Tag: research

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.

Today, we are excited to announce that we are collaborating with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) STRIDES (Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability) Initiative to foster innovation in biomedical research using technological advancements in the AWS Cloud.

Cromwell is a workflow management system from Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research institute that leverages the power of genomics to help us understand biology as well as treat human disease. Cromwell aims to facilitate scientific workflows for genome analysis. It enables genomic researchers, scientists, developers, and analysts to efficiently run their experiments, without deep expertise in computing capabilities. And it’s now on AWS.

Serverless architecture remains on the rise. From simple Alexa Skills to advanced web services, our customers’ use cases are innovative and diverse. Take Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)’s genomics research, for example. “AWS has become versatile and interoperable making it possible to set up complex research workflows as serverless web services,” says CSIRO’s Dr. Denis Bauer. Dr. Bauer and her team created a bioinformatics research tool, GT-Scan2, which Jeff Barr featured two years ago as one of the first examples of serverless architecture for compute-intensive tasks.

Since going live in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has delivered groundbreaking images to broaden our understanding of the universe. Each image captured by the telescope is archived and made publicly available, free of cost, by NASA through the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). The Hubble images archive is used by a global community of astronomers, researchers, and engineers and has led to the discovery of distant galaxies and nebulae. “The legacy is a treasure trove of data that can be mined in the future,” Arfon Smith, head of data science at STScI, said.

Achieving sustainable development and addressing local and national needs requires access and analysis of large datasets and the use of complex tools and algorithms. This creates barriers for many users, particularly for communities in developing countries where resources for data storage and data analysis are limited. The African Regional Data Cube (ARDC), a new data management technology developed on AWS, hopes to address this challenge by building capacity in those communities to access large datasets in support of their local and national needs framed around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the broader development priorities.

Last year, we shared a post about the Nonprofit Open Data Collective and how a consortium of nonprofits and researchers came together to make the data from the IRS’s 990 filings easier to work with. As a follow-up, we spoke with David Borenstein, one of the driving forces behind the Nonprofit Open Data Collective, about his new project: Open990.

Imagine you are on a city street surrounded by skyscrapers. When you look up to the stars, you will only see the part of the sky that is not blocked by buildings. This type of vision is called sky view factor (SVF). The SVF denotes the ratio between the radiation received at a point on Earth and the available radiation for a hemisphere over that point. Dr. Andrea Pagani, a data scientist at the DataLab of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, has been looking at how to efficiently compute the SVF for the Netherlands. Read on to learn more about Dr. Pagani’s work to help us understand what’s between us and the sky – and why that matters.