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With October already in the rear-view mirror, take a look at the month’s highlights from the public sector blog.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) is a worldwide organization for law enforcement leadership to communicate new ideas, share experiences, disseminate information, and build relationships with other law enforcement entities. This year’s conference included sessions on trends in the law enforcement environment, new ideas, technology, and real-world applications. Here are some of the topics that AWS and our network of partners and solutions providers are working on to improve with law enforcement.

Age UK is the UK’s largest charity dedicated to helping everyone make the most of later life. They have the vision to make the UK a great place to grow older and they work every day to achieve this by providing companionship, advice, and support for older people who need it most. Scalability, cost savings, and security are key in delivering Age UK’s services to more than 7 million people every year. In 2012, Age UK turned to AWS to help revamp their technology to better support the older generation in the UK.

Last week, we hosted our fifth annual AWS Public Sector Summit in Canberra, Australia. More than 1,100 government, education, and nonprofit attendees from across the region attended the Summit, which featured 35 breakout sessions within seven tracks.
In this blog post, we recap the major themes coming from the event.

With the heat of summer came another hot month for the public sector blog. Here is a look at the top five posts from August.

Last year, we shared a post about the Nonprofit Open Data Collective and how a consortium of nonprofits and researchers came together to make the data from the IRS’s 990 filings easier to work with. As a follow-up, we spoke with David Borenstein, one of the driving forces behind the Nonprofit Open Data Collective, about his new project: Open990.

Since the launch of the AWS Canada (Central) Region in December 2016, many organizations have begun using AWS to transform Canadian healthcare infrastructure and services. The entities use AWS to help lower the cost of IT services, provide more focus on patients, improve data security and compliance, improve healthcare clinician and staff productivity, and begin resolving major health problems impacting the general population. From data center migration to machine learning, healthcare authorities, hospitals, and service providers have been focused on the following key trends.

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.

From skin cancer detection through the SkinVision app to a virtual tour of the White House through the White House Experience app, technology is bringing the previously unimaginable into the hands of the public. Over 100 customers shared their stories of cloud transformation at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C, and we had a front row seat to the action.

While the fires spread in Sonoma County in October 2017, the focus was on fighting the flames that burned more than 110,000 acres and on helping the citizens displaced from their homes get access to emergency response resources. In addition to shelter, food, and water, time was another important resource. Citizens have high expectations for government services, whether at the state or municipal level, especially in the aftermath of a disaster. Immediately following the Sonoma County fires, the staffing resources in place could not handle the demands required to provide services and educate the public on what resources were available. To scale to meet the demands of citizens, QLess, an innovator in customer-interaction management (CIM) technology, worked around the clock to deploy its Amazon Web Services (AWS)-hosted solution for Sonoma County in a single weekend.