Category: Education

Leaders in higher education recognize that generative artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), cloud computing, and other advanced technologies are rapidly changing how education and research happen on campus. Whether through data-driven administrative decision-making, generative AI infrastructure for research, or enhanced learning tools for the classroom, higher education institutions are developing and applying technology in innovative and helpful ways. Some of these examples will be shared at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference from October 21-24 in San Antonio.

Where will the next pandemic-causing virus come from? The answer to this pressing question is locked away in the immense diversity of DNA carried around by life on Earth. A research team located at the Institut Pasteur, a Paris-based leading international research organization, plans to break into that vault of knowledge with IndexThePlanet. Read this post to learn more about the project, which aims to index the DNA of all living organisms, identify previously unknown viruses species, and create a DNA search engine.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is proud to be a healthcare and technology partner for the Cancer AI Alliance (CAIA), a new initiative announced today. The CAIA is a consortium of four National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated cancer centers, led by the Fred Hutch Cancer Center, and leading technology and service companies. AWS is contributing a total of $10 million towards the more than $40 million in funding that helps establish the CAIA.

Singapore General Hospital (SGH), SingHealth Office of Academic Informatics (OAI), and Amazon Web Services (AWS) collaborated to develop a cost-effective, scalable cloud infrastructure that enables researchers to perform their own analyses on a centrally secured and compliant cloud platform. AWS HealthOmics offers a suite of services that help bioinformaticians, researchers, and scientists to store, query, analyze, and generate insights from genomic and other biological data. Read this post to learn more about the three primary components of HealthOmics used in the solution.

In this post, we explore how healthcare and life sciences organizations can embrace the data mesh and data as a product (DaaP) principles to unlock the full potential of their health data, drive faster and more efficient drug development, and ultimately, bring life-saving treatments to patients more quickly. We also showcase the Amazon Web Services (AWS) services that support the journey towards effective data management and alignment with data mesh principles.

In January 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) inaugurated a Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The CIC uses emerging technologies to solve real-world problems and has produced more than 50 prototypes in sectors like healthcare, education, and research. The Centre’s work has involved 300-plus AWS accounts across various groups, including external collaborators, UBC staff, students, and researchers. This post discusses the management of AWS in higher education institutions, emphasizing governance to securely foster innovation without compromising security and detailing policies and responsibilities for managing AWS accounts across projects and research.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies is changing how we work and what skills workers need to be able to thrive. To help meet this challenge in Australia, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has deepened its strategic collaboration with the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education (DoE), which prioritises both educator and student upskilling. Read this post to learn more.

The COVID-19 pandemic took a heavy toll on students’ mental health and well-being. In fact, a staggering 87 percent of public schools reported that the pandemic had negatively impacted their students’ social-emotional development during the 2021–2022 school year. These effects have lingered long past the pandemic, and students’ social-emotional well-being remains a primary concern of administrators, teachers, and parents. To address this ongoing crisis, The Happy Sad Company was founded. Collaborating with Amazon Web Services (AWS), they strategically planned, scaled, and launched an app to help teachers, parents, and students gain a better understanding of how things are going.

Pathologists have been looking at morphological patterns in patients’ tissue sections highlighted by hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining for more than a century. However, as the pathology transformation from glass slides to digital imaging gains momentum, it opens the door to artificial intelligence (AI) tools to complement expert assessment with quantitative measurements to enable data-driven medicine. Yet, challenges remain with handling digital imaging files such as storage and pre-processing prior to application of AI tools. Genomics England have utilised Amazon Web Services (AWS) and tools such as Amazon SageMaker to demonstrate how to prepare digital pathology images for research and the development of machine learning models.

The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London is a world-class visitor attraction and a leading science research center. NHM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have partnered up to transform and accelerate scientific research by bringing together a broad range of biodiversity and environmental data types in one place for the first time. In an earlier post, we discussed NHM’s overall vision for using open data in combination with large-scale compute, data systems, and machine learning (ML) to create the Planetary Knowledge Base (PKB), a knowledge graph of global biodiversity. In this post, we focus on the underlying services and architecture that comprise the PKB.