cloud computing

Mason, Amazon collaboration to deliver innovations in education and research

Colleen Rich — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 17:03:01 +0000

Mason, Amazon collaboration to deliver innovations in education and research Colleen Rich Mon, 11/28/2022 - 12:03

��AV and Amazon have entered into a strategic collaboration that will allow the university to better serve students, advance its commitment to a more sustainable campus environment, and introduce new educational programs in data center engineering.

Photo by Evan Cantwell/Creative Services

By leveraging technical solutions from Amazon Web Services’ cloud services, Mason will develop a unified platform to improve the process for students from community colleges to transfer into the university. The seamless process will support Mason’s commitment to access by eliminating obstacles related to enrollment and transfer, ensuring systematic barriers do not prevent student success.

Mason faculty, students, staff, and public-sector and industry partners can also expect the development of new approaches to address food insecurity, reduce the technical skills gap in data center engineering, and advance environmental priorities. In the coming years, students will be able to access these novel programs and new curriculum that will help learners pursue careers in data center engineering across the greater Washington metropolitan area, where there is an increasing need for mechanical and electrical engineering talent.

Mason is among the largest producers of tech talent in Virginia, with 40% of students majoring in STEM fields. The university is ranked No. 1 in the commonwealth and No. 9 nationally among public institutions for innovation by U.S. News and World Report.

“The diverse talent pipeline that ��AV produces is in part what attracted Amazon to Arlington,” Mason President Gregory Washington said of the company’s construction of a headquarters in the city. “Mason’s work with Amazon will better serve the students in that pipeline as well as drive economic growth through business, government and community collaborations as Mason becomes one of the most technologically advanced, inclusive universities in the nation.”

As Mason works with Amazon Web Services to implement enhanced, high-performance computing and machine learning, it also will accelerate its research capabilities and provide new platforms for innovation, including an increased collaboration with the intelligence community to drive research and new discoveries with artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and 5G technology.

In total, this unique collaboration will deliver a secure, cloud-based environment for university, industry and government mission partners to conduct cutting-edge research.

"This is just the beginning of a powerful collaboration," said Amazon's Paul Misener. Photo by Ron Aira/Creative Services

"In this long-term initiative, customer services and resources from across Amazon will accelerate innovation at Virginia's largest public research university, including by helping Mason innovate and build on the vast portfolio of AWS Cloud technologies and solutions,” said Paul Misener, vice president for global innovation policy and communications at Amazon. “This is just the beginning of a powerful collaboration that not only will improve student outcomes, but also will create a more resilient, efficient, and sustainable future for the university.”

The newly announced projects will add to an already strong collaborative effort between Mason, AWS, and Amazon to support students and innovation.

A just-completed hackathon co-hosted by Mason and Amazon, a project based out of the university’s Mason Square in Arlington, Virginia, challenged teams from U.S. and international academic institutions, companies, and other affiliations to develop innovative ideas to improve public-private collaborations against the industry-wide global challenge of counterfeiting.

Mason Square is also the future home of Mason’s Fuse building, a 345,000-square-foot facility that will open in 2025 as the flagship tech hub for digital innovation, showcasing the power of partnerships in the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, connecting students, faculty, industry, and government.

Additionally, AWS’ Girls Tech Day in Northern Virginia was held at Mason’s Science and Technology Campus with the goal of inspiring girls and women to pursue careers in the technology sector. And Mason President Gregory Washington recently participated in a panel discussion, hosted by Amazon, that focused on workforce development and the future of work.

“��AV has proven to be a leading education institution in the nation’s capital for a number of years,” said Kim Majerus, vice president, U.S. education, state and local government at AWS. “As one of the first universities to launch a cloud computing degree program, Mason has always seen how the power of technology can help meet mission outcomes. This collaboration will be transformative in showing the positive impact technology can have on the education community across the nation, as well as advance research in cybersecurity, defense, and military intelligence for public-sector leaders.”

