AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog

The new AWS Educate release is here to help teachers better integrate cloud technology into their curriculum with new content, tools, and professional development.

Take a look at some of the new features now available in the AWS Educate Educator portal:

• Get Content: The “Get Content” section of the site allows you to collect, curate, and download content specific to your classroom. Search for key assets and browse the wide variety of resources. Resources are pre -grouped into specialty areas like Software Development, Cloud Architecture, and Big Data and Analytics. Save the content you want into custom course collections and download into formats compatible with most Learning Management Systems (LMS).
• Tools and Credits: In the “Tools and Credits” section, you can request AWS Promotional Credits for your class as either a promotional code that you manage in your account or as individual codes for students. This includes an automated educator central code to request AWS Credits for every student in your class, regardless of whether they have already requested their individual code. If you need more AWS Credits – for GPU-intensive coursework, for example – you can create a special request. Also, encourage your class to enroll in AWS Educate individually via automated signup through a Learning Tools Interoperability integration with your LMS. You can use those credits to try out new services and facilitate classroom projects. This section is loaded with additional tools. For instance, you can also browse and download sample scripts, public datasets, Amazon CloudFront templates, and learn about Amazon Machine Images to integrate into your course.
• Professional Development: Check out the “Professional Development” area to boost your AWS Cloud knowledge. Discover the online AWS Essentials class – a no-cost AWS training option – and explore discounted AWS certifications exclusively available to AWS Educate members. You can also experience AWS Educate from the student side by logging in and exploring cloud career pathways.

We hope you find the Educator Portal helpful as you build or manage your class. Get started today by logging into your account or by signing up at www.awseducate.com.

To help power up teachers and students with the latest technology as they head back to school, AWS has launched an EdTech startup accelerator – AWS EdStart.

Let’s take a look at how AWS EdStart is working with innovative startups. Focusing on the next generation of online learning, analytics, and campus management solutions on the AWS Cloud, we connected with four different EdTech startups from AWS EdStart to learn how they are ramping for back-to-school success.

Vocareum: Vocareum offers cloud-based learning and assessment labs for computer and data science classes. Its platform capabilities include grading automation, plagiarism detection, team projects, and peer reviews for improved assignment management, assessment efficiency, and student engagement.

This school year, Vocareum expects to have over ten million auto-graded homework submissions on its platform, coming from over 100,000 students this year. Sign up for a demo to learn more.

“By moving student work to the cloud and leveraging cloud computing resources, we make it possible to deliver cost-effective and current computing labs to our partners,” said David Lin, VP Business Development, Vocareum. “AWS has enabled us to quickly build and scale our business to meet the growing need for cloud learning environments in computer and data science education. “

Sown To Grow: In Sown To Grow, students set learning goals, track their own progress, and write reflections on the strategies that work best for them (or new ones they want to try). Teachers set expectations, monitor growth, and provide feedback on student reflections. The platform provides scaffolding with learning strategies that are proven to work and insights for teachers to better reach struggling students. The result? Students care more, focus on growth, and become better, more empowered learners.

As the new school year kicked off, Sown To Grow passed the mark of over 20,000 users and has seen a 350% increase in teacher registrations.

“The reliability, scalability, and relative ease of use of AWS enable Sown To Grow’s small development team to focus on improving the application to meet customer needs, instead of spending time setting up and troubleshooting infrastructure,” said Colin Gilbert, Product and Marketing Strategy Manager, Sown To Grow. “Sown To Grow is still in a stage where we’re constantly iterating. AWS allows us to deploy new features, updates, and bug fixes quickly, enabling us to create smoother experiences for teachers and students.”

Gradescope: Gradescope allows instructors to grade handwritten, digital, and coding assignments in less time. The tool supports almost any format (paper exams, book problems, quizzes, programming projects) and any type of question. Class time isn’t spent collecting homework, since students can upload images or a PDF of their work directly to Gradescope, and students get their work back as soon as it’s graded, rather than having to wait until the next time they see their instructors.

Gradescope is used in over 1,000 courses around the world. In total, this means instructors have trusted Gradescope to grade over 17 million pages of work. The user base has grown by over 2000% over the past few years.

