Category: Nonprofit

Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO, Andy Jassy, spoke with Teresa Carlson, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS, in a fireside chat at the 2019 AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC. The conversation spanned a variety of topics including how AWS is helping public sector customers accelerate their pace of innovation, how organizations can leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence, the unwavering support of AWS for our defense and national security customers, and the critical nature of moving fast to solve public sector challenges.

As cloud transforms the public sector, every organization has the ability to think big and transform their ability to achieve their mission. From enabling the workforce to securing data to finding the right tool for the right job, organizations can design for a future of continual innovation, enabled by AWS. See below for the 15 highlights, speakers, and announcements from the Tuesday Keynote at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC.

Calling all nonprofits with technology-driven projects! We are now accepting applications for the 2019 AWS Imagine Grant Program from eligible 501(c) nonprofit organizations in the United States. New this year, organizations have the opportunity to receive up to $100,000 in unrestricted funding and up to $100,000 in AWS Promotional Credits, in addition to other capacity-building resources, including AWS training and implementation support.

The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) announced the 21 projects from 17 developing countries that will be awarded $1.5 million USD worth of cloud services, grants, and technical support through the Earth Observation Cloud Credits Programme. Under the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), this programme will enable Earth observations and applications to support sustainable environmental development including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

During a research project at the University of Southampton in the UK, Professor Mike Santer was researching the use of mobile phones in Sub-Saharan Africa. His research led him to wonder how the power of the Internet can be brought to the 3 billion unconnected people in the world? Eventually, his enquiry led him to co-found BluPoint Ltd., a startup with a mission to develop Internet solutions for places where connectivity is either intermittent, non-existent, or cost-prohibitive.

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.

Today, on Red Nose Day, we are shining a light on the annual campaign to end child hunger. In the US alone, there are approximately 15.5 million impoverished children. Studies show that suffering from food insecurity can have lifelong effects on children, contributing to physical and mental health problems and lower academic performance. To address this issue, nonprofits are discovering that technology is a powerful resource to use on behalf of the populations they serve. Learn how one campaign – No Kid Hungry – is using data and technology to help end childhood hunger:

Listen closely… can you hear the rainforest? Rainforest Connection is a 501c3 that creates technology to empower protectors of the rainforest who wish to end illegal deforestation in real-time. But, when a tree falls in the forest, how many people are around to hear it? A quick look at the facts shows why this issue is relevant to anyone reading this post.

The mission of the Allen Institute for Brain Science is to accelerate our understanding of how the human brain works in health and disease. As part of this mission, scientists collect massive amounts of data, which is publicly released to help accelerate research in the field of neuroscience. Massive datasets can be challenging to share, so the Allen Institute uses AWS to share them around the world.

Radiant Earth Foundation is a nonprofit focused on delivering open geospatial data and analytics to the global development community (GDC) in support of their missions to address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other key targets. Radiant Earth supports GDC by aggregating open geospatial data and providing access through its cloud-based platform, generating open Earth Observation (EO) machine learning tools and training data libraries, and creating new metadata standards through its MLHub Earth initiative. Additionally, the organization offers training resources to support capacity development and expertise in the geospatial and remote sensing sciences.