AWS Public Sector Blog
Category: Customer Solutions
Using the cloud to integrate homelessness data with whole-person care services
Without a safe place to sleep at night, it’s hard to focus on employment, staying healthy, raising a family — the building blocks of a good life. In communities across the country, organizations, philanthropists, and government are working hard to make homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurring. In many cases, they’re using AWS to coordinate their response.
Making financial aid simple for students and staff: How Highline College collaborated with AWS on a financial aid tracking tool
As student enrollment begins to stabilize at colleges and universities, higher education leaders are focused on supporting equitable access to postsecondary education. Many leaders are turning to technology to address systemic barriers to education by making services more transparent, efficient, and simple for learners and staff. Together with AWS, Highline College’s financial aid department created a key tool that helped eliminate one such barrier.
How Xavier University of Louisiana’s migration to AWS is creating a “technology renaissance”
In 2022, Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA) launched their journey to future-proofing with the cloud. Modernizing the university’s technology was a top priority to help improve the security of the university, improve business continuity, and solve the unique challenges of the university’s location. Working together with AWS and AWS Partners Strata Information Group and VMware, XULA migrated over 90 percent of its critical systems to the cloud, boosted its cybersecurity posture, and reduced IT costs.
Using data-driven solutions to end homelessness with the cloud
Community Solutions is a US-based nonprofit working to end homelessness through its Built for Zero program, a movement uniting with cities across the US to bridge strategy and support to reduce homelessness. The AWS Fix This podcast sat down with the Community Solutions team to see how it uses AWS to unlock data to measure and monitor its progress. Plus, representatives from the nonprofit Coming Home of Middlesex County, based in New Jersey, joined to discuss how Middlesex County and Community Solutions are working together to create a future where no one is left behind.
How EdIndia Foundation uses AWS to upskill teachers and increase student success
EdIndia Foundation is an Indian nonprofit organization whose mission is to create innovative solutions that impact the quality of education at scale. EdIndia’s research showed that between the ages of 8–11, there is a stark difference in learning outcomes of students taught by high-performing teachers compared with low-performing teachers. EdIndia saw an opportunity to address this problem using AWS.
Creating real-time flood alerts with the cloud
The Latin America and Caribbean region is the second most disaster-prone region in the world behind Asia and the Pacific Rim, with floods being the most common disaster in the region. There have been extraordinary levels of flooding around the world—but in Panama, flooding has become particularly challenging. The AWS Disaster Preparedness and Response Team and AWS Partner Grupo TX saw an opportunity to leverage the cloud to better understand and prepare for flooding and ultimately save lives.
Accelerating economic research at UBC with high performance computing using RONIN and AWS
Dr. Kevin Leyton-Brown and Neil Newman are computer scientists at the University of British Columbia (UBC) working at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and microeconomic theory. Their research demands large-scale, high-performance computing, in episodic bursts, to run parallel simulations of complex auctions. When Leyton-Brown and Newman began research into the computationally complex auction theory behind the 2016 United States wireless spectrum auction, their ML models required significantly more computing power than their on-premises infrastructure could provide. The UBC team turned to RONIN, an AWS Partner, and the virtually unlimited infrastructure of the AWS Cloud, to accelerate their time to answers and new discoveries.
Alzheimer’s disease research portal enables data sharing and scientific discovery at scale
The National Institute on Aging Genetics of Alzheimer’s Disease Data Storage Site (NIAGADS DSS), powered by AWS, is a genomic database that provides access to publicly available datasets for Alzheimer’s disease and related neuropathologies. Created to make Alzheimers-genetics knowledge more accessible to researchers, NIAGADS has genomics data on 172,701 samples from 98 datasets and is now 1.3 petabytes (PB) in total size. NIAGADS is creating a system that promotes scientific discovery through data sharing with a large cadre of institutions.
How Hartnell College recovered critical systems using AWS after a cyber attack
Cyber events are unfortunately becoming a common event in higher education. When Hartnell College experienced a cyber event in 2022, they used AWS while working with AWS Partner Ferrilli to recover and rebuild their systems. Based on the lessons learned from Hartnell College’s experience, higher education leaders can explore certain steps to better prevent and prepare against cyber events.
Unifying nonprofit healthcare data using Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud
Nonprofit organizations tend to have a lot of data that resides in systems that don’t interact with each other. For organizations in the nonprofit healthcare industry, this problem is made more difficult to manage by the sheer volume of data that they collect. Solving this data unification problem is the reason that Collibra, an AWS Partner, built the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud. Froedtert and the Medical College of Wisconsin (F&MCW), a nonprofit academic medical center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, uses the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud on AWS to unify access to diverse datasets to improve patient outcomes.