Tag: research

Dr. Nicholas Chilton and his research group at The University of Manchester’s Department of Chemistry in the School of Natural Sciences investigate the magnetic properties of molecules for high-density storage, quantum computing, and applications like MRI contrast agents. He turned to the cloud when the university’s onsite HPC cluster couldn’t provide the high-throughput compute power needed to answer his research questions.

The botany department at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the UBC Data Science Institute are working together to research the evolution and genetic makeup of sunflowers – a critical crop in addressing global food security.

As nonprofits work toward their missions, resource efficiency is top of mind, so that as much of their budget as possible is dedicated to achieving their mission. Working with limited budgets, nonprofits and charities use the cloud to help them remain lean, scale their missions, and address their skills gaps. Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is the world’s largest independent cancer charity dedicated to saving lives through cancer research.

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) — the technology that won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — lets scientists peer into the molecular “machines” at work in our cells in ways that were previously impossible. Using advanced microscopes, cryo-EM captures images of proteins flash-frozen in vitreous ice, revealing their 3D structure in near-native states. Even as access to this technology improves, many researchers are still limited by computing bottlenecks. The cryo-EM field needs to provide more hands-on training in how to process such large datasets. Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows us to provide training, broadening the impact of this important structural biology technology.

The University of Nottingham has a history dating back to 1881, and while the university is now global with campuses in China and Malaysia, its flagship campus remains in the UK. Today, the university’s research efforts span nearly every discipline. One current project is Crossbow, a new, open source software project conceived and developed by Dr. Christian Suess, a research fellow at The University of Nottingham in conjunction with principal investigator Prof. Charlie Laughton, professor of computational pharmaceutical science. Crossbow is based out of the school of pharmacy at the University of Nottingham, where there is a particular interest in researching the design of new medicines using computer simulations of drugs and proteins.

At the AWS Sydney Summit, Swinburne University of Technology announced the launch of the Data for Social Good Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC) powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new centre is the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere and will leverage the expertise of Swinburne’s research institutes, which specialise in health, social innovation, and smart cities.

Managing water crises is one of the Sustainable Development Goals and the decline in the available quality and quantity of fresh water is ranked as one of the top ten most serious societal risks by the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Global Risks report. Using satellite imagery available through the AWS Open Data Program and the AWS Cloud, BlueDot Observatory is establishing a global monitoring system for all at-risk water bodies. This monitoring reveals a sad truth – the total loss of water bodies is in the not too distant future.

We invited Anze Zupanc, a data scientist who manages the BlueDot Observatory at Sinergise, to share how the AWS Open Data Program and the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative support this work.

MIT is replacing the Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel (WBWT) with a new, state-of-the-art facility. And they’re relying on AWS to do it. Post-refresh, the WBWT, first commissioned in 1938, will be the largest and most advanced wind tunnel to reside in a U.S. academic setting. But first, it helps to understand why the re-design is happening in the first place.

AWS CloudFormation templates are now available for nonprofit organizations to deploy a production-ready REDCap environment in 20 minutes, increasing researchers’ agility and reducing the cost of electronically capturing research survey information. This automation deploys the latest REDCap software on secure, highly available AWS infrastructure and includes the ability to utilize the REDCap “Easy Upgrade” feature. With this automation and architecture, researchers can deploy and manage REDCap with a click of a button, without the need for specialized IT skills

Enterprises, nonprofits, and startups around the globe are using the cloud to accelerate innovation in geospatial workflows to respond to natural disasters, fuel precision agriculture, plan city infrastructure, provide weather forecasts, and drive a myriad of other purposes. We convened an Earth on AWS session at the 2018 ESA Φ-week event, with presentations and discussions from experts showing how they’re using the AWS Cloud to unlock value from geospatial data and learn more about our world.