Tag: AWS CIC

Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs) powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) aim to empower public sector organizations to quickly create and test new ideas using Amazon’s innovation methodology. In the second half of 2020, all those who participate in the CIC program, from students and researchers to the technology teams from AWS, worked on wide-ranging societal problems. Their focus was on improving education with virtual computer labs, working on climate change initiatives, improving economic and healthcare research, and supporting at-risk high school students. What were they up to at the end of 2020?

Public sector organizations—from state and local governments, to nonprofits, federal, and defense agencies—often ask us, “How does Amazon innovate?” Our approach centers on four pillars that help us innovate on behalf of our customers: culture, mechanisms, architecture, and organization.

The global network of Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs) powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) aims to empower public sector organizations to quickly create and test new ideas using Amazon’s innovation methodology. The CIC program brings students, researchers, and the technology expertise of AWS together to solve public sector challenges and gives students the opportunity to engage in project-based learning. Check out some of the CIC challenges during the third quarter of 2020.

The University of Bahrain (UoB), the Kingdom’s largest university with over 28,000 students, is going all-in on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The university is in the final phase of migrating its entire IT infrastructure to AWS. Once finalized, UoB becomes the largest university in the Middle East to migrate its core applications—student information system (SIS), correspondence management system (CMS), homepage portal, and subdomain, and all backend systems—to AWS.

The National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog), a policy think tank of the government of India, and AWS announced the launch of a Frontier Technologies Cloud Innovation Center (CIC). A CIC is a public-private partnership that focus on addressing societal challenges through digital innovation. The CIC program, created by AWS, provides an opportunity for nonprofits, education institutions, and government agencies to collaborate with other public sector organizations on their most pressing challenges, innovate and test new ideas, and access the technology expertise of AWS. The NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC is the first AWS CIC in India.

Working with a network of 100 biodiversity information centers and 1,000 conservation scientists, NatureServe identifies and understands the most important places to prevent species extinction and ecosystem loss. They provide land use decision-makers in federal and state agencies, industry, academics, and nonprofits with information to meet both regulatory and biodiversity conservation needs. NatureServe and its network collect and maintain data on the conservation status and location of threatened and endangered species, developed over decades of field data collection. But these data have been underutilized in environmental review decision-making processes due to challenges surrounding awareness, access, and reliable or seamless integration with other systems. To address these challenges, they developed an online spatially explicit tool on AWS.

AWS Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs) focus on solving real-life societal challenges facing the public sector. These public-private partnerships between a public sector organization—like a university or local city—and AWS can help unlock innovation, faster. Through the CIC challenges, organizations and students work to solve societal problems through digital solutions and Amazon’s innovation processes while providing students a platform to learn. These solutions and results are published open source, so others can benefit from this innovative work. This past quarter, CICs worked on address Alzheimer’s, citizen services, and coronaviruses.

The COVID-19 pandemic magnified the health and financial strain in communities across the country. Before the pandemic hit, Wildfire, a state association for Community Action Agencies, was working with Prefix, an AWS Partner Network Technology Partner, to develop a cloud-based solution for utility and rental assistance. When the City of Phoenix requested they support the distribution of $20 million CARES Act funds, they shifted their resources and existing infrastructure and, in a matter of weeks, stood up a repeatable public-facing solution.

Social information systems – how we share information – use both public systems such as social media and private systems internal to organizations such as internal blogs and wikis. The MUAS Digital Transformation Lab is experimenting with a number of theoretical concepts to create a research framework on social information systems. The goal is to reduce polarization in opinion-forming processes, help people avoid false news, and increase social cohesion by reducing social media “bubbles” and increasing the range of information sources.

At CODE University of Applied Sciences, we aim to educate the digital pioneers of tomorrow. For us, that means teaching talented students from around the world modern digital product development using real-world technology and challenges. One of our initiatives to work toward this mission is the Better Future Lab (BFL) – the Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) at CODE. A CIC is a long term, public-private collaboration between a public sector organization and AWS.