Category: Government

AWS announced the winners of the inaugural State and Local Government (SLG) Champions Awards at the AWS Imagine Conference in Sacramento, California. The SLG Champions join the AWS Education Champions community, which was launched last year. The Champions program celebrates public sector agencies whose work empowers innovation and transformation in education and government using the AWS Cloud.

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.

AWS announced the 13 startups selected to participate in the AWS European Defence Accelerator. The startups offer solutions to help the European Defence industry enhance its energy resilience, secure information sharing, sensing and decision making, quantum, and cyber resilience for mission-critical needs for land, air, maritime, space, and cyber domains. Applications were invited from startups around the globe who are interested in doing business with defence and national security organizations across Europe.

States are reevaluating the resiliency, security, and adaptability of their unemployment insurance (UI) systems. The AWS whitepaper, Why Unemployment Insurance Systems Belong in the Cloud, explores lessons learned from the pandemic – and provides opportunities for a path forward. While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to modernization, we propose five tenets to anchor a vision of modern UI benefits systems and explore the different technical approaches to realize that vision.

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.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are transforming many industries. But although public sector organizations are realizing the benefits of these technologies, there are many remaining challenges, including biases and a lack of transparency, that limit the wider adoption to unlock the full potential of AI and ML. In this post, learn a high-level framework for how AWS can help you address these challenges and provide better outcomes for constituents.

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.

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.

How can leaders transform good ideas into the kinds of services that change lives? That’s the central question of the IMAGINE conference from AWS, a two-day, no-cost event for state and local government and education leaders. From July 11-12, 2023 in Sacramento, CA, leaders from across state and local government and education will gather to learn more about how to transform public services to deliver for students, constituents, and communities. Will we see you there? Register now for the IMAGINE 2023 conference in Sacramento.

At the AWS Public Sector Partner Forum on the second day of the AWS Summit Washington, DC, Jeff Kratz shared how AWS is inventing and simplifying for AWS Partners, and innovating on behalf of our customers. More than 350 AWS Partners joined for the AWS Partner Forum, but there are thousands more around the world that weren’t able to join. Learn some of the highlights, announcements, and more from the forum.