AWS Public Sector Blog

From studying messages from the universe to building a bulldog bot, check out what you missed in November on the AWS Public Sector Blog.

Prodigy Game (Prodigy) has a mission to help every child in the world love learning and make education freely available to students globally. Prodigy’s math game – geared toward learners in the first to eighth grade – allows students to hone their math skills with questions delivered according to their individual needs. As their user base grew, so did the strain on their ability to handle the increasing demands. They turned to AWS.

re:Invent 2019 is next week! Are you still filling out your schedule? Remember that reserved seating is now available for some sessions. Consider these can’t-miss sessions for the public sector.

Researchers at the IceCube Experiment and University of California, San Diego just completed the largest cloud simulation in history using 51,500 cloud GPUs including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) On-Demand and Spot Instances to understand messages from the universe. The IceCube experiment searches for ghost-like massless particles called neutrinos deep within the ice at the South Pole using a unique buried cubic kilometer-size telescope consisting of 5,160 optical sensors.

Parsons Corporation, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Advanced Consulting Partner, announced 10 semi-finalists in the first Parsons Smart Cities Challenge. The competition, titled Transforming Intersections, will award the winning city with a year of support and services to help increase mobility around cities and reduce the amount of time citizens spend at red lights.

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.