AWS Impact Computing Project at the HDSI

The AWS Impact Computing Project at the Harvard Data Science Initiative (HDSI) is an alliance with Amazon Web Services (AWS) aimed at reimagining data science and high performance computing to identify potential solutions for society’s most complex challenges.

This collaboration provides a structural framework for catalyzing the development and application of data science methodologies to achieve meaningful benefit for society. Through this unique and ambitious academic-industry framework, Harvard University data science researchers encompassing many disciplines can pose new questions for exploration in collaboration with AWS. This alliance ultimately strives to mitigate and solve complex human and environmental global crises brought on by rapid changes in climate, ecology, social determinants, and food security.

Funded Research

Since launch of the project, the HDSI has announced support for 6 faculty led research efforts. The project plans to regularly support research over the near term.

Climate change and volatility in food supply: historical contributions to and future implications for food insecurity
Peter Huybers, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Environmental Science and Engineering (Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences)

This project will study how climate change increases volatility in food production and the implications of variability in supply for food security, addressing existing limitations in data and methodologies.

Linking climate and environmental exposures to malnutrition in a food- insecurity hotspot
Christopher Golden, Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Planetary Health (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

In this project, data affecting multiple sectors in Madagascar will be triangulated and harmonized so that it can be accessed in real-time by multiple government ministries to analyze and respond to health, environmental, and agricultural challenges.

Data Platforms, Causal inference (CI) and Machine Learning Methods (ML) for Identifying Social Determinants of Health in the US 
Francesca Dominici, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population, and Data Science (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

This project will develop data architectures, enhance casual inference algorithms and software, and develop interpretable machine learning mechanisms to advance evidence-based policies and actions to protect populations under several converging trends: the co-occurrence of multiple exposures to extreme weather and air pollution, the rapidly aging US population, and societal stressors such as gun violence. 

Development of a deep learning model to enable serosurveillance of vector-borne diseases and their hosts
Daniel Neafsey, Associate Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases; Sarah Fortune, John LaPorte Given Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases; Junwei Lu, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

The immune system generates antibodies in response to infection by vector-borne pathogens. This project will link the presence and relative levels of these antibodies to climate change metrics to elucidate connections between climate change and vector-borne diseases.  The team will then create a surveillance tool that can generate large-scale prevalence data to inform public health measures, train ecological models of climate change, determine new vaccine targets for vector-borne diseases, and more.

Optimizing Global Nutrition from Seafood Harvested from a Warming Ocean
Elsie Sunderland, Fred Kavli Professor of Environmental Chemistry (Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences); Christopher Golden, Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Planetary Health (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

This project will leverage several unique, global databases to develop regional scenarios for nutritionally optimized seafood harvests that minimize toxicants and maximize micronutrients in seafood in a warming ocean.

Food Power and Food Insecurity
David Yang, Professor of Economics (Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences)

One countries’ food power – the ability to strategically restrict others’ access to food or flood the market to reduce others’ revenue – can simultaneously support domestic food security and international food insecurity. This project will quantify the causes and consequences of food power. Which countries have food power over which other countries? Does food stockpiling lead to the accumulation of food power? And how does food power shape global patterns of food insecurity and geopolitical alignment?

Previous Solicitations to Harvard Faculty

• Consolidated call for letters of intent: Social determinants of health, climate change, food security (May 2024)
• Social determinants of health (SDOH) (August 2023)
• Climate change (August 2023)
• Food security (August 2023)

For information about these solicitations or the Project more generally, please contact Lawrence Weissbach, Scientific Director (lawrence_weissbach@harvard.edu). Please subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when the next solicitation is announced.

Articles