing events, building our email lists, and running its online university. Boolean Girl uses the AWS Nonprofit Credit Program to cover vital IT expenses while achieving its mission.