Category: Regions

Despite its abundance of natural resources, Colombia has the fourth highest rate of deforestation worldwide. To help battle deforestation and illegal logging, Amazon Web Services (AWS), in collaboration with the United States Embassy in Colombia and Jorge Tadeo University (UTadeo), sponsored the Zoo Hackathon event in Bogota in November 2019.

Social information systems – how we share information – use both public systems such as social media and private systems internal to organizations such as internal blogs and wikis. The MUAS Digital Transformation Lab is experimenting with a number of theoretical concepts to create a research framework on social information systems. The goal is to reduce polarization in opinion-forming processes, help people avoid false news, and increase social cohesion by reducing social media “bubbles” and increasing the range of information sources.

United Arab Emirates-based global EdTech Alef Education is on a mission to digitally transform the education sector to support its most valuable resource: teachers. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics estimates that the world needs almost 69 million new teachers by 2030 to meet the deadline of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal for quality education. But according to latest projections, the world will fail its education commitments without addressing the teacher shortage.

Almost 2,000 Amazonians – one-third from Amazon Web Services (AWS) – led 280 events globally in more than 20 countries and 160 cities to teach children ages 5-18 to code as part of the 2019 Hour of Code. Check out what AWS employees had to say about their Hour of Code experience.

The Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance (CGPS) is based at the Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge and The Big Data Institute, University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Much of its work involves collaborating with laboratories around the world to enhance genomic surveillance by using big data, engineering, training, and genomic capacity building. Ultimately, the Centre hopes to enable the linking and real-time interpretation of data globally to track pathogens and antimicrobial resistance at an affordable rate. Typically, spikes in cost for research are a common challenge for laboratories. With the cloud, the team wanted to mitigate their costs, and particularly those of their partners in low and middle-income countries, by exploring the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud’s pay-as-you-go infrastructure.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Bahrain hosted its first artificial intelligence (AI) two-week hackathon, culminating at the AWS Summit in Bahrain. Twenty-six students in eight teams from the University of Bahrain (UoB) went deep into innovation, fun, and development. Bahrain has a national focus on developing digital skills for its citizens.

After ten years in retail, Bode Popoola saw his future in technology and decided to make a career change. Originally from Nigeria, Bode attended the Technological University of Ireland (TUI) in Dublin, Ireland, where he studied computer science and information technology. For his final class project, he focused on cloud computing, and thanks to one of his professors, he learned about AWS Educate. Using his knowledge of cloud computing as well as AWS services to help him prepare, Bode applied for – and got – an internship at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Bode now works as a cloud support associate in Dublin.

At the first Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Sector Summit in New Delhi, India more than 1,000 technologists gathered to learn about digital transformation through cloud technologies, get inspired, dive deep, and begin to build. AWS customers highlighted the groundbreaking work done in India through technology to improve the lives of the more than one billion Indian citizens. Read more for some highlights from the AWS Public Sector Summit New Delhi, including simplifying the delivery of citizen services in rural India, a new vision for the data-driven city in India, and skilling and re-skilling the workforce of the future.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a consortium of Bay Area community colleges along with their K12 and California State University partners, launched a regional initiative to prepare students for jobs in one of the fastest-growing, and highest-paying, areas in the technology field: cloud computing. The schools include City College of San Francisco, Canada College, De Anza College, Evergreen Valley College, Foothill College, Las Positas College, College of San Mateo, Mission College, SIATech High Schools and Skyline College.

One of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s biggest events is the annual Department of Defense Intelligence Information System (DoDIIS) Conference. In August, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) brought together over 3,700 experts and innovators from government and industry at DoDIIS to share their insights on this year’s conference theme – Resiliency, Redundancy and Security: Adapting to Asymmetric Threats. For years, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has helped the federal government harness the power of the cloud to transform its mission and create a better world by enabling rapid sourcing, enrichment, and analysis of massive amounts of global data to reveal insight and actionable intelligence.