Author: AWS Public Sector Blog Team

From accelerating genomics research to addressing the teacher shortage to improving commutes, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are fueling digital transformation in the government, education, nonprofit, and healthcare sectors. Austin Tanney, head of AI at Kainos, shared his ML learnings and where he sees the technology going.

To help the global education community during a period of increased remote learning, AWS Educate is launching an “Educator Mobilization” initiative to provide resources that support educators as they migrate to virtual instruction. Launching the week of April 6th, resources will include webinars hosted by educators who are members of AWS Educate with expertise teaching in online classrooms, as well as virtual office hours.

April 1 is Census Day 2020: the day everyone in the United States is counted. Household respondents to the U.S. Census are asked to count every individual living in their household as of Census Day. From representation in Congress to funding for local schools, roads, and emergency services, important decisions are made by the government based on census data, impacting those services for the next decade.

Over 28,000 school age children across the United States competed to name the Mars Rover 2020, but only one student’s name persevered. When the Mars Rover 2020 launches in July 2020 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, it will be named Perseverance.

Moving to remote operations can be difficult in any industry, but especially in education where various stakeholders need to be prepared – from students, teachers, families, and administrators. Moving a highly structured, in-person environment to online is no simple task, so educational leaders across age and learner groups seek out best practices to support remote learning, teaching, and core operations. Here are three examples of how the cloud can help education quickly scale to support disruptions.

In support of governments and educational institutions around the world, AWS is quickly deploying people and technology to enable remote learning and home working. Our services can help address our customer’s most pressing challenges during this unprecedented time, including making sure citizens are productive with remote working solutions, that students can access online learning platforms, and that communications are reliable and available for public entities at all levels of government.

Are you a U.S. government employee or contractor who is interested in learning about cloud computing? AWS is now offering the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials Day and AWS Technical Essentials Day courses virtually to government workers interested in learning about the cloud. These instructor-led courses will be offered online starting Monday, March 23.

As part of our response to COVID-19, AWS is providing tools to support remote learning and teaching. This includes providing customers in the most affected regions with technical support, offerings, and AWS Promotional Credit, which help cover costs while enabling organizations to quickly stand up and scale their infrastructure and tools to meet demand, to help our educational technology providers and educators around the world quickly deploy or extend learning into the home.

Innovation is discovery that enables government to do more with less, advance economic and national security, and transform public service. In Government Matters Tech Leadership Series: Innovation, leaders from the United States federal government and AWS discussed how innovation is fueled by the cloud and is helping them achieve their missions and deliver citizen services.

Whether you’re beginning to think about migrating to the AWS Cloud or already planning your migration, you probably have questions such as how much migrating to the cloud will cost. Determining total cost of ownership (TCO) for a cloud migration project can be challenging when evaluating what-if scenarios, over-provisioning, outdated servers, legacy applications, or spreadsheets of stale data. Learn about some AWS TCO tools and best practices.