AWS Public Sector Blog

Category: Nonprofit

4 ways conversational AI and Amazon Lex help the public sector transform customer engagement

Public sector organizations want to innovate the way they engage their communities to make information easier to access, improve user experience, expand their reach by supporting multiple communication channels, and improve efficiency and scalability through intelligent automation. Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots can be used to transform the customer experience, enhance engagement, improve services, and help scale more simply.

Announcing the keynote speakers for the AWS Summit – Washington, DC

The AWS Summit – Washington, DC keynote will be hosted by Max Peterson, vice president of public sector at AWS. Peterson will take a look at the latest innovative advancements happening across the public sector and share key learnings on how organizations can continue to push boundaries with the cloud. Learn more about the inspiring guest speakers who will join him on stage to explain how they are leveraging the cloud to further drive their missions.

Barnes Foundation takes art education virtual and reaches record number of new learners

The Barnes Foundation is home to a legendary art collection, including some of the world’s most important impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings. At the core of its mission is the advancement of education and art appreciation. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person tours and classes, the Barnes Foundation used the cloud to quickly pivot to develop and launch new online programming to continue to deliver their educational mission, and allowed them to triple enrollment in online courses for adults and reach 40 percent more school-age students during the 2020-2021 school year compared to in-person courses in pre-pandemic years.

AWS Startup Ramp now available in South Korea and South East Asia

The AWS Startup Ramp is a program for early-stage startups building solutions in health, digital government, smart cities, agriculture, and space technology, and is dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs as they build, launch, and grow. AWS Startup Ramp works to remove barriers for entrepreneurs who want to make an impact in the public sector by providing technical design and architecture reviews, mentorship, credits, and support with go-to-market plans to help navigate the complex regulatory and security requirements in the public sector.

Celebrate Open Science Week with the Allen Institute and available open datasets

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.

Amateur radio meets edge computing to keep disaster response teams connected

In the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, cell towers, power lines, and telephone and internet cable are often damaged or destroyed, limiting the ability for responders to share data and access the internet. The AWS Disaster Response team conducted a field testing operation designed to replicate a common disaster response scenario, to show how to establish an ad-hoc network at field sites with limited connectivity and create a link to an office headquarters to provide access to cloud-based resources and data to responders in the field.

It’s back: Register for the in-person AWS Summit in Washington, DC

Registration is now open for the no-cost, in-person AWS Summit Washington, DC, taking place September 28-29, 2021 at Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. Deepen your cloud knowledge and gain new skills to design and deploy solutions in the cloud to accelerate your mission. Across breakout sessions, chalk talks, builders’ sessions, workshops, and more, learn how the public sector is innovating in a post-pandemic world.

Spreading good and sharing content globally, quickly, and securely with the cloud

Goodnet is an organization with a mission to share the good things happening globally. AWS allows Goodnet to disseminate video and written content to audiences all over the world to help spread positivity. Specifically, Amazon CloudFront supports the delivery of their online articles, newsletters, and videos to distribute content to their large community of viewers and readers quickly and safely, no matter where they are in the world. Learn more about Goodnet in this guest post from their team.

Nonprofits save time and money with AWS Lambda: How to set up a function

Nonprofit need solutions that help them spend less money and time on IT infrastructure and allow them to further core goals. AWS Lambda can help. Learn how AWS Lambda can reduce IT management burden and how to create an example AWS Lambda function that streamlines how nonprofits cut down their AWS spend.

How open data from weather radar helps scientists improve environmental understanding

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.