AWS Public Sector Blog

Today, at the Simo Education trade show in Madrid, Spain, SM Educamos, an educational network learning platform, announced the launch of its new Alexa skill SM Educamos. Powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the skill is available free of charge to SM Educamos’s one million current users and in more than 1,200 educational centers.

As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is supporting Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa). DE Africa is enabling African nations to track changes across the continent in unprecedented detail by making Earth observation (EO) data more easily accessible. This will provide valuable insights for better decision-making around prevention and planning in areas including flooding, droughts, soil and coastal erosion, agriculture, forest-cover, land use and land cover change, water availability and quality, and changes to human settlements.

As nonprofits work toward their missions, resource efficiency is top of mind, so that as much of their budget as possible is dedicated to achieving their mission. Working with limited budgets, nonprofits and charities use the cloud to help them remain lean, scale their missions, and address their skills gaps. Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is the world’s largest independent cancer charity dedicated to saving lives through cancer research.

During Homecoming 2019, the California State University, Fresno (Fresno State) Hub of Digital Transformation showcased the Bulldog Bot – a robotic take on the school mascot – built with Amazon Web Services (AWS) RoboMaker and AWS artificial intelligence (AI) services. The interactive Bulldog Bot engaged fans across campus by telling jokes, playing karaoke, and answering Fresno State homecoming trivia questions.

From tracking antimicrobial resistance to filling skills gaps, check out what you missed in October on the AWS Public Sector Blog.

Emergencies and national disasters can strike at any moment. And with the change in how people communicate – from the internet to cell phones and more – emergency response systems need to be modernized to meet the immediate urgent needs of constituents. Amazon Web Services (AWS) supports many disaster recovery architectures, from those built for smaller workloads to enterprise solutions that enable rapid failover at scale. AWS provides a set of cloud-based disaster recovery services that enable fast recovery of your IT infrastructure and data.

Know a student in kindergarten through 12th grade? They could name the next Mars Rover. Eligible students can submit a 150-word essay with their Mars Rover name suggestion to the NASA via the Mars 2020 Mission – Name the Rover Contest website. Submissions are due by November 1, 2019. After a finalist from each U.S. state is announced, the public will vote on a final winner. The winner will be announced in February 2020.

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) — the technology that won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — lets scientists peer into the molecular “machines” at work in our cells in ways that were previously impossible. Using advanced microscopes, cryo-EM captures images of proteins flash-frozen in vitreous ice, revealing their 3D structure in near-native states. Even as access to this technology improves, many researchers are still limited by computing bottlenecks. The cryo-EM field needs to provide more hands-on training in how to process such large datasets. Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows us to provide training, broadening the impact of this important structural biology technology.

AWS GovCloud (US) isn’t just for government agencies – U.S. commercial companies in aerospace, defense manufacturing, law enforcement, healthcare, financial services, and energy with regulated workloads, sensitive data, and export-controlled data rely on AWS GovCloud (US) to modernize IT. Learn more during next week’s AWS Compliance Week. Themed “Achieving Cloud Compliance and Security in the AWS Cloud,” AWS solutions architects will discuss in five webinars how customers can meet cloud security and compliance challenges using AWS GovCloud (US).

Since 2015, 11 communities in the United States have reached “functional zero” – effectively ending chronic or veteran homelessness and demonstrating that although homelessness is a complex challenge, it is solvable. By reaching this milestone, communities in Built for Zero, a national initiative comprised of more than 70 U.S. communities, have shown that real-time, personal-level data can empower organizations to respond to the homelessness challenge. These communities measurably ended homelessness when they followed these best practices.