Author: AWS Public Sector Blog Team

From November 28 to December 3, 2021, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is hosting the 10th annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Attendees can deepen their cloud knowledge and gain new skills to accelerate their missions—as well as network, chat with AWS experts, and have fun with thousands of other cloud enthusiasts. With so much content available, how can you make the most of the event? Whether you’re attending in person or virtually, here’s what public sector attendees need to know to prepare.

In the Greater Stockholm Area, SL (Stockholm Public Transport) is responsible for public transport services for more than three million citizens. SL is transforming their ticketing system with a new, “future-proof” alternative built and managed in-house. This major digital transformation project, built on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and using microservices, is currently being rolled out across the city. The new ticketing system is an integral part of SL’s commitment to make sure everyone who lives, works in, or visits Stockholm, “has access to well-developed, easily accessible and reliable public transport.”

Across Canada, hospitals, care providers, academic health sciences centers, and more are using accessible, scalable technology to support their staff and provide faster, better access to citizens in need of care. With Amazon Alexa, patients only need their voice to answer a few questions and get started towards healing.

Companies and asset managers looking to protect their financial investments from climate change-related risks, and invest in more sustainable solutions, can now access a new dataset on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud to help inform their decision making. Amazon announced that the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) dataset is now available and free for anyone to access in the cloud. The dataset includes key reference information that supports clear and unique identification of legal entities participating in financial transactions, and each LEI contains information about an entity’s ownership structure, including ‘who is who’ and ‘who owns whom’.

The second annual AWS DeepRacer Army-Navy Competition brings teams together to train a robotic vehicle to discover whose car can autonomously navigate a track with the fastest time, using artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. The competition is for anyone affiliated with the Army or Navy, no matter their experience with AI, machine learning, or robotics. Novices can get started with machine learning quickly with hands-on tutorials. The second annual competition will happen on December 11 2021, prior to the Army-Navy football game. Registration is now open.

A recent report by 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, commissioned by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Institute, reveals that moving enterprise and public sector IT workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud can reduce energy consumption and associated carbon emissions by nearly 80%, and is five times more energy efficient than the typical on-premises Asia Pacific (APAC) data center.

The AWS Cloud Credit for Research Program launched a new opportunity for Amazon Scholars and Amazon Visiting Academics to apply for AWS Promotional Credit to accelerate innovation through cloud technology. Amazon Scholars are world-class academics and Amazon Visiting Academics are pre- to newly-tenured academics, selected to tackle real-world technical challenges as they continue to teach and conduct research at their universities. AWS Promotional Credit is offered through this initiative is to support the awardees’ impactful university research that’s distinct from their work at Amazon.

During the opening keynote of the AWS Summit Washington, DC, Max Peterson, vice president of worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS), welcomed customers, partners, sponsors, and guests to the two-day event. Peterson highlighted the success of AWS customers from the past 18 months, and announced exciting new initiatives from AWS. Check out what you might have missed from the keynote from the AWS Summit Washington, DC.

Discovery Education (DE) provides standards-aligned digital curriculum resources, engaging content, and professional learning for K12 classrooms. Learn how they worked with AWS to enhance its K12 learning platform with machine learning (ML) capabilities.

To offer security conscious enterprises and government agencies the ability to implement important governance and security controls, AWS acquired Wickr in June of 2021. Wickr helps organizations protect their collaboration with a secure and compliant solution. Built with a security-first mindset, Wickr delivers advanced security features not available with traditional communications services.