AWS Public Sector Blog

From EdTechs to higher education institutions, customers are thinking big about leveraging the AWS Cloud to build inclusive solutions for learners with cognitive and physical disabilities. Read on to learn more about how these pioneers are transforming the education industry with assistive learning technology.

As technology makes it easier to connect with constituents, state and local governments are looking to build systems centered around and empowered by the citizen experience. This is especially the case with health and social services agencies. Public health systems often struggle to connect data across agencies and systems—leaving some communities without the insights they need to optimally allocate resources or to take action in the face of emerging epidemics. In a keynote address to over 800 government health IT leaders, Taha Kass-Hout, senior leader of healthcare and artificial intelligence at Amazon Web Services (AWS), said, “It’s not for a lack of technology, and it’s not for a lack of passion. It’s about the difficulty alleviating the heavy lifting that leaves agencies extremely resource constrained.”

AWS hosted its first-ever Latin America AWS Public Sector Summit in Bogota on Thursday, March 28th, 2019. More than 800 attendees from Colombia and the region joined us to learn about innovation across the public sector, sustainability, database migrations, and the next generation of tech talent. The President of Colombia, Iván Duque Márquez, helped kick off the keynote presentation with a fireside chat discussing the technology opportunities and initiatives that Colombia is pursuing.

Iron Arrow Consulting (IAC) is collaborating with AWS through AWS CloudStart to help organizations in Turkey build their public sector solutions. AWS CloudStart supports Economic Development Organizations (EDOs) by providing resources to educate, train, and embrace the cost-effective options that AWS cloud computing services can offer to firms whose products, solutions, and services are for the public good.

Writing code and deploying an application can expose you to security vulnerabilities. This means your security woes don’t end after architecting. This post reviews common application security vulnerabilities, as well as how to build, test, and deploy code to catch vulnerabilities early.

Ada, Bolton College’s chatbot, has been supporting students since April 2017, answering a broad range of questions about the College and its services. Recently, the college launched its staff-facing chatbot, which responds to questions from teachers and support teams regarding campus services, student progress, and more. Through the voice-first Alexa Skill, students, teachers, and support teams can get information about the College, their studies, and their work through their Echo smart speakers or via their Alexa smartphone app.

Today at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Brussels, Munich University of Applied Sciences (MUAS) and CODE University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, announced the launch of their innovation labs designed to accelerate the digital transformation of the public sector. The centers will focus on driving innovation in Germany, helping government, education, and nonprofits tackle some of the most pressing challenges to delivering a wide range of citizen services. With this initiative, students will have access to AWS technologies, innovation methodologies, and technical expertise to experiment with ‘born-in-the-cloud’ solutions.

AWS Educate has launched a RoboMaker Classroom in collaboration with AWS RoboMaker to provide students, researchers, and educators with a new way to accelerate robotics learning. This centralized classroom has been the most requested feature by instructors who want to use AWS RoboMaker with their students.

AWS EdStart members are creating products and solutions to improve teaching and learning and are using machine learning and analytics to advance global education. Octopus BI, HelioCampus, Singsound, and Bibliotech use AWS to revolutionize education analytics, language learning, and eBook distribution. Read on to learn about these EdTechs.

Before a developer can commit their first line of code, they must think about the security of their application. With a move toward a DevSecOps culture, security is not solely the job of the security team – in the same way that infrastructure and deployment are not the sole responsibilities of the operations team. Developers should partake in both operations and security, as they know their own application best. This blog outlines a framework for thinking about security for your app’s infrastructure and how AWS’ product features can address those concerns.