AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog

Whiteboard with an SA: AWS Direct Connect

on | in Education, government, Nonprofit |

In this brief whiteboarding video, learn how to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS with AWS Direct Connect. Todd Gagorik, AWS Solutions Architect, shows you how you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment with AWS Direct Connect. In many cases, this can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections.

Todd will walk you through how to establish a dedicated network connection between your network and one of the AWS Direct Connect locations. This allows you to use the same connection to access public resources, such as objects stored in Amazon S3 using public IP address space, and private resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances running within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using private IP space, while maintaining network separation between the public and private environments.

Watch this video to learn how you can take advantage of the benefits of AWS Direct Connect.

Continue to whiteboard with our AWS Worldwide Public Sector Solutions Architects for step-by-step instructions and demos on topics important to you in our YouTube Channel. Have a question about cloud computing? Our public sector SAs are here to help! Send us your question at aws-wwps-blog@amazon.com.

University of Muenster Creates openSenseMap to Engage with Citizens and Students

on | in Education |

From the home to the classroom, University of Muenster works to engage citizens and students with scientific learning. As part of this effort, the university recently created the openSenseMap, an easy-to-use, open application platform built for the publishing of open sensor data.

With the openSenseMap, University of Muenster relies on sensors to collect geographic and environmental data (temperature, humidity, air pressure, and illuminance) from users with do-it-yourself sensor stations called senseBox:home and senseBox:edu. With a senseBox, you can take measurements that will help to answer a variety of scientific questions supporting citizen science projects locally and globally. Data collected by senseBoxes can provide measurements of various environmental factors and can contribute to more precise statements regarding climate, pollution, or traffic. Each senseBox:home  and senseBox:edu transmits its measurements directly to the map, where anyone can observe, analyze, and download the data. This method to collect data has provided an accessible and tangible way to work with data, teach programming skills, and learn more about the environment.

“To get more people involved, the sensebox needs to be usable and fast. By moving the platform to the AWS Cloud, we have seen improved speed and better service, and it is more secure and more stable compared to our local server,” said Thomas Bartoschek, Research Associate at the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Muenster, and founder and leader of the GI@School Lab and of senseBox.

Prior to moving to AWS, the openSenseMap was hosted on local servers at the university. They were unable to scale up, and the team dealt with problems running and scaling the app. With the goal of engaging with more citizens and students, they needed scalability. Since they received funding in April from the German Education Ministry, they have tripled the number of users from 60 to 250 registered sensors and devices actively submitting data.

The senseBox program works with schools, teachers, and citizens to educate, share data, and engage with scientists to discover more about the environment. The senseBox is developed exclusively following open science principles publishing the collected data for public use. Anyone can take the data and build dashboards or other tools on top of it. It is also not restricted by products, and is open to other sensors as well.

The university also won the CodeWeekAward, an independent EU and German initiative to get citizens and young students interested in coding. They organized a sensebox hackthon for kids during summer vacation, and 40 kids between 10-18 from Germany took part in the event. During the three-day hackathon powered by AWS, the participants gathered ideas, formed groups, coded applications, and built prototypes with the hardware. AWS provided access to our platform services and provided an Alexa Echo device for building voice interfaces to the sensebox. For example, two students used Alexa to interact with the sensebox data on OpenSenseMap to determine whether they would need sunscreen in City X or what to wear on that given day. See the presentation here. Three other groups used AWS to generate applications on measuring daily CO2 output and to save sensor output (camera pictures, temperature data, and more) on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

An Eye on Science: How Stanford Students Turned Classwork into Their Life’s Work

on | in Education |

Imagine visiting your doctor only to discover that you are losing your vision. That’s the reality for millions of people with diabetes every year around the world. Diabetic retinopathy causes progressive damage to the retina and is one of the leading causes of blindness. It afflicts more than 100 million people.  Early intervention helps in 90% of the cases, but often the diagnosis happens too late due to the cost, complexity, and expertise required for the scanning exam.

