Category: Public Sector

Saint Louis University (SLU) will become the first university to bring virtual personal assistants into every student residence on its campus and to equip them with a private, SLU-specific skill through Alexa for Business. This fall, SLU plans to place more than 2,300 Amazon Echo Dots in residence hall rooms and student apartments.

AWS Educate members now have access to expanded features provided by educational cloud-lab environment provider, Vocareum. The new features provide simple, secure, and no-cost learning environments for educators and students to leverage AWS on projects, assignments, and other classroom environments without needing a credit card.

The AWS Competency Program highlights top AWS Partner Network (APN) partners who have demonstrated technical proficiency and customer success in specialized solution or industry areas. Within the public sector, we have Education Competency Partners and Government Competency Partners. Today, we are adding a third competency: the Nonprofit Competency.

Many nonprofits are called upon in mission-critical situations, when they don’t have time to waste on IT because lives may be on the line. The new AWS Disaster Response Program enables disaster response organizations access to cloud services at the edge, even in the harshest conditions.

Are you a nonprofit organization using technology as a mission-critical component of your projects? Are you looking for support to pursue your technology-driven goals? The AWS Imagine Grant is a public grant opportunity open to registered 501(c) nonprofit organizations in the United States, who are using technology to solve the world’s most pressing challenges. As part of the program, we are seeking proposals for pilot projects, proof of concepts, strategic technology planning, or existing programs that utilize technology in a new or expanded way.

Imagine you are on a city street surrounded by skyscrapers. When you look up to the stars, you will only see the part of the sky that is not blocked by buildings. This type of vision is called sky view factor (SVF). The SVF denotes the ratio between the radiation received at a point on Earth and the available radiation for a hemisphere over that point. Dr. Andrea Pagani, a data scientist at the DataLab of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, has been looking at how to efficiently compute the SVF for the Netherlands. Read on to learn more about Dr. Pagani’s work to help us understand what’s between us and the sky – and why that matters.

July was another busy month for the AWS Public Sector blog. Here are the top five posts you won’t want to miss. 1. Microsoft Windows on AWS: How to Bring Microsoft Apps to AWS When you plan your data center migration to the cloud, it’s critical to consider how workloads will run for maximum performance […]

According to the World Wildlife Fund, approximately three billion people in the world rely on both wild-caught and farmed seafood as their primary source of protein; yet the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that eighty-five percent of marine fish stocks are either fully exploited or overfished. To combat this, the annual Fishackathon, first organized by the U.S. Secretary of State’s Office of Global Partnerships in 2014 and organized this year in partnership with HackerNest, took place in over 40 cities around the globe.

To kick off the AWS Opioid Crisis Council’s inaugural meeting, AWS public health leader, Michael Jackson, convened a panel of healthcare experts at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC. Government health officials, research scientists, pharmacy executives, and industry pioneers examined proposed solutions with open data, and shared ideas for attacking this complex issue. All stakeholders rallied around a common customer: our community.

Over the past decade, consecutive administrations and the U.S. Congress have focused on IT modernization, issuing policies, directives, and passing legislation to help agencies move from legacy systems to modern commercial technologies. Policies that embrace cloud help save the government and taxpayer money and become more efficient, customer-focused, and secure. The following is a brief timeline of the U.S. government’s continued journey to the cloud.