Modern education requires an increasing amount of computing power, so it makes sense to utilise the cloud as effectively as possible. The University of West London is the first university in the country to work with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Educate programme.

The partnership, which began this summer, has already borne fruit, with experts from Amazon sharing their knowledge with students and staff alike.

The collaboration with Amazon allows students, staff and other interested parties to obtain first hand experience and training of working with the AWS Cloud. The university offered a workshop whereby step by step instruction was provided on AWS features and functionality, with the events also providing students the chance to network with key people at Amazon.

The partnership has also secured a $10,000 Amazon Research Grant to Associate Professor Wei Jie, which is part of a wider Amazon initiative to finance and support cutting-edge research using AWS. Professor Wei Jie will use the grant for his project, A Self-organizing Community Detection Algorithm for Large-scale Social Networks.

The project aims to develop a tool to analyse behaviours in large social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, but also in offline social networks. The outcome will provide greater insight into how individual behaviours are influenced by and influence the wider community. It will be built, tested and evaluated on the AWS platform.

It's hoped that the partnership with Amazon will expand significantly from this promising beginning, with the potential for collaborative course development, joint teaching and a range of internships and work placements in the pipeline.

Professor Amir Alani, Head of the School of Computing and Technology, said, ‘The collaboration between Amazon and the School of Computing and Engineering is a very exciting one. It will offer our students the benefits of working with an industry-leading company in real-world environments.’