UBC and AWS collaborate to embrace the use of AI at the UBC Cloud Innovation Centre

April 12, 2024

Today, University of British Columbia (UBC) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the UBC Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) powered by AWS will pivot to a new focus on generative AI.

The UBC CIC has been operating as part of an exclusive program in which AWS collaborates with an institution, working together with students and researchers to solve challenges sourced from the community. Since opening its doors in January 2020, the UBC CIC has largely focused on community health and wellbeing projects. To date, there has been more than 40 successfully completed projects that contributed to the following challenge themes: community access to water; better medical diagnostics; improved patient care; harm reduction for students; AI for analysis of curriculum; fostering research collaboration, and more.

That said, the UBC CIC has already helped create a generative AI-powered question and answer repository that serves up conversational responses to student advising questions, along with other solutions using generative AI – A Cloud-Based Generative AI System for Automated Assessment of Course Flexibility. 

With the progress CIC has made, and innovations like generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) transforming how organizations operate, the CIC is embracing these tools to support community outcomes and be a part of B.C.’s landscape in ensuring students are ready for the workforce of today and tomorrow, post-graduation.

Moving forward, the new focus of the CIC will support student learning and provide a space of innovation to develop valuable new uses of generative AI while maintaining a balanced and informed approach.

“UBC has long been at the forefront of using new and emerging technology to support learning and student success, from the development of one of the first Learning Management Systems here at UBC more than a quarter of a century ago, to our research-led efforts to deploy blended and active learning at scale over a decade ago. The CIC is a wonderful example of that innovation, providing transformative learning experiences for students to generate impactful solutions to pressing community challenges. In addition, the current focus on AI is timely and critical for how we prepare our students to be confident and fluent in the use of these tools in ethical and productive ways.” — Gage Averill, Provost and Vice-President, Academic at UBC 

About UBC Cloud Innovation Centre

Under its global Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) program, AWS brings together non-profit, education, and government organizations to collaborate on solutions that address challenges and real-world problems that matter most to communities. Universities bring their expertise, while AWS provides resources to work through challenges and find new ways to innovate and deploy technology solutions together. Located at UBC’s Point Grey campus in Vancouver, BC, the UBC CIC leverages Amazon’s “Working Backwards” innovation methodology to offer no cost design thinking and prototyping services. Organizations who participate shorten the process to AI deployment that advances their mission. 

UBC students collaborate with UBC and AWS professional staff and community sponsors to design solutions using cutting-edge cloud computing and AI technologies.