As public health organisations, universities, governments and companies globally scramble to predict and monitor the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic across the spectrum, Amazon Web Services (AWS) which is e-commerce giant Amazon’s Cloud arm is helping them leverage the true potential of Cloud.
As school districts temporarily close their doors due to COVID-19, parents, teachers and administrators are quickly turning to online education to help students continue their studies.
“In India, CareerLauncher is working with the government in Delhi to help train teachers on effective virtual teaching techniques and technologies,” informed Matt Garman, Vice President of AWS Sales and Marketing.
A pilot programme of the company’s Aspiration.ai portal went live just two weeks ago and will roll out to 1,200 schools and 190,000 students in Delhi over the next month.
AWS is currently helping experts at the Imperial College London and its Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics by leveraging AWS to provide public health agencies and governments with real-time data and models to inform COVID-19 responses.
With the help of AWS, researchers can quickly review data from around the world to understand transmission and outbreak severity, as well as the impact of different intervention methods, the company said in a statement.
“From scaling telehealth solutions to expanding online education offerings, AWS is powering global efforts to address the COVID-19 crisis and related challenges,” said Garman.
AWS is supplying the World Health Organization (WHO) with advanced cloud technologies and technical expertise to support this acceleration.
“This includes building vast data lakes (groups of data from multiple sources) to aggregate epidemiological country data as well as rapidly translating medical training videos into different languages,” Garman informed.
It recently launched the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative – a programme to support customers working to bring better, more accurate diagnostics solutions to market faster, and promote collaboration across organisations that are working on similar problems.
“As part of this, we are committing an initial investment of $20 million to accelerate diagnostic research, innovation, and development to speed our collective understanding and detection of COVID-19,” said AWS.
Recent beneficiaries of this initiative include radiologists and physicians at UC San Diego Health working to quickly detect pneumonia and better distinguish COVID-19 patients who need supportive care in the hospital from those who can be followed closely at home.
With support from AWS, healthcare providers at UC San Diego Health are using AI in a study to speed the detection of pneumonia, a condition associated with severe COVID-19 cases.
Kinsa, a developer of internet-connected thermometers and a health-tracking app, aggregates real-time fever and symptom information to create visualisations of the spread of the illness.
Its US Health Weather Map pulls data from more than one million QuickCare and Smart Ear thermometers to help public health officials identify potential hotspots and measure the impact of social distancing.
AWS has also joined the White House COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium, offering research institutions and companies technical support and AWS credits to advance research on diagnostics, treatments, and vaccine studies related to COVID-19.