“AWS lets us get started quickly with a solid, reliable architecture, without needing to worry about every single detail,” said Arjun Singh, Cofounder and CEO, Gradescope. “More recently, we’ve taken advantage of AWS Lambda, which lets us run our machine learning algorithms over huge amounts of student work nearly instantly, even with the bursty, irregular load that we see.”

Learnmetrics Inc: Learnmetrics is a smart data company that aggregates, analyzes, and activates learning data to reveal the information that’s too hard to find, understand, standardize, or work with. The tools uncover these hidden insights, giving educators valuable clues about how best to ignite the potential of each and every student, and to refine the efficacy of learning organizations at-large. They take all of their tools and data sources and transform them taking them from disparate, opaque, and inadequate to connected, transparent, and workflow-oriented insights.

“We work with student data, which is a privilege and an honor, but also comes with serious responsibilities and potential ramifications. Working with AWS has allowed us to leverage world-class cloud services with proven security and reliability,” said Julian Miller, Founder & CEO, Learnmetrics Inc. “This allows us to live up to those responsibilities while focusing on our customers’ problems and needs, rather than our operational ones.”

Build Your Teaching and Learning Solutions on the AWS Cloud

Each of these EdTechs is a member of AWS EdStart. The EdTech accelerator enables startup educational technology companies to innovate faster by providing AWS Promotional Credits, community engagement, office hours, customized trainings, live events, and specialized support to these startup EdTech industry pioneers.

“AWS EdStart has enabled us to work at the bleeding edge of technology to support teaching and learning. We are testing new strategies and deploying technologies at scale and at pace, which wouldn’t otherwise be possible at our size,” said Julian from Learnmetrics.

Learn more about how AWS EdStart can help you build teaching and learning solutions on the AWS Cloud.

Two students had an idea: match excess food with people in need. Maria Rose Belding and Grant Nelson created MEANS, a nonprofit database where people list a donation, food banks and pantries get notified about food near them, and then they claim and pick up the food.

MEANS is now in 49 states and territories and has successfully matched over a million pounds of food in the past two years since launch, helping divert food from the trash to local emergency feeding services with the ease and speed of the internet.

“When we were choosing what tools and platforms to use, we focused on ease of adoption. We wanted to be able to quickly and easily iterate versions,” said Grant, cofounder and founding CTO of MEANS, “AWS makes it easy to get something from an idea on a notepad to actually serving web traffic.”

Dealing with urgency, as the donated food may be someone’s only chance of food for the day, or even the week, availability and reliability were key elements when Maria Rose and Grant were looking to build their nonprofit in the cloud.

MEANS was built out and integrated on AWS using services including Amazon CloudFront for content delivery, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storage, Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) for data validation, and Amazon Machine Learning to predict which food pantry they should be calling to maximize the chance of a donation finding a home.

“Most developers are already familiar with AWS toolsets and there is a depth of tutorials available for users. For someone like me who was juggling law school while founding a nonprofit, I built and deployed the database and was able to have a 14% MoM user growth for 18 months straight,” said Grant. With a group of 16 volunteers, the technology side had to be easy so they could focus on wasting less and feeding more.

Making the match

For MEANS, the core job is to distribute information, so the fewer times people have to visit the site the better. Using Amazon CloudFront, MEANS sends out notifications when food is available near you, but only when the food is something you want. When you create an account, you specify how far you are willing to go to get food, and which categories of food you want to be notified about. MEANS’ notification algorithm makes sure that the people most likely to pick up a donation fastest are notified first.

The MEANS team found that many of the phone numbers of the food pantries publicly listed were inaccurate. By using mTurk as well as their volunteers, they were able to build an accurate pantry relationship manager.

Whether it is five pounds of pizza sauce, 250 rutabagas, or 100,000 pounds of lemonade, MEANS uses the AWS Cloud to quickly, easily, and cost-effectively connect food distributors with those in the area most in need.

