St. Louis University uses AWS to make big data accessible for researchers

This article discusses how St. Louis University's Sinquefield Center for Applied Economic Research (SCAER) used AWS to manage and process large datasets of anonymized cell phone data for research on social issues like homelessness and healthcare access.

Specifically, the article covers:

• The challenges SCAER faced in receiving, storing, cleaning, and formatting 450 TB of data from a vendor
• SCAER's decision to use AWS and work with an AWS Partner (Ideas2IT) to create a cost-effective solution
• The technical solution implemented using Amazon EMR, Apache Spark, and Amazon S3 to preprocess the data efficiently
• How the solution made the data searchable and easily accessible for researchers while ensuring security
• SCAER's plans to share their learnings and make the data available to other research groups