Category: Public Sector

Robotics and machine learning (ML) aren’t just for the technology industry. Robotics are being used in education to advance student learning through one-to-one support, adaptive learning algorithms, and immediate feedback mechanisms within K12 schools. Robots can use ML algorithms to adapt to student learning styles, teaching children to code through interactive, fun games and supporting core curriculum in classrooms with high student to teacher ratios. These four Amazon Web Services (AWS) EdStart Members are using robotics to revolutionize K12 education.

Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 specifies the security requirements for cryptographic modules that protect sensitive information. It is the current United States and Canadian government standard, and is applicable to systems that are required to be compliant with Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) or Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). In this blog, we demonstrate how to enable FIPS mode in Amazon Linux 2 and verify that unauthorized cryptographic functions are not being used in OpenSSL or the OpenSSH server.

The AWS Public Sector Summit Online 2020 is happening June 30 and registration is still open and at no-cost. Teresa Carlson, vice president of worldwide public sector at AWS, will host the event keynote, reflecting on the impressive global efforts of our customers and partners over the past few months and sharing the latest news and announcements. Three customers—from Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training, Navy ERP, and OTN—will join her on our virtual stage to tell their stories focused on fast migration, business resiliency, scalability, and innovation.

In May 2020, the AWS Public Sector Blog covered stories on the AWS Public Sector Summit Online 2020, chatbots and call centers, and open source solutions. Check out some of the top stories from the blog below. For more blog highlights from this month, you can also check out The Brief, hosted this month by Mike Colson.

Forest wildfire risk is increasing in the western United States. In the past five decades, large wildfire frequency and the area destroyed have risen by more than four and six times, respectively. The increased risk posed by wildfires has prompted scientists to try to assess wildfire risk to help inform whether to move people to safety before disastrous wildfires occur.

K12 educational organizations are modernizing their institutions by providing secure anywhere, anytime access to learning for students. Whether a district or school is a cloud veteran or forging new ground, the cloud is helping break down barriers to opportunity, like the ability to access applications through any device. By using the cloud, many K12 institutions—including schools, districts, educational service agencies, and state education agencies—are having breakthroughs in educational models and student engagement.

One year ago, the state of Louisiana announced a collaboration with AWS to launch statewide an AWS Educate cloud associate degree program. Built in collaboration with the Office of the Governor John Bel Edwards, Greater New Orleans, Inc., and the Louisiana Community and Technical College System (LCTCS), the program provides cloud computing opportunities across the 12 LCTCS colleges. After the first year of the program, LCTCS provided an update on how the program continues to grow and scale.

The breadth of challenges that can be addressed by overhead imagery is broad and continues to grow as new and improved sensors are deployed. To make the best use of this data, you need to have high-quality training data—data that you know is true (often called ground truth data) so that your algorithms can learn from it. A lack of this high-quality labeled training data continues to impede progress in many areas of remote sensing analytics, including machine learning. Two of the SpaceNet collaborators, Capella Space and AWS, are providing access to a unique dataset to help foster innovation in geospatial-based artificial intelligence. Learn more about Earth observation data, the SpaceNet 6 Challenge, and available datasets.

The third episode of the Mission Critical Cloud Fix This podcast mini-series by Teresa Carlson, vice president of the worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS), is now live. We dove into how the cloud helps state and local government customers deliver critical services to citizens. Interviews featured in the podcast include the state of West Virginia (WV), Smartronix, and Los Angeles County Internal Services Department (LA County ISD). You can stream all episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn, Overcast, iHeartRadio, and via RSS.

Government agencies and public sector organizations in energy and utilities rely on smart solutions to detect, locate, and fix utilities outages faster based on input from their customer contact centers and field crews. One popular outage management solution (OMS) is Schneider Electric’s ArcFM Responder (Responder) OMS. In this post, we discuss how to deploy the Schneider Electric’s Responder environment on AWS.