Category: Government

Cal Poly has announced the Satellite Data Solutions (SDS) Initiative to support the growing opportunity to solve the planets most critical challenges with low earth orbit (LEO) satellite data. The DxHub will work closely with the AWS Ground Station team to test and improve satellite connectivity and improve access to satellite-acquired data to solve problems. Through the DxHub and the SDS Initiative, students and faculty will have access to AWS services, technologies, and technical expertise to experiment with ‘born-in-the-cloud’ solutions that build on, and add to, space-based data analytics.

AWS Competency Partners have the expertise to help you succeed at each stage of your cloud journey. The AWS Competency Program helps you identify and choose top APN Partners that have been vetted, validated, and verified by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Guidance from these partners can provide value-added services and solutions, leading to bigger results that help organizations at any stage of their cloud adoption journey. At the AWS Public Sector Summit, we highlighted the following APN Partners who were recently awarded AWS Government and Education Competency designations.

Recreation.gov is your gateway to discover America’s Outdoors and more. From trip planning to information sharing to reservations, the webpage is the one-stop shop to plan your American adventure. As a digital portal to 3,500 federal areas and over 100,000 facilities and activities, the webpage needs the right technology to bring the outdoors to your computer screen. Booz Allen Hamilton designed a new Recreation.gov website that launched in the fall of 2018 that runs completely on AWS. The website personalizes the user experience through data analytics and recommendation engines, while keeping all data secure.

From inside the classroom to inside the human brain, the blog stretched to new heights this past month. Check out five of our best posts from the month of May.

NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover is heading to the red planet. Submit your name by September 30, 2019, and fly along! NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) launched their serverless website on AWS – Send Your Name to Mars. People around the world can now submit their names to be inscribed on the Mars Rover and sent 313 million miles away to Mars in 2020.

The world’s leading digital governments rely on the cloud’s flexibility, innovation, and scale to empower officials with the insight they need to deliver top-tier public services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) helps governments become digital organizations, which enables them to focus on their core mission – serving citizens.

As technology makes it easier to connect with constituents, state and local governments are looking to build systems centered around and empowered by the citizen experience. This is especially the case with health and social services agencies. Public health systems often struggle to connect data across agencies and systems—leaving some communities without the insights they need to optimally allocate resources or to take action in the face of emerging epidemics. In a keynote address to over 800 government health IT leaders, Taha Kass-Hout, senior leader of healthcare and artificial intelligence at Amazon Web Services (AWS), said, “It’s not for a lack of technology, and it’s not for a lack of passion. It’s about the difficulty alleviating the heavy lifting that leaves agencies extremely resource constrained.”

Tonight’s Fed 100 gala marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Federal 100 awards. These awards recognize the important work that federal government and industry leaders are doing with the help of technology.

Congratulations to the 100 women and men recognized and a special shout out to these two cloud leaders who are playing a critical role in modernizing government: Kevin Smith, CIO, U.S. Census Bureau, and Richard “Rick” Jack, Distinguished C4ISR Software Engineer (SSTM), SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific, U.S. Department of the Navy.

Communities across the country are searching for ways to end homelessness. Many experts point to disparate data as an inhibitor to understand and address the needs of individuals experiencing homelessness. Although the causes of homelessness vary, people who find themselves homeless often interact with multiple agencies – housing, healthcare, law enforcement, and nonprofits providing support services. But those organizations rarely share information with each other – a challenge that, if addressed, can be a game changer in the national efforts to prevent and combat homelessness.

Cities spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to do point-in-time traffic studies. Those studies assist cities in planning traffic signal timings and detours during street-closures. The City of Louisville, Kentucky, was paying every year for traffic studies and analysis and was getting static reports back. Instead, Louisville decided to use real-time congestion data freely available to governments through the Waze CCP (Connected Citizens Program). Combined with other information like built environment data and collision reports, Louisville could bring this together in the cloud for advanced analytics.