Tag: Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative

Universities and colleges around the world are taking an active role in sustainability efforts. Read this blog post to learn how higher education institutions are incorporating sustainability into cross-institutional strategies, differentiating their curricula and research funding proposals, and innovating in support of their communities and wider society.

Open source geospatial artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) analyses along with Internet of Things (IoT)-connected sensors can power near real-time data built on the cloud and assist in decision-making. Read this blog post to learn how Amazon Web Services (AWS) is supporting the Government of Pará, Brazil, in designing and deploying SeloVerde (Green Seal), a cutting-edge tool to address climate change challenges and traceability in deforestation-risk supply chains.

In 2022, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) Global Hackathon, part of a new collaboration with the International Research Centre in Artificial Intelligence, under the auspices of UNESCO. Participants were asked to use their creativity, intelligence, and technical skills to build sustainability solutions using data from ASDI on any AWS Cloud services to build solutions that support one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the United Nations (UN). We connected with Jeff McWhirter, the first place winner, to learn more about his winning project, the Repository for Archiving and MAnaging Diverse Data (RAMADDA).

As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), AWS invited Seán Lynch, the founder of OpenLitterMap, to share how AWS technologies and open data are helping to solve global challenges like biodiversity loss and plastic pollution with citizen science. Solutions like OpenLitterMap help unlock the potential that a global abundance of technology has for the collection and dissemination of pertinent data that is an instrumental part of positive social change.

The First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research and technology group, is committed to making climate risk information accessible, simple to understand, and actionable for individuals, governments, and industry. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), AWS invited Dr. Ed Kearns, the chief data officer of First Street Foundation, to share how AWS technologies and open data are supporting their mission to provide accurate and up-to-date information on climate related risks.

To assist the science community in conducting studies of climate change impacts at local to regional scales, NASA created the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) Global Daily Downscaled Projections (GDDP) dataset, or NEX-GDDP-CMIP6. This dataset is expected to enhance public understanding of possible future climate patterns at the spatial scale of individual towns, cities, and watersheds. It provides a set of global, high resolution, bias-corrected climate change projections that can be used to evaluate climate change impacts on processes that are sensitive to finer-scale climate gradients and the effects of local topography on climate conditions. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), this dataset is available at no cost on the Registry of Open Data.

Earlier this year, AWS launched the 2022 Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) Global Hackathon, part of a new collaboration with the International Research Centre in Artificial Intelligence, under the auspices of UNESCO. Participants were asked to use their creativity, intelligence, and technical skills to build sustainability solutions using data from ASDI on Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab, or any AWS Cloud services, to build solutions that support one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the United Nations (UN). Learn more about the winning projects.

The Amazon re:MARS 2022 conference brought together thought leaders, technical experts, and groundbreaking companies and organizations that are transforming what’s possible in machine learning (ML), automation, robotics, and space. Advancements in these fields are the engines that will drive innovation for the next 100 years. Read on to learn about announcements from re:MARS related to the public sector, plus some of the innovative organizations and companies that were onsite to inspire guests with breakthrough technologies and ideas.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are critical tools being used in healthcare research, autonomous applications, predictive maintenance, and also a key tool used to advance sustainability solutions. However, to use AI and ML to solve sustainability problems, innovators need specific datasets that are prepared for analysis and training of the models. To help create and accelerate sustainability solutions, the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) today announced easier identification of sustainability datasets with integration in AWS Data Exchange and the launch of a sustainability hackathon.

Can you see sounds? Using open data, you can. To celebrate this year’s World Oceans Day, an artist and sustainability application architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS), created an artwork titled Can You See the Sound of the Ocean. To create the art, she drew inspiration from the Pacific Ocean Sound Recordings from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), available through the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI). Learn more about the dataset and the art work.