Category: Research

The AWS for Nonprofits team announced a new Amazon AppFlow data connector that enables nonprofits to transfer valuable data from Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT to AWS services and other destinations. In this blog post, learn some common nonprofit use cases that can be addressed by integrating your data with other AWS services and commercially available software-as-service (SaaS) applications.

This quarter, AWS released 36 new or updated datasets. As July 16 is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Appreciation Day, the AWS Open Data team is highlighting three unique datasets that are analysis-ready for AI. What will you build with these datasets?

To celebrate the leaders and organizations that are propelling the academic landscape forward, AWS announced the 2023 cohort of Education Champions at IMAGINE: Education, State and Local Leaders 2023 Conference. The 2023 AWS Education Champions are pioneers that demonstrate meaningful digital transformation at their education institution to improve student outcomes, build institutional resiliency, accelerate research that can lead to life-changing discoveries, and more – all using the AWS Cloud.

AWS announced the availability of Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA) for Education, an industry-specific deployment of the LZA on AWS, designed to further support education customers in designing cloud environments for their compliance needs. The LZA on AWS solution is architected to align with AWS best practices and multiple, global compliance frameworks. The new LZA for Education builds on the LZA to help customers secure their research workloads or workloads containing student data by giving them a set of default configurations that they can use as a starting point and iterate on to define security and compliance posture as code.

Dr. Kevin Leyton-Brown and Neil Newman are computer scientists at the University of British Columbia (UBC) working at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and microeconomic theory. Their research demands large-scale, high-performance computing, in episodic bursts, to run parallel simulations of complex auctions. When Leyton-Brown and Newman began research into the computationally complex auction theory behind the 2016 United States wireless spectrum auction, their ML models required significantly more computing power than their on-premises infrastructure could provide. The UBC team turned to RONIN, an AWS Partner, and the virtually unlimited infrastructure of the AWS Cloud, to accelerate their time to answers and new discoveries.

The National Institute on Aging Genetics of Alzheimer’s Disease Data Storage Site (NIAGADS DSS), powered by AWS, is a genomic database that provides access to publicly available datasets for Alzheimer’s disease and related neuropathologies. Created to make Alzheimers-genetics knowledge more accessible to researchers, NIAGADS has genomics data on 172,701 samples from 98 datasets and is now 1.3 petabytes (PB) in total size. NIAGADS is creating a system that promotes scientific discovery through data sharing with a large cadre of institutions.

The NYUMets team, led by Dr. Eric Oermann at NYU Langone Medical Center, is collaborating with AWS Open Data, NVIDIA, and Medical Open Network for Artificial Intelligence (MONAI), to develop an open science approach to support researchers to help as many patients with metastatic cancer as possible. With support from the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program, the NYUMets: Brain dataset is now openly available at no cost to researchers around the world.

Building an organized system for common information—such as addresses, phone numbers, purchasing account numbers, a curated and annotated literature section, lab recipes and protocols, meeting schedules, and links to commonly used online tools—can prove extremely valuable for professors and their teams. Building this knowledge base on AWS with Amazon Lightsail can save hours of administration and maintenance time, while providing additional control and flexibility for remote access. In this blog post, learn how to set up a content management system (CMS) using Lightsail, including how to manage basic network security, backup, and upgrades, to build a knowledge base for your lab, agency, startup, or other team-based environment.

Geospatial data, including many climate and weather datasets, are often released by government and nonprofit organizations in compressed file formats such as the Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) or GRIdded Binary (GRIB). As the complexity and size of geospatial datasets continue to grow, it is more time- and cost-efficient to leave the files in one place, virtually query the data, and download only the subset that is needed locally. Unlike legacy file formats, the cloud-native Zarr format is designed for virtual and efficient access to compressed chunks of data saved in a central location such as Amazon S3. In this walkthrough, learn how to convert NetCDF datasets to Zarr using an Amazon SageMaker notebook and an AWS Fargate cluster and query the resulting Zarr store, reducing the time required for time series queries from minutes to seconds.

The AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program makes high-value, cloud-optimized datasets publicly available on AWS. Through this program, customers are making over 100PB of high-value, cloud-optimized data available for public use. As April 22 is Earth Day, the AWS Open Data team wanted to highlight some new datasets from our geospatial and environmental communities of practice, as well as the other new or updated datasets available now on the Registry of Open Data on AWS and also discoverable on AWS Data Exchange.