Author: Ray Rogers

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.

This month, the Fix This podcast focused on how technology can be used to end human trafficking. To raise awareness of the issue, we interviewed leaders who are committed to finding solutions to the problem. Listen to episodes five and six now, featuring interviews with Thorn, Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), The Freedom Seal, and Unseen UK. The episodes are available for streaming and download on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Overcast, iHeartRadio, and via RSS.

In 2019, Grand River Hospital turned to AWS to build the first AWS healthcare data lake in Canada. The data lake was built to house the hospital’s sensitive patient and administrative data while retiring its legacy hospital information systems, comprised of electronic patient record and other administrative systems. Grand River Hospital in Ontario, Canada is a 580-bed community hospital with a yearly operating budget of around $400 million CAD serving a community of 600,000-650,000 people.

Prodigy Game (Prodigy) has a mission to help every child in the world love learning and make education freely available to students globally. Prodigy’s math game – geared toward learners in the first to eighth grade – allows students to hone their math skills with questions delivered according to their individual needs. As their user base grew, so did the strain on their ability to handle the increasing demands. They turned to AWS.

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.

Connect Our Kids, a Virginia-based 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization, is using technology to connect children in foster care with permanent homes with People Search. People Search is a free search engine powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that makes it easier for social workers to find people connected to the child.

The Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance (CGPS) is based at the Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge and The Big Data Institute, University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Much of its work involves collaborating with laboratories around the world to enhance genomic surveillance by using big data, engineering, training, and genomic capacity building. Ultimately, the Centre hopes to enable the linking and real-time interpretation of data globally to track pathogens and antimicrobial resistance at an affordable rate. Typically, spikes in cost for research are a common challenge for laboratories. With the cloud, the team wanted to mitigate their costs, and particularly those of their partners in low and middle-income countries, by exploring the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud’s pay-as-you-go infrastructure.

Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) in Virginia has two on-premises data centers. One was built in the 1990s – almost 30 years ago – and the second data center is close to 15 years old. In recent years, LCPS has experienced multiple unit failures, and started to feel the strain of their aging infrastructure.

Purolator, Canada’s leading courier company, embarked on a bold transformation plan to keep it at the forefront of evolving customer expectations. Called Delivering the Future, the company recently launched an aggressive five-year $1B investment plan to step-change its company in four key areas – including accelerating the digital experience for customers by investing in new technology and modernizing its existing infrastructure using cloud technology.

CDSM Interactive Solutions Ltd (CDSM), founded in 1998, is a multi-faceted EdTech company that provides bespoke e-learning services and Thinqi, a next generation learning management system (LMS), to the state education sector. We spent some time with two of CDSM’s more senior colleagues, Steve Finch, Head of Marketing, and Darren Wallace, Chief Technical Officer, both of whom have been with CDSM since the early 2000s.