Tag: research

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.

The SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) specification aims to standardize the way geospatial assets are exposed online and queried. The China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellites (CBERS) are the result of a cooperation agreement between Brazilian and Chinese space agencies (INPE and CAST, respectively), which started in 1988. Since then, five satellites were launched (CBERS-1/2/2A/3/4). The mission generates images from Earth with characteristics similar to USGS’ Landsat and ESA’s Sentinel-2 missions. In 2004, INPE announced that all CBERS-2 images would be available at no charge to the public. It was the first time this distribution model was used for medium-resolution satellite imagery. Now, this model is used for all CBERS satellite images.

Gut microbiome plays a critical role in building our immune system at birth. It provides a life-long personal and natural protection. To fully explore and characterize the role of the human gut microbiome, Enterome uses different approaches, including the latest genome sequencing technologies, to reconstruct microbial genomes and quantify the abundance of different species and microbial genes in the gut across large cohorts of patients. The current high throughput sequencing technologies produce tens of millions of DNA sequences for each biological sample and the human gut microbiome is estimated to contain hundreds of species and several million unique bacterial genes that can be identified and analyzed. Enterome’s mission is to translate all of this information into actual knowledge, which can be applied to advanced clinical and drug discovery programs.

Data can be a powerful driver in solving social issues. The AWS Cloud Credits for Research Program seeks to remove barriers and enable researchers to do their best work, bringing them closer to the answers. DrivenData and the Data Science for Social Good Fellowship are two entities using research credits to make a difference for society.

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.

The UCLA School of Medicine’s BREATHE (Biomedical REAl-Time Health Evaluation) project for pediatric asthma wanted to know if real-time data collection could pinpoint ways to predict and prevent asthma attacks in children. To explore this, the School of Medicine Research Computing (RC) Team designed an Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment that uses 24/7 data collection, machine-learning algorithms, and heavy computation that their on-premises cluster could not handle.