AWS Public Sector Blog

The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) is a worldwide organization for law enforcement leadership to communicate new ideas, share experiences, disseminate information, and build relationships with other law enforcement entities. This year’s conference included sessions on trends in the law enforcement environment, new ideas, technology, and real-world applications. Here are some of the topics that AWS and our network of partners and solutions providers are working on to improve with law enforcement.

The United States Diplomacy Center and World Resources Institute hosted ImpactHack, a data visualization hackathon in Washington, D.C. Sixteen teams competed to demonstrate diplomacy’s impact, from state economies to global issues, using their coding and design skills. Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsored the event, donating the time of several solutions architects, technology, credits, and expertise in managing the hackathon. Over the course of over a single Saturday, these teams developed their submissions. Projects from the hackathon will be used to develop Diplomacy Center exhibit prototypes. Congrats to the three winners!

Today, VP of Public Policy, Brian Huseman, attended the White House signing ceremony for the SUPPORT for Patients & Communities Act, which seeks to help those impacted by the opioid crisis. Amazon was one of 21 companies in attendance who are working in different ways to solve for the crisis.

Today, we are excited to announce that we are collaborating with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) STRIDES (Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability) Initiative to foster innovation in biomedical research using technological advancements in the AWS Cloud.

As open data policies become commonplace, it is worth examining the history and value of open data, and discuss why we share it in the cloud. The idea of sharing data dates back at least to the 1950s, when the International Council of Scientific Unions established World Data Centers to facilitate sharing of data among scientists. In recent years, governments have created open data policies that require government agencies to share data with the public.

Better estimates of hurricane wind speeds can lead to better decisions around evacuations and general hurricane response planning, saving both lives and property. Hurricane windspeed estimates are currently made using the manual Dvorak technique. The National Hurricane Center releases them every three to six hours. Artificial intelligence (AI) experts with the IMPACT team at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Development Seed created the Deep Learning-Based Hurricane Intensity Estimator to automate this process.

Over the years, many organizations’ on-premises IT infrastructure has been compromised. Often times, organizations are left defending infrastructure, data, and people without understanding who is attacking them and why. But the sliver lining is that attackers often use the same tactics to try to initially compromise their targets. Knowing the ways that attackers try to get a foothold in your environment can help you defend it better.

Happy Birthday! It has been 10 years of our customers running Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server on AWS. Our government customers are some of the largest users of Windows. As public sector customers are looking to modernize their infrastructure, they have been turning to AWS. They trust their Windows workloads on AWS because of our experience, reliability, security, and performance.

The Canberra Grammar School Code Cadets are a group of students with a passion for technology and applying their knowledge towards interesting projects beyond the classroom. The Code Cadets have been working with AWS technology for many years, being long-time participants in GovHack, which AWS has supported in the past – and are planning to use AWS Educate in their Year 9 and 10 elective software development courses next year.

The second annual AWS Public Sector Summit in Singapore took place on Tuesday, October 2, at the Marina Bay Sands Convention Center in Singapore. More than 1,100 attendees showed up from across the public sector. The event kicked off with the keynote presentation and was followed by 17 sessions that were offered across two tracks. And, for the first time, there was also a student track.