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The School of Information Management is very pleased to announce that Dr. Mike Smit has been awarded an Amazon Web Services Research Grant of $7,250 to further his research in emerging technology & information. This grant complements a $10,000 Amazon Web Services Teaching Grant, which Dr. Smit obtained earlier this year.

The Research Grant will allow Dr. Smit to explore how individuals and businesses can more easily use cloud resources for medium-sized short-term information processing. For example, a researcher might temporarily use cloud computing power to quickly and efficiently acquire and process textual data that is too large for a laptop but too small to justify large-scale research computing. Just as Dropbox and Google Drive seamlessly extend desktop storage into the cloud, Dr. Smit expects to extend desktop information processing into the cloud.

Dr. Smit also brings his expertise in cloud systems to the classroom; he holds a $10,000 Amazon Web Services Teaching Grant which offers students free access to cloud services provided by Amazon, the leading infrastructure-as-a-service provider. Students in the Master of Library and Information Studies program have so far spent over $3,000 using cloud resources for class projects, which translates into more than 24,000 hours of cloud server time!

Dr. Smit joined the School of Information Management in July 2013.  He draws on his education and experience as a computer scientist (PhD, University of Alberta) to conduct research on the interactions among people, information, and technology, and to teach courses on Data Management, User-Centric Information, and Research Methods in the Master of Library and Information Studies and Master of Information Management programs.

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"Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customer businesses in 190 countries around the world." -