Category: Public Sector

During the first week of December, students all around the world will learn computer science during the annual Hour of Code event led by Code.org. It’s an important effort, aimed at helping kids from all backgrounds learn to code and work toward successful careers making use of computer science skills.

It’s almost the end of the 2018 calendar year. Still, no signs of holiday fatigue for the public sector blog. Here are the biggest takeaways from November.

The United Nations, World Bank, and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) with support from Amazon Web Services and other technology companies, recently launched the Famine Action Mechanism (FAM). The FAM is the first global mechanism dedicated to preventing future famines. In the past, responses to these devastating events have often come too late, once many lives have already been lost.

On Monday during the Public Sector Partner Advisory Council at AWS re:Invent 2018, we acknowledged the achievement of 17 public sector partners from around the world who have completed the AWS Public Sector Partner Transformation Program (PTP).

Satellites are used by an increasing number universities and governments for applications including weather, surface imaging, communications, and video broadcasts. To do this today, they must build or obtain long-term leases on ground antennas to communicate with the satellites. This is a significant undertaking and cost because customers often require antennas in multiple countries to maintain satellite connectivity. Beginning with the recently announced AWS Ground Station, customers can save up to 80% of their ground station costs by only paying for satellite communications when their organization needs them.

Today at re:Invent, the AWS Public Sector Breakfast focused on tech for good. Read below for the key takeaways.

AWS Educate released significant enhancements to its job board and career-management tools for members to create a pipeline of cloud-ready students for companies that use AWS. The program, available at no cost to students and educators around the world, is also launching the AWS Educate Interview Accelerator in the U.S. and then followed by additional countries, putting qualified students in the fast lane to job opportunities.

We announced the Authority to Operate (ATO) on AWS program, which provides resources to Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who aspire to achieve a compliance authorization, such as FedRAMP, Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), Payment Card Industry (PCI), Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS), and many other compliance programs.

With re:Invent 2018 just a few days away, take the opportunity to meet our AWS Public Sector Competency Partners who will be sponsoring an exhibiting with us in Las Vegas. Within the APN, the AWS Competency Program validates our partners’ solutions to ensure they have deep expertise and proven customer success in their chosen focus areas – government, education, and nonprofits.

RoboGen™ is an open-source educational and research platform for the co-evolution of robot bodies and brains. It was developed at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL led by Professor Dario Floreano with the focus on evolving robots, which has a capability to introduce new body morphology and actuation that have never been imagined before. The team’s goal is to develop a low-cost, simple and versatile platform for research, answering questions around embodied cognition, crossing the reality gap, and learning via Darwinian principles.