Early last year, Stanford University students, Jason Su and Apaar Sadhwani, took the Project in Mining Massive Data Sets course taught by Dr. Anand Rajaraman and Dr. Jeffrey Ullman.  The course gives students practical experience in data mining and machine learning algorithms for analyzing large amounts of data.  Students undertake team projects of their own design with the mentorship of professors and the cloud computing power of Amazon Web Services (AWS).  AWS provided platform credits to the students and instructor as part of the curriculum.

Building on their project that used AWS in the classroom, Jason and Apaar dared to ask the question:  can deep learning be applied to quickly and cost-effectively identify the precursors to blindness caused by diabetic retinopathy?

Deep learning is like machine learning; it allows the computer to adjust and fine-tune a general model based on the data it sees and “learns” from it, rather than having a human enter parameters or design complicated rules for the machine to follow.  In the past, algorithms to understand retinal images were all based on narrow approaches assuming ideal images. They couldn’t manage the many common artifacts in pictures and they required a prohibitive amount of compute power, making them impractical for a real clinic. In practice, doctors painstakingly scan through eye images looking for tiny lesions that suggest the onset of the disease. This process of finding needles in a haystack takes several minutes for each image. Deep learning could be the key to automating this process.

Based on their experiences in class, Jason and Apaar knew AWS provided the compute and storage resources for an automated diagnostic solution based on eye imagery.  This was the starting point for their journey from “grass roots to [a] sophisticated infrastructure” for predicting eye diseases.

Using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Apaar and Jason have imported more than 80,000 eye images and they are trying to access tens of thousands more from other sources, both local to Stanford and international.  They are using AWS to manage, crunch, and review the many gigabytes of data.

For Apaar, AWS makes research much easier. “It is difficult to get access to large computing resources.  AWS is so convenient to scale up and scale down.  With AWS, we start small and it gives the institution and professors the confidence that we should be investing more.”

Next, they experimented with new architectures for neural networks—the models for deep learning—that they created to automate diagnosis of retinal images.  It takes just two days to train a new model from scratch on AWS. They try new models over and over, based on advice and insights from ophthalmologists, improving diagnostic accuracy to expert human-level and speeding the network to analyze several images every second.

Their project, Automatic Grading of Eye Diseases through Deep Learning, is gaining attention.  The project was one of the featured highlights at the GPU Technology Conference 2016 in San Jose, California.  In the future, they hope to deploy their solution on cameras that are widely accessible to primary-care doctors, pharmacists, and patients, so monitoring becomes ubiquitous, regardless of income level or access to medical care. With greater vigilance, surgical intervention becomes safer and more effective, improving the chance of saving patients’ sight.

For now, the team will continue their work. “Before AWS, we couldn’t even attempt these projects.  Now we can launch nodes at whim and just try something new, whatever pops into our heads.  We come up with an idea, implement, and let it go,” said Jason Su. “AWS makes research liberating.”

 

 

What will your students dare to ask when they use the cloud?  Join AWS Educate for free credits and other cloud resources, and bring the power of possibility to your classroom.

AWS Public Sector Month in Review – September

on | in Education, government, Nonprofit |

Check out the AWS Public Sector Month in Review featuring the content published for the education, government, and nonprofit communities in September.

Let’s take a look at what happened this past month:

All – Government, Education, & Nonprofits

Education

Government

Nonprofits

New Customer Success Stories

Latest YouTube Videos

Upcoming Events

Attend one of the events happening in October listed below and meet with AWS experts to get all of your questions answered.

Follow along on Twitter for all of the latest AWS news for government and education.

Whiteboard with an SA: Tags

on | in Education, government, Nonprofit |

What are tags and what can you do with them? Tags help you manage your instances, images, and other Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) resources. Tags enable you to categorize your AWS resources in different ways – for example, by purpose, owner, or environment.

In this whiteboarding video, Jerry Rhoads, AWS Solutions Architects, walks you through how to tag. This is useful when you have many resources of the same type — you can quickly identify a specific resource based on the tags you’ve assigned to it. We recommend that you devise a set of tag keys that meets your needs for each resource type. Using a consistent set of tag keys makes it easier for you to manage your resources. You can search and filter the resources based on the tags you add.

Watch this demo video to learn more about how tagging works.

