Tag: Registry of Open Data on AWS

In 2014, the Wall Lab at Stanford University sought to answer one of the most pressing questions in neuroscience: What genes influence autism spectrum disorder (ASD)? According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), this neurodevelopmental disorder affects roughly one in 54 children in America and is on the rise—nearly tripling since 1992. In the lab’s study of ASD genetics, they chose the cloud—and a unique experimental approach—to speed the time to science.

Forest wildfire risk is increasing in the western United States. In the past five decades, large wildfire frequency and the area destroyed have risen by more than four and six times, respectively. The increased risk posed by wildfires has prompted scientists to try to assess wildfire risk to help inform whether to move people to safety before disastrous wildfires occur.

The breadth of challenges that can be addressed by overhead imagery is broad and continues to grow as new and improved sensors are deployed. To make the best use of this data, you need to have high-quality training data—data that you know is true (often called ground truth data) so that your algorithms can learn from it. A lack of this high-quality labeled training data continues to impede progress in many areas of remote sensing analytics, including machine learning. Two of the SpaceNet collaborators, Capella Space and AWS, are providing access to a unique dataset to help foster innovation in geospatial-based artificial intelligence. Learn more about Earth observation data, the SpaceNet 6 Challenge, and available datasets.

Last December, AWS announced the expansion of its collaboration with the U.S. NOAA to make environmental data easier to access and use through the Big Data Program. Users can now access new, authoritative NOAA data on AWS without needing to download and store their own copies. Researchers and entrepreneurs can deploy compute resources on-demand in the cloud, perform analysis quickly and efficiently, and save costs by letting researchers ask more questions and experiment more easily. One of the foundational datasets now available on AWS through this collaboration is Himawari-8, the Japan Meteorological Agency’s satellite dataset.

The world’s forests have decreased by nearly half since the onset of human civilization. Deforestation is continuing at a high rate due to agricultural pressure, poor land management, and climate change, which increases drought, disease, and invasive species. But a new generation of technologies is transforming our ability to manage and grow forests. The unprecedented level of data enables ecology-trained artificial intelligence (AI) to inventory the ecosystem and identify problems like plant condition stress, invasive weeds, species decline, and erosion. Learn how Dendra Systems is using the cloud to restore ecosystems around the world.

April 1 is Census Day 2020: the day everyone in the United States is counted. Household respondents to the U.S. Census are asked to count every individual living in their household as of Census Day. From representation in Congress to funding for local schools, roads, and emergency services, important decisions are made by the government based on census data, impacting those services for the next decade.

Amazon today announced the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative to promote sustainability research, innovation, and problem solving by making key data easily accessible and even more widely available. The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative leverages Amazon Web Services’ technology and scalable infrastructure to stage, analyze, and distribute data, and is a joint effort between the AWS Open Data and Amazon Sustainability teams.

GREENSPIN is a startup company from Würzburg, Germany, that works in the area of data analytics for better agriculture. In this blog post, Dr. Sebastian Fritsch tells us how GREENSPIN is using Earth Observation data available via the Registry of Open Data on AWS to improve agricultural practices. Check out the Q&A with Dr. Sebastian Fritsch from GREENSPIN.

Reanalysis is the term for using modern-day technology to analyze weather data from the past. By doing so, meteorologists and climatologists can produce a more accurate analysis of previous weather conditions, which is important for climate change research. The European Centre of Medium Range Forecasts (ECMWF) is producing its latest reanalysis dataset, called ERA5. Recently, Chris Kalima and his team at Intertrust, in conjunction with the AWS Public Datasets Program, have been working to bring the ERA5 data to AWS.