AWS Public Sector Blog

The botany department at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the UBC Data Science Institute are working together to research the evolution and genetic makeup of sunflowers – a critical crop in addressing global food security.

Oklahoma State University in Oklahoma City (OSU-OKC), a two-year, technical-focused college, has historically faced challenges with consistent reporting, database management, and analytics. Technology generalists hired to do these tasks required extensive training to successfully extract data from traditional student information systems, manipulate data for state and federal compliance reporting, and generate limited campus reporting for operational or academic program review and analysis.

Virginia Tech wanted to build a modern data warehouse to complete new requests and quickly answer difficult questions in order to make more informed decisions. To do this, we turned to AWS. We were looking for a way to build forecasting models faster so we could quickly react to changing conditions.

Four Twenty Seven builds tools and services that help bring climate data (sourced from government agencies and academic institutions) to public and private organizations so they can better understand their exposure to climate hazards and manage risk in their communities. Four Twenty Seven’s new on-demand scoring application allows users to enter an asset’s location and receive risk scores for each site in real-time.

In collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and NVIDIA, Arizona State University (ASU) hosted its first-ever robotics hackathon. At the Arizona Robo Hackathon, 64 undergraduate and graduate students across seven institutions came together to compete in an Arizona statewide competition hosted on AWS. By the end of the hackathon, students successfully applied their knowledge of computer science, engineering, and programming skills in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) application development.

The sixth annual City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge opened new categories to highlight innovative customers that are driving actionable change for the benefit of constituents. The competition includes categories for constituent services, solving persistent problems, sustainability and equity, powered by AWS, dream big, and public datasets. The competition received more than 100 nominee use cases that highlighted how AWS customers are using the cloud to innovate and improve the lives of constituents.

Connect Our Kids, a Virginia-based 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization, is using technology to connect children in foster care with permanent homes with People Search. People Search is a free search engine powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that makes it easier for social workers to find people connected to the child.

To keep up with rapid technological advancement and the new world of work, current and future generations of leaders should be equipped with the right skills and mindset. Innovating in classrooms and beyond and creating citizen-centric services means taking advantage of the latest technology. It also means empowering the people who build and use it. AWS created resources that demonstrate paths to achieving a more diverse and prepared workforce – and how tech can help.

To help solve a few challenges I faced with my family, including the need to track the location of a child, I needed a serverless global positioning system (GPS) monitoring solution. Commercial geographic monitoring GPS solutions are not cost-effective because of the cost of digital map licenses from third parties and running servers around the clock. Existing GPS systems work with proprietary GPS devices that lock-in the users’ vendors’ devices. My solution? Build my own serverless GPS monitoring and alerting solution.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and FIRST®, a global robotics community, launched an initiative to provide students with cloud-related learning content and resources on subjects from storage to machine learning. The AWS Educate program, featuring computer science and cloud content, is now available to all volunteer mentors and students ages 14 and up participating in FIRST Robotics Competition and FIRST Tech Challenge.