AWS Public Sector Blog

Tag: Amazon S3

Mosaic Learning Amazon IVS

Bringing low-latency livestreaming to education with Amazon IVS

With in-person collaboration limited for much of 2020 and the foreseeable future, educational institutions have embraced new virtual means to connect with students and deliver information like classroom lectures, conferences, and dissertation presentations online. Recognizing the value and importance of high quality virtual collaboration, educational technology companies (EdTech) have been working to maintain the benefits of an in-person experience, for speakers as well as audiences, in online environments. Inspired by the increased demand for sophisticated virtual collaboration solutions, EdTech Mosaic Learning built and integrated new Amazon Web Services (AWS) features into its custom platform tailored for delivering dynamic video experiences at scale.

Sharing SAS data with Athena and ODBC

Sharing SAS data with Athena and ODBC

If you share data with other researchers, especially if they are using a different tool, you can quickly run into version issues, not knowing which file is the most current. Rather than sending data files everywhere, AWS offers a simple way to store your data in one central location so that you can read your data into SAS and still share it with other colleagues. In this blog post, I will explain how to export your data, store it in AWS, and query the data using SAS.

Hurricane imagery acquired by NOAA RSD

Open data helps recovery in the aftermath of devastating weather events

Severe and extreme weather events not only wreak havoc on lives, property and the economy, but the extent of the destruction and devastation left behind can be difficult to map and quantify. Having high resolution imagery of areas devastated by weather events (hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and etc.) helps to characterize impacts, formulate needed recovery and response activities, support emergency managers in saving lives, and restart the flow of commerce. NOAA’s data plays a critical role in this process. As part of ASDI, we invited Jena Kent from NOAA’s Big Data Program to share how AWS is helping with disaster response by providing access to aerial data and imagery through open data initiatives.

global map in blue showing connecting cities

Combating illicit activity by tracking flight data via the cloud

Many organizations including the intelligence community, security organizations, law enforcement, regulatory bodies, news organizations, and non-governmental organizations work together to disrupt transnational crime networks. Their missions include combating illicit trade; disrupting human, animal, and narcotics trafficking; detecting money laundering; and exposing political corruption. This community needs rapid analysis of large, diverse streams of information about air transportation networks, because air transportation is the fastest way to conduct illicit trade internationally. The nonprofit Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) built the Icarus Flights application to meet this need. By building on AWS using managed cloud services, C4ADS spends less time and energy managing infrastructure, which frees them to focus on building innovative analytics and alerting services that their user community needs.

Baltimore harbor at sunset

Addressing housing barriers with the cloud: Baltimore launches My Digital Data Locker

Removing the barriers to rehousing, especially for those chronically homeless, is a critical part of a community’s efforts to combat homelessness. This month, the City of Baltimore is launching My Digital Data Locker, an innovative cloud-based platform that gives people who are experiencing homelessness a secure place to manage digital copies of vital documents. This service reduces one of the key barriers to housing for people experiencing homelessness: vital document storage and access. The solution uses the cloud.

Amazon RaiseUp Buildathon

Building innovative solutions to help nonprofits with fundraising, content delivery, and mission delivery

Nonprofits and cultural institutions need support to serve and deliver impact to our local and global communities. Amazon’s Raise-up Buildathon, presented by AWS, empowered developers, technology enthusiasts, and advocates to build cloud solutions that enhance digital capabilities to help with fundraising, content delivery, and mission delivery. The majority of the winning solutions are available to nonprofits and cultural institutions via open source. Learn more about what these solutions can do, from donor management to augmented reality, to improving how you reach out to constituents to expand your donation stream.

Mineduc Digital app on a smart phone

Enabling remote education in Guatemala with scalable learning platform Mineduc Digital

AWS Partner ITZ Data, with support from UNICEF and the Canadian Embassy in Guatemala, helped Ministerio de Educación de Guatemala launch Mineduc Digital—the country’s first online platform where students can access digital self-study guides from any device connected to the internet. The Ministry implemented the solution in less than two months, paving the way for the digital transformation of their education system. The solution was built on AWS.

aerial view of yellow sneakers on blue sports surface

Using AWS for on-premises WordPress site continuity

Applications running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack are ubiquitous—WordPress alone represents 38% of all content management systems. Because of the popularity of these applications, public sector organisations such as educational institutions should protect their business continuity by implementing disaster recovery (DR) solutions: policies, tools, and procedures to help the recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure and systems following a disaster. AWS Professional Services created a business continuity solution for on-premises LAMP applications that could eliminate the need for physical backup infrastructure and improve recovery time. The solution was recently piloted by Cardiff University.

A generalized approach to benchmarking genomics workloads in the cloud: Running the BWA read aligner on Graviton2

The AWS Cloud gives genomics researchers access to a wide variety of instance types and chip architectures and this elasticity allows us to rethink genomics workflows when running workloads in the cloud. Given the increased performance of the Graviton2 instances, we wanted to explore if they can be used for cost-effective and performant genomics workloads. Read on to learn about our generalized approach for determining the most effective instance type for running genomics workloads in the cloud.

Hope orbiter Mars, photo courtesy of MBRSC, United Arab Emirates

UAE Mars mission uses AWS to advance scientific discoveries

On February 9, a new object successfully began to orbit Mars: an uncrewed spacecraft called the Hope Probe. The mission has already returned the first image of Mars, taken by Hope’s Emirates eXploration Imager from an altitude of 24,700 km. Led by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC), the Hope Probe is the first interplanetary mission for the United Arab Emirates, the fifth country in history to reach the red planet. It will also be the first spacecraft to capture a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere and its layers during different times of the day and different seasons for one complete Martian year. Once data transmitted by the Hope Probe reaches the scientific teams on Earth, MBRSC will use AWS advanced technologies to process and analyze the vast amounts of data and imagery to help researchers better understand the Martian atmosphere and its layers.