Reliability and availability – plus scalability

“One of the upsides of AWS is our ability to turn up capacity based on web traffic,” said Maria Rose, Co-Founder and Executive Director of MEANS. “Last year, the Daily Show aired a clip of me filmed by Starbucks’ Upstander Series. When I heard, I was in various stages of joy and panic, but then I remembered that with AWS, all would be fine.”

Learn more about donation made easy with MEANS and how AWS can take your idea from design to implementation.

Propelled by current global efforts, such as personalized medicine and cancer research, genomics has become an essential tool for modern medicine and biology.

Computational genomics deals with the interpretation of genomics data, which is growing at an exponential scale due to quickly evolving next-generation sequencing technologies. Input data size for single samples can easily reach 100s of Gigabytes and studies now require the analysis of thousands of such samples. A typical analysis requires running complex workflows with substantial disk-space, input/output, CPU and memory demands, usually executed in expensive high performance compute (HPC) environments.

By leveraging the inherent data-parallel features of computational genomics, AWS Lambda functions can be used to analyze large amount of genomics data efficiently.

At our upcoming AWS Public Sector Summit in Singapore, the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) will explore the use of pure serverless architectures for analysing big genomics data. Read what Andreas Wilm of the Genomic Institute of Singapore has to say about using AWS Lambda for computational genomics.

Serverless architectures, like AWS Lambda, offer an inexpensive execution environment (originally meant for running microservices), which is limited in terms of disk space, memory, processing power and runtime (maximum five minutes). As such, AWS Lambda doesn’t seem an intuitive fit for big data processing in genomics. However, by exploiting the data-parallel nature of genomics datasets, we can run analyses at scale and cost efficiently with AWS Lambda. Here, we showcase two applications:

1. We established a proof of concept by porting a typically resource-hungry analysis step to AWS Lambda: variant calling on a human genome, a process that can take hours in multi-core environments. Our starting point was a preprocessed genome stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), containing roughly 100 billion data points. Using AWS Lambda functions only, we were able to complete the analysis in less than 15 minutes at costs of roughly 10 cents USD (assuming the user exhausted the 1 million free AWS Lambda requests, which are renewed every month).
2. Furthermore, we implemented an entire analysis workflow for bacterial samples on AWS Lambda. The analysis is started by simply uploading the input files and subsequent steps are automatically triggered and run in a highly parallel fashion.

Learn more about how GIS uses AWS Lambda at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Singapore.

We are pleased to announce that AWS is bringing infrastructure to the Middle East with an AWS Region opening by early 2019. The new region will be based in Bahrain, will be comprised of three Availability Zones at launch, and will give AWS customers and APN Partners the ability to run their workloads and store their data in the Middle East with lower latency. AWS today also announced it will launch an AWS Edge Network Location in the UAE in the first quarter of 2018. This will bring services such as Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, and AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to the region and adds to the 84 points of presence AWS has around the world.

These announcements add to our continued investment in the Middle East. Earlier this year, we opened the doors to our first offices in Bahrain and Dubai to empower organizations of all sizes, from startups to governments, as they make the transition to the AWS Cloud. Prior to this, we have supported the growth of technology education and new businesses in the region with AWS Educate and AWS Activate.

Today, we also hosted an AWS Summit for the Middle East, representing the first-ever AWS conference of this scale in Bahrain. The Summit provided an interactive forum for the cloud-computing community to connect, collaborate, and learn. Keynotes were delivered by Fetcher, MBC, Bahrain Polytechnic, and the Kingdom of Bahrain Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA).

Government organizations are working with AWS to lower costs and better serve citizens in the region. For example, the Bahrain Institute of Public Administration has moved their Learning Management System to AWS, reducing costs by over 90%.

The iGA, who joined us onstage at the AWS Summit, is charged with moving all government services online and is responsible for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) governance and procurement for the entire Bahrain government. Earlier this year, the iGA launched a cloud-first policy, requiring all new government ICT procurement to evaluate cloud-based services first.

