Category: Public Sector

For the first-ever Amazon Alexa EdTech Skills Challenge, AWS teamed up with SXSW EDU to challenge United States-based EdTechs to use Alexa to transform education. With six finalists remaining, the event is now virtual and the public can vote for their favorite. People who register to participate and vote will also be entered for a chance to win an Amazon Echo Show (2nd Gen).

I am happy to share that the first AWS Public Sector Summit Online will happen virtually on Tuesday, June 30, 2020. Registration is now open, and we are building an experience that you will be able to access right from your own home. Leading up to the Summit, I am also excited to announce the release of a new, five-part series of the Fix This podcast. I will be one of the guest hosts, and I look forward to speaking with government, education, and healthcare customers about how they are solving some of the world’s most pressing challenges with technology.

Schools are looking for ways to help their students remain productive and connected while learning remotely. End user computing (EUC) helps schools enable remote learning by providing every student access to the applications they need for class on any computer. This means bring the on-premises computer lab experience to the students, virtually. Amazon AppStream 2.0 can help educational institutions create virtual computer lab spaces at scale. AppStream 2.0 is a fully managed application streaming service that offers on-demand access to desktops and applications. Check out five things you should consider when rapidly deploying a virtual computer lab space using Amazon AppStream 2.0.

Today, AWS Educate announced the first cohort for the AWS Educate Student Ambassador Program. The AWS Educate Student Ambassador Program provides student leaders from around the world the opportunity to gain real-life experience while helping their peers gain valuable AWS technical skills to develop successful cloud careers. Through a competitive process that showcased member academic and extracurricular accomplishments, the selected inaugural cohort contains 326 members from over 50 countries and more than 250 higher education institutions.

Public sector organizations are experiencing a high volume of requests for information ranging from health to finances to municipal services. At a time when in-person interaction is limited, citizens can call into contact centers to get the insights they need to make real-time decisions about their health and safety. Many organizations are turning to the cloud to quickly scale and deploy a contact center. But, understanding your cloud contact center at granular level can help better serve your constituents.

The EHDEN Academy is launching a no-cost online e-learning platform to train researchers on the mapping of patient data in the OMOP Common Data Model and the use of Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) tools to perform health analysis. The EHDEN Academy is the global educational resource for those working with data to generate real-world evidence and outcomes research. The EHDEN Academy is open to the public to better support the need for technical expertise in Europe and abroad.

Academic medical centers (AMCs) are under pressure to reduce costs, innovate at scale, and improve operational performance. To do this, they’re turning to the cloud. Two AWS Partner Network (APN) Public Sector Partners used the cloud to create solutions for AMCs that use large datasets to help advance medical research and analyze genomic data. Learn how these two partners are building solutions in the cloud to help AMCs further their mission.

Last December, AWS announced the expansion of its collaboration with the U.S. NOAA to make environmental data easier to access and use through the Big Data Program. Users can now access new, authoritative NOAA data on AWS without needing to download and store their own copies. Researchers and entrepreneurs can deploy compute resources on-demand in the cloud, perform analysis quickly and efficiently, and save costs by letting researchers ask more questions and experiment more easily. One of the foundational datasets now available on AWS through this collaboration is Himawari-8, the Japan Meteorological Agency’s satellite dataset.

Far above the clouds, one of the fastest growing missions for the public sector is taking place. Technological advances and open data initiatives provide new paths to explore space, impacting our lives here on Earth. From satellites to rovers, cloud computing and cloud-enabled technologies help us find answers to our biggest questions.

At the end of 2019, el Servicio Nacional del Aprendiza (SENA) in Colombia graduated 160 students after completing AWS Educate Cloud Career Pathways to build their IT and cloud technology skills. This was the first group of students to graduate after Colombia’s President Iván Duque Márquez and Jeff Kratz, General Manager AWS Public Sector Latin America, Caribbean and Canada, announced a strategic partnership with SENA to train 10,000 students throughout Colombia in IT and cloud technology.