Tag: higher education

The University of Minnesota Athletics Department had access to a lot of data, but lacked a way to bring it together. Even answering simple questions, like how many tickets were sold and who received them, required hours of cross-platform data wrangling. In less than a year, the department replaced that complexity with a scalable data lake built on AWS. The new data architecture—which gives the department full visibility into ticketing transactions and digital behavior—was built by a small internal team, without requiring a complete overhaul of their existing systems.

In this post, we explore how The Chronicle of Higher Education harnessed the power of generative AI and Amazon Bedrock to build Chron: a search assistant that unlocks the full value of The Chronicle’s rich archive for educators, administrators, and all higher-education professionals.

To help researchers reclaim their time and focus on discovery, Indiana University developed a secure, scalable, and cost-effective Automated Transcription Service (ATS) built on AWS. Since launching, the service has supported nearly 60 projects across 16 departments and has become a model for how universities can use cloud-native tools to affordably streamline research workflows and protect sensitive data.

Cloud infrastructure expansion, agentic AI advancement, and national security initiatives took center stage today during the keynote of the AWS Summit Washington, DC. The annual gathering in the nation’s capital showcased the continued commitment of AWS to public sector innovation and digital transformation.

Last year, AWS launched the AWS Public Sector Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Impact Initiative, a two-year, $50 million investment designed to help public sector organizations accelerate innovation using AWS generative AI services. Today, we’re excited to share the remarkable progress we’ve made and highlight how organizations are utilizing AWS technologies to transform operations and deliver better outcomes for the communities they serve.

The University of British Columbia (UBC) Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC) has become a hub for innovation by prototyping generative AI applications in collaboration with public sector sponsors. This post highlights how the UBC CIC uses AWS to accelerate generative AI development, sharing lessons learned, tools used, and actionable insights you can apply to your projects.

Academic research IT departments around the world face the same challenge: how to balance their existing on-premises infrastructure with the opportunities of cloud computing. At the Supercomputing 2024 (SC24) conference, Amazon Web Services hosted a panel featuring two research IT leaders: Circe Tsui, associate director of solutions architecture at Emory University in the Office of Information Technology, and Dr. Robert Shen, director of the RMIT AWS Supercomputing Hub (RACE) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). During the panel, Tsui and Shen shared how their institutions use AWS to augment and enhance their research operations with more scalability, security, and collaboration alongside their on-premises infrastructure. Read this post to learn more.

By 2026, more than 90 percent of organizations worldwide will face challenges related to an IT skills shortage. Artificial intelligence skills are among the most in-demand, but a variety of cloud skills like architecture, data management and storage, and software development are among the top 10 needed IT skills. To address these needs, Amazon Web Services hosts AWS State, Local, and Education Learning Days, a series of no-cost in-person events nationwide. These one-day events provide IT professionals and business executives in state and local government (SLG) and education with hands-on learning opportunities to grow their cloud skills. Read this post to learn more.

Higher education institutions are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the effectiveness of their programs and provide students with a clear path to degree completion. Data analytics can help these institutions proactively identify and support at-risk students, allowing them to develop personalized intervention strategies to improve student retention and graduation rates. In this post, we’ll explore how Amazon Redshift ML, a powerful machine learning (ML) capability within the Amazon Redshift data warehouse, can enable higher education leaders to quickly predict student outcomes and communicate insights to key stakeholders.

To remain viable and continue to fulfill their mission, educational institutions are constantly seeking ways to optimize their IT costs while maintaining high-quality services. One often overlooked area for potential savings is the management of cloud resources, particularly Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Many universities and colleges find themselves facing unexpected costs when EC2 instances are left running during off-peak hours or periods of inactivity. In this post, we explore how higher education customers can implement automatic shutdown mechanisms for EC2 instances, significantly reducing cloud expenses.