Tag: open data

The AWS Institute interviewed Natalie Evans Harris, co-founder and CEO of BrightHive and former senior policy advisor to the US Chief Technology Officer in the Obama administration. Harris founded the Data Cabinet, a federal data science community of practice with over 200 active members across more than 40 federal agencies, co-led a cohort of federal, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations to develop data-driven tools through the Opportunity Project, and established the Open Skills Community through the Workforce Data Initiative. She also led an analytics development center for the National Security Agency (NSA) that served as the foundation for NSA’s Enterprise Data Science Development program and became a model for other intelligence community agencies.

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.

Coastal communities in the Southern United States are frequently impacted by flooding from storm surge, rain, and tides. To help monitor and enhance flood emergency preparedness, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) at the College of William & Mary has been providing tidal forecasts since 2012 for a dozen locations in the lower Chesapeake Bay through its VIMS TideWatch Network. To expand and enhance these capabilities along Virginia’s seaside Eastern Shore, VIMS developed StormSense. The StormSense project works closely with coastal local governments leveraging a network of Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled water level sensors, VIMS’s hydrodynamic flood modeling and forecasting capabilities, and the VIMS TideWatch Network to improve flood resilience in the region.

Sharing data requires more than just making it available for download or creating an API to access it. In many ways, sharing data is similar to shipping a software product. Just like software; data is made up of digital information; it requires documentation; it will be used by groups of users who may require support; and it may become vital to those users’ work. Another common characteristic of software is that it often gets updated over time as software developers learn from their users and adapt to new technologies.

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.

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.

As open data policies become commonplace, it is worth examining the history and value of open data, and discuss why we share it in the cloud. The idea of sharing data dates back at least to the 1950s, when the International Council of Scientific Unions established World Data Centers to facilitate sharing of data among scientists. In recent years, governments have created open data policies that require government agencies to share data with the public.

Better estimates of hurricane wind speeds can lead to better decisions around evacuations and general hurricane response planning, saving both lives and property. Hurricane windspeed estimates are currently made using the manual Dvorak technique. The National Hurricane Center releases them every three to six hours. Artificial intelligence (AI) experts with the IMPACT team at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Development Seed created the Deep Learning-Based Hurricane Intensity Estimator to automate this process.

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.

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.