AWS Public Sector Blog

Tag: Internet of Things

Top announcements from the AWS Public Sector Partners leadership session at re:Invent 2021

During the 10th anniversary of re:Invent, I was thrilled to share announcements and achievements from AWS Partners and programs for the public sector around the world. Since its launch, AWS’s Public Sector Partner Program participation has increased by an average of 54% year over year, with partners providing solutions in mission areas across healthcare, space, energy, transportation, government, education, and nonprofit. In both the Global Partners Summit keynote at re:Invent 2021, as well as in my public sector leadership session, I highlighted the new and upcoming AWS Partner solutions and accomplishments.

The road to zero waste: Driving efficiencies in sustainability with cloud technology

The new four-part documentary series Climate Next from Amazon explores how governments and organizations around the world use cloud technology from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to drive innovation in response to our changing planet, create scalable solutions to address climate change, and empower communities to protect and preserve our planet. One episode of the series showcases how the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico uses cloud technology to create a more efficient waste and recycling management operation to divert waste from landfills and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

AWS Imagine Grant 2021

Announcing the winners of the 2021-2022 AWS Imagine Grant

This year’s cohort of nonprofit winners of the Imagine Grant represents the biggest group of winners out of a record number of applications, each exhibiting a commitment to innovation and an insistence on the highest standards for the mission areas they serve. For the first time, this year’s Imagine Grant offered two distinct award categories, inviting nonprofits of all sizes to put forward both advanced technical projects in the Go Further, Faster award category and foundational IT projects in the Momentum to Modernize award category.

How to build smart cities with FIWARE Orion Context Broker and Cygnus on AWS

Several smart cities use FIWARE, an open source framework supporting the development of smart solutions. FIWARE leverages sensing data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, then collects, stores, and analyzes data with an API call. One FIWARE component, Orion Context Broker, gathers context information from diverse sources such as mobile apps, IoT devices, and social networking services, and manages the lifecycle of this context information, from registrations, updates, queries, and subscriptions. In this blog post, we address building Orion Context Broker on AWS. Learn how to deploy Orion Context Broker and Cygnus on AWS with AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) and Docker Compose quickly.

Announcing the AWS IoT Rapid Adoption Assistance Initiative for Public Sector Partners

Education, government, and nonprofit organizations seek to deliver quality services to support their missions in increasingly dynamic and complex environments, all while facing common challenges, such as shortage of systems to collect and analyze data in real-time. To support public sector organizations on their missions and with the growth of Internet of Things (IoT), Amazon Web Service (AWS) is launching the AWS IoT Rapid Adoption Assistance Initiative for AWS Partners.

Grandma Emergency Button: A simple emergency alert solution with AWS IoT Button

My grandma is 88-years old with reduced mobility. She lives alone, without a caretaker, in a small village. If she falls, then she is in danger. If something goes wrong when she’s in bed, she might need assistance. With an AWS IoT button, she can call for help in a simple way and potentially save her life. Her village provides free Wi-Fi coverage, so I built an emergency alert system using AWS. When she clicks the AWS IoT button, a series of events will take place to get her the assistance she needs. This can help her in difficult situations. It’s a solution that others can create as well. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to get started.

How Cloud Services Can Help Optimize Public Transportation Systems in Cities

Transportation and traffic management are hot topics when city planners and administrations think about ways to make a city smarter and more livable. Recent statistics tell us that drivers in the U.S. spend an average of 42 hours per year in traffic in cities and lose $1,400 on gas, while idling. In Europe, cities like London and Paris show an average of 74 and 69 hours spent idling per year respectively. Researchers in England found adding an additional 20 minutes of commuting per day has the same negative effect on job satisfaction as receiving a 19% pay cut. These statistics and an increasing desire to be more environment friendly are reasons why city leaders are looking to tackle this problem.

A Case for the Cloud in LATAM: When Urban Cleaning and Waste Collection Meet IoT

Recife, the capital of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco, is distinguished by its many rivers, bridges, islets, and peninsulas. The municipality of Recife, with an estimated population of 1.62 million, is at the center of a metropolitan region formed by 13 municipalities and around 94 neighborhoods. The cost to maintain such a large metropolis is great, requiring a complex public-cleaning operation with thousands of vehicles and employees, which was consuming nearly 10% of the city’s budget. Before implementing a new technology solution, supervising contractors and controlling the quality of street-cleaning services throughout the city was challenging.

Predictive Maintenance: Untapped Potential in Public Sector

Public sector organizations worldwide have responsibility for high-value assets and operations associated with utilities, public venues, roads, bridges, transit and mobility systems, airports, ports, and public health systems. Unexpected downtime can lead to critical outages that cost millions of dollars in lost productivity, but replacing or fixing broken equipment can also cost tens of thousands of dollars in extra expenses. Predictive maintenance analytics capture the state of the equipment, so you can identify potential breakdowns before they impact operations.

Creating a Long-Term Smart Cities Vision with AWS

Cities worldwide are improving citizen services and economic and environmental outcomes through technology, while also seeking to create a vision of what a smart, connected, and sustainable city of the future will look like. While you can start building and experimenting today, it’s important to have a long-term vision and a set of principles to guide you in building cost-effective, adaptable, secure, and low-risk solutions during a time of rapid technological change.