AWS rolls out machine learning solution for healthcare, new SageMaker capabilities at Re:Invent

Amazon Web Services has rolled out Amazon HealthLake, a service for healthcare and life sciences organizations, and nine new capabilities for its cloud based machine learning platform SageMaker.

The Amazon HealthLake solution works by aggregating an organisation’s data spread across silos and disparate sources into a centralized AWS data lake. The information is then processed by harnessing machine learning (ML) capabilities for further use by the organization for necessary insights.  

AWS said the solution would make it easier for organisations to classify and find clinical information based on tags, indexes and events through standardized labels.

“With Amazon HealthLake, healthcare organizations can reduce the time it takes to transform health data in the cloud from weeks to minutes so that it can be analyzed securely, even at petabyte scale,” said  Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president, Amazon Machine Learning for AWS, during a keynote at the ongoing Amazon Re:Invent conference on Tuesday.

Read: AWS vs Google Cloud vs Microsoft -- pandemic intensifies battle in cloud services

 For its flagship ML platform, SageMaker, AWS announced nine new capabilities which would make it easier for developers to automate and scale all steps of the end-to-end ML workflow. Some of these capabilities include faster data preparation, a repository for prepared data, workflow automation, greater transparency in training data to counter bias, distributed training capabilities to train large data models as well as model monitoring for devices on the edge.

“The capabilities will make it easier for developers to build end-to-end machine learning pipelines to prepare, build, train, explain, inspect, monitor, debug, and run custom machine learning models with greater visibility, explainability, and automation at scale,” said Sivasubramanian.

 Also read: General availability of EC2 Mac among announcements at Andy Jassy’s re:Invent keynote

Large scale client migrations to AWS

During the week at Re:Invent, AWS announced that it had completed large scale migration of business information services provider Thomson Reuters’ data into the AWS cloud, as part of the company's larger digital transformation strategy.  Thomson Reuters has migrated thousands of servers and hundreds of revenue-generating models onto AWS, the company said.

Additionally, media company ViacomCBS has entered into an agreement with AWS to migrate its broadcast footprint spanning 425 TV channels and 40 global data and media centers onto the AWS cloud.

AWS also announced a partnership with German automotive giant BMW to jointly develop solutions for the segment. BMW will migrate data from over a hundred countries to AWS. The move is expected to include BMWs core IT systems and databases for functions in sales, manufacturing and maintenance. The move is expected to help increase agility and innovate quickly, AWS said.