Amazon Web Services has announced AWS in Education, a set of programs that lets the academic community leverage Amazon Web Services for teaching and research. With AWS in Education, educators, academic researchers, and students can get free access credits to tap into the on-demand infrastructure of Amazon Web Services to teach courses, tackle research endeavors, and explore projects AWS in Education also provides self-directed learning resources on cloud computing for students. To sign up and begin using Amazon Web Services, and to apply for grants for usage credits, visit: CC
To assist educators in bringing the cloud to the classroom, AWS is offering grants of $100 per student for free usage of AWS infrastructure services in eligible courses at accredited universities. Faculty can apply for these grants via a simple online form and provide their students with hands-on access to the same infrastructure services used by software developers and IT staffs around the world.
Beginning immediately, AWS will selectively award grants for AWS service credits to make it even easier for higher learning institutions to conduct important research. Each quarter, AWS will evaluate proposals and award grants to researchers at accredited universities based on factors such as the uniqueness and usefulness of the project, use of AWS within the project, and potential to attain matching funds from other organizations interested in the project.
For students and student organizations, AWS is a platform for completing coursework, supporting individual projects, or for exploring the reliability, scalability, and cost effectiveness of an in-the-cloud technology infrastructure. Amazon has made a number of tutorials available online to help students begin exploring cloud computing concepts in a self-directed manner. These tutorials include advanced computing topics such as asynchronous messaging, consensus algorithms, priority queues, and more. In addition, Amazon will accept proposals from individual students or student groups at accredited universities and will award AWS free usage grants for worthy individual or group projects.
"The grant we have received from the AWS in Education program will dramatically increase the reach of my student group's collaboration with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) to develop distributed assistive computer vision technology for the visually impaired," said Serge Belongie, Associate Professor at the University of California in San Diego.
