Category: Open Source

As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), AWS invited Seán Lynch, the founder of OpenLitterMap, to share how AWS technologies and open data are helping to solve global challenges like biodiversity loss and plastic pollution with citizen science. Solutions like OpenLitterMap help unlock the potential that a global abundance of technology has for the collection and dissemination of pertinent data that is an instrumental part of positive social change.

As part of the Registry of Open Data on AWS, AWS invited Alexander Rey, creator of Pirate Weather, to share how AWS technologies and open data are supporting his efforts to provide a no cost and open weather forecast API.

Today, the winners of the first Future of Government Awards were announced. The Future of Government Awards is a program recognizing the people and projects leading public sector digital transformation around the world. We received more than 150 nominations from 52 countries across three categories for this year’s awards. In this blog post, meet the winners and learn their stories.

Nominations are now open for the Future of Government Awards, a new global awards program to recognize the people and projects leading the digital transformation of governments around the world. The Future of Government Awards program seeks to celebrate the hidden public sector heroes who work tirelessly to modernize their governments to improve citizen services. The awards champion innovative technology solutions that the public sector has created and shared—as well as the stories of government organizations that have successfully adapted and reused them. Nominate a public sector digital transformation hero today.

In 2017, the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF) founded the Childhood Cancer Data Lab (Data Lab) to address an important gap in the pediatric cancer field: vast amounts of accumulated data were not being put to use at scale. To address this gap, the Data Lab used AWS to build refine.bio, an openly available collection of normalized bulk gene expression data, to make public datasets interoperable and reusable.

In my time working for the UK government’s Digital Marketplace as the service manager, I saw first-hand the benefits of open source in government. Combined with transparent processes, using open source solutions helped streamline digital project execution, build trust with constituents and the global community, and save time and money. Now, as the senior manager of government services (GovServices) at AWS, and as a teacher for the AWS Institute Executive Education Program, I want to share best practices for government leaders looking to use open source solutions.

Terabytes of Earth Observation (EO) data are collected each day, quickly leading to petabyte-scale datasets. By bringing these datasets to the cloud, users can use the compute and analytics resources of the cloud to reliably scale with growing needs. In this post, we show you how to set up a Pangeo solution with Kubernetes, Dask, and Jupyter notebooks step-by-step on Amazon Web Services (AWS), to automatically scale cloud compute resources and parallelize workloads across multiple Dask worker nodes.

The Allen Institute seeks to understand how our brains, cells, and immune systems work when we are healthy and, ultimately, how they go wrong in disease. Allen researchers have generated and shared atlases that map the brain, gene-edited stem cell lines, and many more resources that have been used by millions of scientists around the world to accelerate their research. In collaboration with AWS and the Registry of Open Data on AWS, they make many of their datasets publicly available. In celebration of Open Science Week, check out some of these open datasets from the Allen Institute, and their impact on the research community.

Weather radars see more than just the weather: they see smoke from fires, meteors, birds, mayflies, and almost anything else in the atmosphere. This makes weather radars an invaluable tool for scientists seeking to further the understanding of atmospheric processes and anything else that happens to be flying through the radar’s field of view. The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) seeks to accelerate sustainability-related innovation and research by helping to minimizing the cost and time required to store, acquire, and analyze large weather and climate datasets.

Governments have similar problems and are not in competition, so using technology that others have developed and made freely available via open source to transform essential services makes sense. To make open source solutions easier to find for governments, AWS recently created an online repository: Open Government Solutions.