AWS Public Sector Blog

Educators are increasingly adopting data analytics to understand and address gaps in education. This includes educators in higher education seeking to personalize student-learning experiences and improve learning outcomes, as well as policymakers looking to understand and scale effective teaching methods, increase efficiency and teaching capacity, among other concerns. AWS’s “Four Steps to Success” offers a high-level guide for leaders seeking to adopt new tools to make better use of the data they are collecting.

In many organisations, IT security and data governance processes can be complex since data is stored across multiple environments and applications. Data privacy, including data classification, is now a core component of security requirements. Organisations need an easier and more pragmatic approach in administering their data assets to mitigate operational risk.

AWS has developed a new FAQ page to help answer questions our customers may have on the CLOUD Act, and AWS’s responsibility to protect customer data.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the British Heart Foundation (BHF) hosted a hackathon on January 22nd and February 5th. The hackathon provided AWS technologists and APN Partners with a collaborative opportunity to contribute to the greater good, innovating to solve some of the challenges the charity currently faces with its operations and objectives. Like many charities, the BHF is entirely reliant on the public’s generosity to fund its lifesaving research and receives no government funding. With around seven million people in the UK living with heart and circulatory diseases, all participants have made a valuable investment to the cause.

When upgrading a school district’s infrastructure, the administration thinks about the physical buildings as well as the IT. In 2018, Portland Public Schools began tackling both. The district is visibly renovating many of its high schools, but behind the scenes, they also migrated to the cloud, increasing both performance and capacity for their users.

Earlier this year, we announced Alexa Skill Blueprints, a way for anyone to create a variety of Alexa skills for personal use by just filling in the blanks. Now, we are adding the ability to publish skills created using Alexa Skill Blueprints to the Alexa Skills Store, so tens of millions of Alexa customers can discover, use, and review your skill. These new tools for content creators enable organizations to reach anyone with an Alexa-enabled device, simply by adding their content into an Alexa Skill Blueprint.

Georgetown University’s Hoya Hacks recently hosted a hackathon for social impact as part of the official Major League Hacking (MLH) 2019 season. Two hundred students from around the Washington, D.C, metro area spent 36 hours on campus building solutions on a variety of themes— gender equality, cybersecurity, digital forensics, and social innovation.

AWS Educate’s 11 foundational Cloud learning Career Pathways are now available in ten new languages – Simplified and Traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, and Bahasa. Now, more students around the world have access to the skills that will provide them access to cloud-based careers and opportunities.

After missing several elections as a graduate student living away from home, Seth Flaxman set out to build a reminder system alongside friend and classmate Kathryn Peters so no one would have to miss an election again. Energized by a vision to make voting a simple, seamless experience, Seth and Kathryn started Democracy Works, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to changing the status quo. Democracy Works set out to build the tools needed to upgrade the infrastructure of our democracy and improve the voting experience for voters and election officials.

To help countries realize the potential of Earth observations for sustainable development, we are teaming with the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) to provide $1.5 million worth of cloud services for projects that improve understanding of our planet. Eligible government agencies and research institutions can apply for up to $100,000 of AWS Promotional Credits to build Earth observations applications that support environmental and development goals, including the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.