Amazon Makes Coronavirus Data Lake Available To Researchers

Amazon Web Services announced the availability of a COVID-19 dataset to all researchers, which offers more than 45,000 research articles, global tracking data, and hospital bed availability.

With this, researchers should be able to build more accurate models and programs to better understand and contain the spread of coronavirus, said the AWS Data Lake team.

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“As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to threaten and take lives around the world, we must work together across organizations and scientific disciplines to fight this disease. we believe that one way we can help is to provide these experts with the data and tools needed to better understand, track, plan for, and eventually contain and neutralize the virus,” the team said in a blogpost.

AWS has pulled data from a wide variety of knowledgeable sources, including John Hopkins University, the New York Times, and the Allen Institute for artificial intelligence.

“The AWS COVID-19 data lake allows experimenters to quickly run analyses on the data in place without wasting time extracting and wrangling data from all the available data sources,” said the Data Lake team.

“They can use AWS or third-party tools to perform trend analysis, do keyword search, perform question/answer analysis, build and run machine learning models, or run custom analyses to meet their specific needs.”

Amazon is not alone in attempting to provide services to coronavirus researchers, Google launched AI software and an open data platform, and Alibaba has made its cloud-based AI platform for coronavirus available for free to all researchers, which has data on the outbreak in Wuhan.