Category: Announcements

In January 2020 at the BETT show in London, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a new contest designed to find some of the best applications of voice technology in education. Our challenge to the EdTechs in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)? Tell us how you would use Alexa to transform education. Check out the six edtech finalists.

For the first-ever Amazon Alexa EdTech Skills Challenge, Amazon Web Services (AWS) teamed up with SXSW EDU to challenge U.S.-based EdTechs on how they would use Alexa to transform education. Out of six finalists, AWS recognized two winners: judges’ choice SayKid, the recipient of $50,000 in AWS Promotional Credit, and people’s choice VOGO Voice, the recipient of $25,000 in AWS Promotional Credit. The other four finalists will receive $10,000 in AWS Promotional Credit.

In September 2020, CEU University will launch the Cloud Computing Program in collaboration with AWS Educate at three Spanish universities: Universidad CEU San Pablo (Madrid), Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera (Valencia), and Universidad Abat Oliba CEU (Barcelona). This is the first program of its kind in Spain. The news was announced during a virtual event on May 14.

The second part of the Mission Critical Cloud Fix This podcast mini-series by Teresa Carlson, vice president of the worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS), is now live. We explored remote education with the Los Angeles County Unified School District (LAUSD), Athabasca University, and Pearson.

As we continue to work with public sector bodies around the world, AWS understands how valuable open source software and development communities are at this time. To accelerate the combined global response to COVID-19, we gathered examples of third-party open code, tools, and standards that reformers in the public sector can immediately use. We’ve included these in a new resource now available in Open Government Solutions.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is now generally available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Now government organizations and commercial organizations in government-regulated industries who adopt Kubernetes as their standard for orchestrating containers can use Amazon EKS to deploy a managed Kubernetes cluster on AWS. According to the 2019 Cloud Native Computing Foundation survey of their community, Amazon EKS is the leading method for deploying Kubernetes.

The COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition is a private-sector led response to COVID-19 that brings together healthcare organizations, technology firms, nonprofits, academia, and startups to preserve the healthcare delivery system and help protect U.S. populations. AWS is a member of the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition, working side by side with leading healthcare providers and researchers such as the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, and ZocDoc. Together, we’re coordinating our collective expertise, capabilities, and data to provide insights to improve clinical outcomes.

Are you a U.S. government employee who is interested in learning about cloud computing? The AWS Training and Certification team is launching an another no-cost virtual series of foundational courses to help you better understand the AWS Cloud, relevant products, common solutions, and architectural best practices for the U.S. Government.

To help researchers learn about cloud computing, AWS curated a list of no-cost, on-demand online courses tailored to researchers’ needs. With the cloud, scientists can quickly analyze massive data pipelines, store petabytes of data, and share their results with collaborators around the world. These online courses are available at any time to help users learn new cloud skills and services.

For the first-ever Amazon Alexa EdTech Skills Challenge, AWS teamed up with SXSW EDU to challenge United States-based EdTechs to use Alexa to transform education. With six finalists remaining, the event is now virtual and the public can vote for their favorite. People who register to participate and vote will also be entered for a chance to win an Amazon Echo Show (2nd Gen).