Mohamed Ali Al Qaed, CEO of Bahrain iGA, said of the announcement, “AWS forms the backbone of our digital government initiatives so the news that an AWS Region is coming to our country is warmly welcomed by us. Through adopting a cloud first policy, we have helped to reduce the government procurement process for new technology from months to less than two weeks. We are in the process of migrating 700 servers with more than 50 TB of data to AWS with the goal of decommissioning our hosting platform by the end of 2017. We have also started to migrate systems of national significance, such as our Bahrain Data Locator, and supporting other entity system migrations, like the Ministry of Education LMS that has 149,000 users, with more planned. As we move more mission critical workloads to AWS, we look forward to even greater efficiencies and being able to complete our mission to become eGovernment & ICT Pioneers.”

The addition of AWS infrastructure in the Middle East will help countries across the region to innovate and grow their economies. We look forward to serving new and existing customers in the Middle East and working with APN Partners across the region. Learn more about the AWS Middle East Region in the press release here.

To further the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, we presented Imagine: A Better World – a global nonprofit conference where over 270 nonprofit leaders from around the globe convened at the Amazon Meeting Center in Seattle for a unique and collaborative learning experience.

There were three high-level conference themes:

1. Overcoming global challenges through technology
2. Increasing scale and reach through effective marketing and fundraising
3. Powering mission and marketing efforts through Amazon’s social good community

AWS hosted the Smart Technology and the Sustainable Development Goals track, where attendees learned best practices and engaged in interactive dialogues around technology’s role in ensuring everyone has the opportunity to live a life of dignity on a healthy planet.

AWS, American Heart Association, AARP Foundation, and Global Citizen took the stage and delivered keynotes that outlined their vision, work, and possibilities for the future in a world that can be changed.

Track sessions included:

• What Really Matters: The Ocean, Data, and New Insights – Ocean Conservancy: Andreas Merkl, President, Ocean Conservancy, discussed the intricate and potentially catastrophic effects climate change is having on our world’s oceans and underwater ecosystems. He highlighted what the data is saying and what happens next.
• Culture & Capacity Building: Technology Skills Development and the Developing World – Digital Divide Data: Frank Heitmann, President, Digital Divide Data, talked about their Cloud Academy providing AWS training to young Kenyans and helping them put their new skills to work on a project at the National Museums of Kenya to preserve their country’s and the world’s human and technology evolutionary history.
• Technology-Driven Problem Solving: Improving Farm Resilience & Emergency Decision Making – World Vision International: Ed Anderson, Global Chief Information Officer, World Vision International, talked about their Early Warning Actions/Farmer Information System that is being used to help Mali farmers make informed decisions about crop types in demand, planting, disease and pest management, harvesting and more, showing what data can do in action to improve people’s livelihood and quality of life.
• The Social Progress Challenge – Social Progress Imperative: Michael Green, Chief Executive Officer, Social Progress Imperative, shared how they are mapping data to social and environmental indicators to measure the three dimensions of social progress: basic human needs, foundations of wellbeing, and opportunity. Hear how the United States did on their social progress score card.
• From Bytes to Classrooms: How Technology and Data are Transforming Brazil’s Public Education – Qedu: Cesar Wedemann, Chief Executive Officer, QEdu, discussed using data to improve Brazil’s education system by providing national leaders and policy makers actionable information, as well as providing schools with new assessment and testing tools that are improving student engagement and results.
• Cyber Considerations for Nonprofits: Understanding the Vulnerabilities within your Cyber Assets and How to Protect Them – C5 Capital-led Panel: Panelists from C5 Capital, SAP National Security Services, International Center for Missing & Exploited Children, and AWS discussed why nonprofits should consider how cybersecurity issues apply to them and how they can ensure they are protected.
• The Voice of Data & Gender Equality – Gates Foundation: Saara Romu, Senior Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, talked about the voice of data and gender equality, the challenges and data gap, and what strides have been made in understanding the global landscape of inequality.
• Getting to Zero: Finding Cures with Zeros & Ones – Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center: Dirk Peterson, Scientific Computing Director, Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center, discussed how cloud computing is advancing their research capabilities and how advanced machine learning, natural language processing, and image analysis are providing new avenues for cancer predication and classification.