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PhD student wins Fellowship for her work in cloud storage

Tama Moni — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 16:24:43 +0000

PhD student wins Fellowship for her work in cloud storage Tama Moni Thu, 09/15/2022 - 12:24

Ioanna Karantaidou

Ioanna Karantaidou, a PhD student in ��AV’s College of Engineering and Computing’s Computer Science Department, has won a one-year fellowship from Protocol Labs, where she will work on their Fielcoin project, investigating innovations in cloud storage. Her fellowship is for $60k, which will cover tuition, travel, healthcare costs, and salary.

Cloud storage is dominated by a few large organizations and Filecoin seeks to decentralize this important service by allowing numerous small entities to provide storage –– even someone with a hard drive could sign up as a provider. But while users may be comfortable saving files in an established company such as Google Drive, they may not have the same trust in a decentralized service with which they are unfamiliar. Karantaidou’s work centers on establishing protocols that will test to ensure service providers are behaving honestly and incentivize them to do so. The goal is for these measures to ultimately lead to greater client trust and more widespread use of decentralized cloud storage services.

Karantaidou says her journey into the field “makes sense.” Growing up in Greece she enjoyed math and wanted to study computers, so got involved in informatics. She says, “In Greece, you don’t have a double major, so I have two bachelor’s degrees - in math and computer science - and cryptography is at the intersection of those two. It was my favorite class in both programs.”

Karantaidou’s advisor at Mason is Foteini Baldimtsi, an assistant professor in the computer science department.

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Fellowships

computer science

NSF CAREER Award funds faculty member’s mission to expand cloud’s capabilities

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 13:03:49 +0000

NSF CAREER Award funds faculty member’s mission to expand cloud’s capabilities Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/15/2021 - 09:03

In This Story

Yue Cheng

Social media platforms and dozens of other web and mobile apps generate countless amounts of data. And with a constant flux of data comes a continuous need for high-performance and highly scalable ways to store and access this data. Yue Cheng, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to meet the needs of the big data industry.

Cheng and his research team will use the nearly $580,000 award “Harnessing Serverless Functions to Build Highly Elastic Cloud Storage Infrastructure” to develop a scalable and cost-effective cloud computing storage system using serverless computing.

“We are researching new ways of using emerging serverless computing capabilities to build a high-performance cloud storage infrastructure,” says Cheng. “Serverless computing is the next generation of cloud.”

Cheng’s new infrastructure, InfiniStore, will reduce the cost and need for manual storage management, says Cheng.

Conventional cloud computing uses virtual machines (VM) that are rented out to cloud users. “The user pays for whatever resources they need, and while it gives great flexibility, the VM-based model isn’t the most effective nor elastic. Cloud service providers still charge for space and capacity that is reserved but not in use. Cloud users also must manually start or stop virtual machines to best suit their needs.”

Serverless computing is the solution to cost and resource issues under the conventional VM model. Because of its inherent elasticity, it can scale up and down autonomously. Since it doesn’t require a space reservation, like with VMs, Cheng can implement a new cloud storage pricing model based on usage.

“Let’s say at one point in time there are no requests, and no cloud function is launched. And a later point in time, there is a huge spike in data access requests. The elastic storage would automatically trigger thousands of cloud functions, each serving as a tiny little data storage unit, to serve this spike of data access requests, and the cloud user is only charged when the data stored in cloud functions are accessed,” says Cheng.

Cheng’s project includes collaborations with industry leaders like NetApp and IBM Research and fellow researchers at Mason. In addition to the development of InfiniStore, the grant also consists of an educational plan centered around teaching serverless computing and increasing access for undergraduate students to participate in leading research.

“We will design a new cloud service called InfiniCloud, which is a digital and interactive notebook service that allows students and educators to implement, write, and deploy serial and parallel Python programs at any scale,” says Cheng. “We will also start an outreach plan to promote diversity in computing and engage undergraduate students in computing research.”

Cheng stresses the importance of advancing computing capabilities and allowing students and educators access too. “This project will support big data storage, which is extremely important, but I am also committed to introducing undergrad students to this state-of-the-art field in cloud computing,” says Cheng.

“Yue’s NSF CAREER Award comes at a time of nearly universal reliance on cloud services to support critical enterprise functions. His research will realize significant improvements in the ways that cloud resources are allocated to end-users, through innovations in cloud storage technology,” says Department of Computer Science Chair David Rosenblum. “And the educational plan he has devised will give Mason students significant hands-on learning opportunities with this important area of computing technology.”

