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UCL partners with Amazon Web Services to accelerate digital innovation with societal impact

UCL has joined forces with Amazon Web Services to speed up innovations in healthcare and education through the UCL Centre for Digital Innovation (CDI).

Graca presenting to a room of people

11 September 2024

The UCL CDI brings together the expertise of both organisations, with the aim of making research more useable, and accelerating transformative innovation.

The centre is AWS’s first cloud innovation centre in the UK. It supports academics and entrepreneurs to create solutions built using research outputs which address pressing global challenges.

UCL and AWS achieve this through:

  • a series of programmes, including a 12-week impact accelerator
  • doctoral scholarships
  • workshops and trainings addressing the challenges and opportunities in digital innovation
  • a meet-up space for like-minded researchers to collaborate

With a particular focus on solving global problems in healthcare and education, the research spans wide-ranging applications. Supported projects range from new algorithms to diagnose diseases more effectively, to cloud-based platforms that rapidly collect data to fast-track educational studies.

CDI Director Graca Carvalho says: “A large number of our academic entrepreneurs were already using AWS platforms for their ventures, so there was a clear overlap for us to collaborate on creating this centre

“UCL academics and students can now access mentorship through the centre to design their research using the most advanced cloud, AI and machine learning technologies. We’ve set up programmes that have accelerated the startup journey, which means ventures can now achieve in 12 weeks what it used to take them six to 12 months to do.”

In its first two years, the centre has supported 19 startups or spinouts, helped 24 PhD researchers with scholarships, and supported over £8.5 million of research grant applications. 

UCL’s partnership with AWS has been supported by UCL Innovation & Enterprise, who’ve helped build the centre’s innovation ecosystem and helped them access Higher Education Innovation Funding.

UCL and AWS are continuing to collaborate on the centre and are now exploring new and bigger ways of working together, including opportunities to collaborate globally.

Watch a video about the partnership between AWS and UCL

In this video UCL and AWS explain how the UCL Centre for Digital Innovation, powered by AWS, is accelerating digital innovation with societal impact.

MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/h4JChAci

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