Amazon.com hosted concurrent sessions where Amazon specialists and nonprofit thought leaders shared learnings and best practices in social media, digital presence, and community engagement. Networking events closed out each day where all participants collaborated with one another and had the opportunity to engage with the various teams across Amazon dedicated to driving impact in the social sector. These included AWS Open Data, AmazonSmile, Amazon Media Group, AWS Cloud Credits for Research, We Power Tech, Amazon Business, Amazon Pay, Amazon Web Services, AWS Educate, and Merch by Amazon.

Learn more about how AWS can help your organization.

Amazon Web Services has made a major milestone in its ability to drive cloud transformation for the Government of Canada (GC). This week, we demonstrated that we are ready to meet the Cloud Security Profile for Protected B / Medium Integrity / Medium Availability (PBMM) to GC. This means that AWS is in alignment with how GC IT Services leverages internationally-recognized, widely-accepted accreditations empowering adopting organizations to benefit from independently validated audits and assessments without any redundant work.

Over the past several months, AWS worked closely with GC to understand its cloud security requirements and authorization needs. AWS proved valuable to the GC due to its extensive experience with the following international and national security accreditations: ISO 27001, Service Organization Controls (SOC), FedRAMP Moderate and High, and most recently the U.S. Defense Department’s Impact Level 5 for sensitive controlled unclassified information.

By aligning with prevailing security accreditations and addressing any residual requirements, AWS demonstrated how its capabilities meet, and in many cases, exceed GC’s security watermark as validated by an independent assessor. Governments such as the UK and Australia have already reaped the benefits of accreditation reciprocity.

Such an approach will allow GC to authorize cloud technology in a secure, compliant manner to transform the delivery of high-value services to Canadian citizens.

Programme d’assistance en sécurité soumis au gouvernement du Canada

Services Web d’Amazon (AWS) a accompli une étape importante dans sa capacité de réaliser la transformation de l’infonuagique pour le gouvernement du Canada (GC). Cette semaine, la conformité au profil de sécurité infonuagique (Cloud Security Profile) pour les données en Protégé B / Intégrité moyenne / Disponibilité moyenne (PBMM) a été démontrée au GC. Cela implique que AWS est aligné sur la manière dont le service TI du GC met à profit les accréditations reconnues et acceptées mondialement, permettant aux organisations qui l’adoptent de bénéficier de vérifications entérinées par des entités indépendantes et d’évaluations qui évitent le travail redondant.

Au cours des derniers mois, AWS a collaboré étroitement avec le GC afin de saisir ses exigences en matière de sécurité infonuagique et ses besoins en autorisations. La vaste expérience d’AWS s’est avérée précieuse pour le GC, mettant de l’avant les accréditations nationales et internationales de sécurité détenues : ISO 27001, Service Organization Controls (SOC), FedRAMP Moderate & High et plus récemment, l’Impact Level 5 du département de la Défense des États-Unis pour traiter des données sensibles, contrôlées et non-classées.

En s’alignant sur les accréditations de sécurité déjà existantes et en examinant toute exigence résiduelle, AWS a démontré, tel que ratifié par un évaluateur indépendant, que ses capacités répondent, et bien souvent, dépassent le seuil de sécurité exigé par le GC. Certains gouvernements, dont celui du Royaume-Uni et de l’Australie recueillent déjà les fruits de la réciprocité d’accréditations.

Une telle approche permettra au GC d’autoriser les technologies infonuagiques de manière sécurisée et en toute conformité afin de transformer la fourniture des services à valeur ajoutée aux citoyens canadiens.

The deadline to implement National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-171 is fast approaching. Beginning in January 2018, you may miss out on government funding that stipulates its implementation if you have not taken action.

In 2015, NIST published Special Publication (SP) 800-171 – Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Non-federal Information Systems and Organizations – introducing the standards for non-federal entities, such as academic institutions working under a government contract. NIST 800-171 was meant to take the security controls from a larger NIST publication, NIST 800-53, and assist non-federal agencies to apply controlled unclassified information (CUI) controls to their environments. When NIST 800-171 was published, it specified a grace period that ends on December 31, 2017. Therefore, compliance with the framework is mandatory beginning in 2018.