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Big Data

Awards

Mason hosts Cloud Computing Conference

John Hollis — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 10:30:00 +0000

Mason hosts Cloud Computing Conference John Hollis Tue, 11/17/2020 - 05:30

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Institute for Digital InnovAtion (IDIA)

cloud computing

Students

Mason, NOVA, Amazon degree program is lauded

Damian Cristodero — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 19:44:44 +0000

Mason, NOVA, Amazon degree program is lauded Damian Cristodero Mon, 12/09/2019 - 14:44

Mason, NOVA announce joint degree program in partnership with Amazon Web Services

Melanie Balog — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 21:02:50 +0000

Mason, NOVA announce joint degree program in partnership with Amazon Web Services Melanie Balog Wed, 06/12/2019 - 17:02

Dolica Gopisetty, left, and Shadman Hossain, third from left, are ��AV students representing the AWS Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. Photo by John David Hollis.

��AV and Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) have announced a new bachelor degree program in cloud computing in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The new Bachelor of Applied Science pathway in Cloud Computing degree will offer a seamless transfer pathway from a two-year associate degree to a four-year bachelor’s degree in cloud computing. The formal announcement came Tuesday at the AWS Public Sector Summit at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.

“We are proud to be part of a collaboration that is working to expand Virginia’s tech talent pipeline,” Mason President Ángel Cabrera said. “This degree pathway marks the beginning of a ground-breaking initiative that will deliver innovative educational opportunities to students across the commonwealth. The collaboration with AWS helps give our students—and our region—a competitive edge.”

The new degree program has been designed to guide students through NOVA to bachelor’s degree completion at Mason. NOVA and Mason faculty worked in unison with AWS Educate curriculum designers to create a path that will help students pursue careers in cloud architecture, cybersecurity, software development and DevOps, a system of software development and delivery.

“This new pathway demonstrates our commitment to creating both educational and employment access,” said Michelle Marks, vice president of academic innovation and new ventures. “These students will be prepared to compete for our region’s most in-demand jobs.”

Mason students Dolica Gopisetty and Shadman Hossain were among six college students enrolled in cloud computing degree programs who shared their experiences during a panel at Tuesday’s summit.

“What I wanted to get across was how important cloud computing is and how important it is for kids to get into cloud,” said Gopisetty, a senior information technology major from the Volgenau School of Engineering. “They’re able to grasp anything complex very quickly.”

The Northern Virginia region is home to one of the largest concentrations of IT jobs in the nation, as well as one of the greatest demands for employees with cloud computing skills. The arrival of Amazon’s new headquarters is expected to increase that need, with the new HQ2 campus promising to deliver 25,000 jobs to the Northern Virginia region by 2030.

“BAS is different from traditional degrees,” said Kammy Sanghera, the associate professor of Information Sciences and Technology who serves as the executive director for the Engineering School’s STEM Outreach program. “Because of the transition of public and private sectors to the cloud, the demand for cloud computing skills is on the rise. This program will prepare students to address industry needs.”

The new degree pathway will launch in fall 2020 as part of the ADVANCE Program, the NOVA/Mason partnership that is streamlining the path to a four-year degree by eliminating traditional transfer obstacles, providing students with additional coaching and financial incentives, and highlighting pathways to high-demand careers.

“Developing a cloud-ready workforce is an urgent challenge and an incredible opportunity,” said Teresa Carlson, vice president for AWS’s Worldwide Public Sector. “Both ��AV and Northern Virginia Community College have been global pioneers in developing cloud curricula for students. We are delighted to be working with these innovative institutions to turn the growing demand for cloud skills into pathways in technology for students from all backgrounds.”

All students in the program will receive membership in the AWS Educate program and gain hands-on, real-world experience with leading cloud technology and tools.

cloud computing

Mason, Amazon collaboration to deliver innovations in education and research

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Mason, NOVA, Amazon degree program is lauded

Mason, NOVA announce joint degree program in partnership with Amazon Web Services