Infrastructure for AI

Data for AI Infrastructure 

Contact: Dr Srecko Joksimovic

Humans working collaboratively with cognitive technologies is now evident in all aspects of society, including healthcare, business, and government. C3L and Comunet Pty Ltd signed a Master Services Agreement to develop secure, cloud-based, scalable, and collaborative platform for seamless integration of learning analytics and AI.

This agreement establishes stronger collaboration between two partners that was initiated in 2019. Building on the Amazon AWS Accelerated Data Lake infrastructure, Comunet Pty Ltd and C3L deployed a robust analytics infrastructure. The solution (Figure 1) provides:

• structure and scalability – highly available with all critical services deployed across multiple availability zones;
• near real-time data ingestion and curation, with full data catalog of records and record types;
• built-in ability for data enrichment, utilizing native AWS machine learning and analytics services;
• seamless integration with variety of learning management systems (e.g., Canvas or edX) and third-party tools (e.g., OnTask, RShiny-based visualizations);
• security – the solution is built on the AWS Landing Zone pattern, having 8 configured accounts, where each account has a preconfigured role (e.g., user management or backup), with the intention that should needs expand more accounts can be easily provisioned for future projects.

This cloud-based infrastructure will serve as the foundation for more sophisticated analysis of the data that is produced as students or employees engage in knowledge work. It will enable C3L researchers to answer questions such as:

• how does adaptive feedback help students to be most successful?
• what types of support do front line medical professionals need from cognitive technologies in order for them to better do their work?
• how does artificial cognition support creativity and brainstorming in corporate settings?

Comunet is a leader in public cloud technologies with global firms Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft specialising in consultancy, software development and operations (DevOps). For over 25 years Comunet has developed software solutions that solve complex business problems with data, being recognised by their clients for expertise in data management to support analytical and ML/AI platforms.