Many universities are turning to AWS to leverage the robust controls in place to maintain security and data protection in the cloud and be compliant with NIST 800-171 rather than overhauling their existing environment or data center facilities. For example, as Purdue University mentions in a recent article published on Educause, AWS allowed them to create a separate domain for controlled research without negatively impacting their existing facilities.

AWS makes compliance easy by providing free NIST 800 Quick Starts. The Quick Start is a reference deployment guide that discusses architectural considerations and steps for deploying NIST 800-53 and 800-171 on the AWS Cloud. In addition, the Quick Starts include an AWS CloudFormation template that automates the heavy lifting required to deploy the reference architecture. Also, the Quick Starts include a security controls matrix, which maps the architecture components to the requirements specified in NIST 800-53 and NIST 800-171.

To get started, view the Quick Start guide in HTML or PDF. To launch the Quick Start, either click on the following link in your browser, or from the AWS console, paste the following URL  into the CloudFormation console in US-East-1 as shown below: https://s3.amazonaws.com/quickstart-reference/enterprise-accelerator/nist/latest/templates/main.template

If you need assistance with an enterprise implementation of the capabilities introduced through this Quick Start, AWS Professional Services offers an Enterprise Accelerator – Compliance service to guide and assist with the training, customization, and implementation of deployment and maintenance processes.

Please contact your AWS Account Manager for further information, or send an inquiry to: [email protected].

When it comes to cloud computing, the purchase process can seem daunting. Fortunately, AWS can help. Our experts at AWS have assisted many government IT leaders in selecting the right acquisition approach for their agency.

Download the on-demand webinar on How to Buy: Cloud Procurement Made Easy.

• Find out how the cloud alleviates upfront costs with a pay-as-you-go model, (only pay for what you need).
• Discover steps for structuring your cloud procurement strategy.
• Examine the different purchase models available to support your agency-specific needs.
• Learn how to shift from capital expenditure to operational spending.
• Uncover partners and contract vehicles available to government agencies for cloud procurements.

For more on how to buy cloud, visit the How to Buy section of our website.

We just wrapped the AWS Public Sector Summit in Canberra, Australia where 900+ attendees participated in workshops, roundtables, bootcamps, breakout sessions, and a keynote delivered by Teresa Carlson, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS.

Teresa was joined onstage by Australia Post, Geoscience Australia, and an adviser to the Australian government, who shared how they use the AWS Cloud to strengthen cyber security, improve service delivery to the public, and innovate faster.

Watch the keynote video on-demand.

Throughout the packed day, attendees could opt for sessions spanning Data and Analytics, Security, Industry & Innovation, and Developer tracks, based on their business and technical interests.

A few featured sessions include:

• How Novel Compute Technology Transforms Medical and Life Science Research: Genomic research has leapfrogged to the forefront of big data and cloud solutions. This session outlined how to deal with “big” (many samples) and “wide” (many features per sample) data on Apache Spark. Attendees also learned best practices for keeping runtime constant by using automatically scalable micro services such as AWS Lambda, as well as how AWS technology has powered research at CSIRO.
• Terraforming Geoscience with Infracode: Geoscience Australia welds science and technology with tools such as Terraform on AWS, to examine the geology and geography of Australia. The organization gave us an inside look at how it secures Australia’s natural resources, builds Earth Observation infrastructure, and analyzes geoscientific data. Learn how Geoscience Australia is taking advantage of this and other innovations – including Packer and CI/CD – to drive change, improve developer experience, and deliver value to users.
• Robots: The Fading Line Between Real and Virtual Worlds: Our Summit audience got to witness how live, virtual 3D worlds rendered with Amazon Lumberyard – a complimentary, cross-platform, 3D game engine – interconnects with IoT devices in the real world. This session illustrated how AWS IoT can be used to remotely control inanimate objects such as Sphero robots, using Bluetooth. Attendees observed how AWS IoT and AWS Lambda empower users to create bi-directional communication between moving robots, which can detect collisions in a virtual world created through Amazon’s game engine. Learn how voice commands control physical and virtual robots using AWS IoT through Alexa Skills Kit and the Amazon Echo.

View all breakout sessions videos.

Interested in attending more AWS Summits? Find them in cities near you.