Category: Nonprofit

nauticAi is a maritime startup from Finland, specializing in affordable intelligent awareness solutions for ship operators. The company’s BOQA-solution (Bridge Operations Quality Assurance) automates the Operational Quality Assurance of maritime operations with proven methods from the flight industry. A few key components in their solution include open weather data from NOAA and Finnish FMI, Internet of Things (IoT) technology, and a serverless AWS architecture using AWS Lambda and Amazon Aurora. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, we invited Capt. Henrik Ramm-Schmidt, CEO and founder of nauticAi, to share the story of nauticAi with us.

Managing water crises is one of the Sustainable Development Goals and the decline in the available quality and quantity of fresh water is ranked as one of the top ten most serious societal risks by the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Global Risks report. Using satellite imagery available through the AWS Open Data Program and the AWS Cloud, BlueDot Observatory is establishing a global monitoring system for all at-risk water bodies. This monitoring reveals a sad truth – the total loss of water bodies is in the not too distant future.

We invited Anze Zupanc, a data scientist who manages the BlueDot Observatory at Sinergise, to share how the AWS Open Data Program and the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative support this work.

At AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, Compassion International participated in the Nonprofit Hackathon for Social Good. People don’t usually connect the dots between cutting-edge technology and nonprofits, but this is where it’s needed most. Hackers were challenged to bridge the communication gap between those in need and empathetic people who want to help. No matter your origin or the language you speak, you can connect and meet the needs of a child in poverty.

There is no one-size-fits-all profile of the ideal artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) customer, user, or developer. AWS is making AI and ML technologies more accessible with managed services that let anyone embed intelligence into their applications. It is why some of the most exciting uses for AI and ML are coming from unexpected places – public sector organizations with a mission to make the world a better place. Learn from some of the many public sector customers re-defining what it means to use AI to solve big challenges.

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications sound cool but what’s real and what’s hype? How do you start to put your arms around this and help your organization solve specific challenges? If you’re curious to see what AI and ML can do for specific missions, join us for AWS Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Week from March 25 – 29, 2019.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the British Heart Foundation (BHF) hosted a hackathon on January 22nd and February 5th. The hackathon provided AWS technologists and APN Partners with a collaborative opportunity to contribute to the greater good, innovating to solve some of the challenges the charity currently faces with its operations and objectives. Like many charities, the BHF is entirely reliant on the public’s generosity to fund its lifesaving research and receives no government funding. With around seven million people in the UK living with heart and circulatory diseases, all participants have made a valuable investment to the cause.

After missing several elections as a graduate student living away from home, Seth Flaxman set out to build a reminder system alongside friend and classmate Kathryn Peters so no one would have to miss an election again. Energized by a vision to make voting a simple, seamless experience, Seth and Kathryn started Democracy Works, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to changing the status quo. Democracy Works set out to build the tools needed to upgrade the infrastructure of our democracy and improve the voting experience for voters and election officials.

At the 2018 AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, AWS made many new product announcements that could transform government, education, and nonprofit missions and operations. Below is our curated list of the top ten takeaways from re:Invent 2018 for you to try this year.

Happy New Year! As we start off 2019, we wanted to share the most popular posts from 2018. With a focus on developing our next-generation of cloud practitioners to best practices to get started in your cloud environment, read the top ten blog posts from the AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofit blog.

My grandma is 88-years old with reduced mobility. She lives alone, without a caretaker, in a small village. If she falls, then she is in danger. If something goes wrong when she’s in bed, she might need assistance. With an AWS IoT button, she can call for help in a simple way and potentially save her life. Her village provides free Wi-Fi coverage, so I built an emergency alert system using AWS. When she clicks the AWS IoT button, a series of events will take place to get her the assistance she needs. This can help her in difficult situations. It’s a solution that others can create as well. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to get started.