Category: Higher education

This is a guest post by Maria Teleńczuk, research engineer at the Paris-Saclay Center for Data Science (CDS), and Alexandre Gramfort, senior research scientist at INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology. Maria and Alexandre explain how they adapted their open source data challenge platform RAMP to train the models submitted by student challenge participants using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot instances, and how they leveraged AWS to support three student challenges.

Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs) powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) aim to empower public sector organizations to quickly create and test new ideas using Amazon’s innovation methodology. With the CIC program, students and researchers, along with AWS teams, focus on solving real-life societal challenges facing the public sector. Learn more about some of the digital solutions on challenges the CIC team published over the last quarter such as working to prevent opioid overdose, discovering new coronaviruses, and using machine learning to monitor beehive health.

The maturing of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought ready-made services that organizations can use, not only to automate data entry work but also to apply intelligence into the business process. Using modern AI capabilities on AWS, organizations can transform approaches to document management. This allows public sector organizations to save time (enabling faster throughput especially during higher volume paperwork times), so they can help get constituents their services faster, and focus on the most valuable work of the high-touch or high-need cases. Document automation helps reduce human entry error and provide backup services in case of natural disaster.

The Urban Analytics Lab at the National University of Singapore (NUS) spearheads research in geospatial data analysis and 3D city modelling. The lab’s work underpins the development of smart cities and provides scientists, architects, urban planners, and real estate developers with data insights. These insights help parties make informed decisions about projects ranging from energy modelling to urban farming. To meet rising global demand for its data analytics and planning tools, Urban Analytics Lab turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In 2020, education transformed like never before. Educational institutions needed to be able to provide students, teachers, and staff with immediate access to education and AWS helped customers and partners modernize their systems and applications and reach learners remotely, quickly, and at scale. In 2021, innovation continues in the world of teaching, learning, and research—as well as the use of technology to automate processes and drive better student outcomes.

Times Higher Education (THE) is a data-driven business that, with the help of AWS, is now realising the value of their data, which enables them to be better informed and make faster decisions for customers. THE provides a broad range of services to help set the agenda in higher education, and their insights help universities improve through performance analysis. THE worked with the AWS Data Lab to create a centralised repository of their data. Launching a data lake helped with providing a cost-effective platform and cataloguing data so they could understand their data and design new products to make use of it.

Research exploring how humans work with machines to solve problems in fields ranging from space to sustainability has established the potential to create far-reaching change in children’s education. The test-bed project is part of a wider program set up by Oxford University with support from AWS. Researchers have been as surprised by how quickly they have reached results as they are pleased with the outcomes. One of the test-beds, the Oxford X-Reality Hub Ed Tech project, set out to investigate how virtual reality (VR) could transform the classroom experience and close the gap between disadvantaged groups of pupils who statistically do less well than their peers.

Applications running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack are ubiquitous—WordPress alone represents 38% of all content management systems. Because of the popularity of these applications, public sector organisations such as educational institutions should protect their business continuity by implementing disaster recovery (DR) solutions: policies, tools, and procedures to help the recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure and systems following a disaster. AWS Professional Services created a business continuity solution for on-premises LAMP applications that could eliminate the need for physical backup infrastructure and improve recovery time. The solution was recently piloted by Cardiff University.

Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs) powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) aim to empower public sector organizations to quickly create and test new ideas using Amazon’s innovation methodology. In the second half of 2020, all those who participate in the CIC program, from students and researchers to the technology teams from AWS, worked on wide-ranging societal problems. Their focus was on improving education with virtual computer labs, working on climate change initiatives, improving economic and healthcare research, and supporting at-risk high school students. What were they up to at the end of 2020?

Do you ever get overwhelmed by the thought of preparing and teaching your students online? It’s a challenging task at best but remember to keep it simple. Leveraging cloud technology can help make teaching and learning remotely more manageable for our students, our community, and us. Picking the right tools in the AWS Cloud can help you with course development. Let’s explore a research-based method called technological pedagogical and content knowledge (or TPACK) that helps plan learning experiences.