Continue to whiteboard with our AWS Worldwide Public Sector Solutions Architects for step-by-step instructions and demos on topics important to you in our YouTube Channel. Have a question about cloud computing? Our public sector SAs are here to help! Send us your question at aws-wwps-blog@amazon.com.

 

The Future of Policing: Not the Robocop Hollywood Imagined

on | in government |

As the technology landscape of state and local government agencies continues to grow and evolve, so does its dependency on cloud computing. Among the agencies most affected by this advancement are the 17,958 state and local law enforcement agencies across the United States. According to a survey conducted by the Department of Homeland Security and Major City Chiefs, 94% of these agencies have deployed or are in the process of deploying body worn cameras to first responders, resulting in thousands of hours of recorded video each day. This sudden influx of data will have a significant impact on the technology systems in place, since much of the agencies’ legacy hardware is not capable of scaling to meet these requirements.

While the future of law enforcement does not include invincible robots, it is data-driven and technologically advanced. The true future of policing is collecting and analyzing data provided by officers and first responders. Through this data, agencies are transforming the way that they operate, allowing officers better access to information, saving critical time, and ultimately, protecting the citizen. The cloud allows public safety organizations to increase agility, scale based on need, compile and organize data, and drive innovation to protect the regions they serve.

AWS leverages a dynamic partner ecosystem to deliver innovative solutions to its customers. For example, Appriss, the creator of the Victim Information Notification Everyday (VINE) platform, compiles and analyzes data to identify fraud, manage risk, and monitor persons of interest. By systematically monitoring thousands of persons of interest at a time, law enforcement agencies can stay ahead of crime, save valuable time and resources, and notify citizens of potential danger through social media and mobile applications. Through their MobilePatrol application, police agencies have received nearly 7,000 crime tips, many of which led to arrests.

Another example is Utility Inc, a leader in body camera technology. They have developed the BodyWorn technology many public safety agencies are adopting. Through video automation, cameras automatically record based on triggers, such as geography, biometrics, and physical activity, which allows officers to focus on the task at hand. With real-time wireless video offload and high-speed video and data communications, officers can connect with dispatchers, deliver vital information, and allow for an accurate assessment of danger and immediate suspect identification.

For over 10 years, AWS has developed 70+ services to support virtually any cloud workload. By leveraging AWS’s platform in conjunction with its extensive partner network, public safety agencies are able to organize resources for greater coverage in high crime areas and drive proactive policing activities and situational awareness.

For more information on AWS’s solution visit the Justice and Public Safety page, download the Future of Policing Webinar, and come see us at IACP in October.

Texas State Library and Archives Commission Turns to the Cloud to Launch Texas Digital Archive

on | in government |

In February of 2014, it was announced that the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) would receive the records of outgoing governor Rick Perry, the longest serving governor in Texas State history, who served from December 2000 to January 2015. This was the first transfer of electronic records to the State Archives, and needed to be both securely preserved for the future and made accessible to the public.

Governor Perry’s records comprised approximately 7 terabytes (TB) of data, including a diverse array of video files, still images, office files, press releases, email correspondence, policy documents, and general files; in addition, TSLAC also had 18 TB of digitized audio cassettes from the state senate it needed to securely preserve.

With one year to go before needing to make Governor Perry’s records public, the team at TSLAC faced the challenge of not having a suitable system in place to digitally preserve and make accessible these important and historical state electronic records.

“Defining our requirements and selecting a standards-based digital preservation system for our electronic government records has been a year-long project involving an extensive formal tendering process. Preservica’s software, hosted on AWS GovCloud (US), stood out as a clear choice, not just in terms of meeting all our requirements, but also based on the company’s reputation and track-record with the other State Archives,” said Jelain Chubb, State Archivist and Director, Archives and Information Services Division at Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

Government organizations, like TSLAC, are using digital preservation systems alongside their existing Content and Records Management systems to ensure digital records remain readable, usable, and trustworthy. In particular, the new system needed to offer a secure and easy way to provide public and internal access, as well as have minimal local IT overheads. “The physical cost of server space in our own state data center was prohibitively high and unsustainable for our agency,” says Mark Myers, Electronic Records Specialist at Texas State Library and Archives Commission. “A cloud deployment frees us of needing to have onsite software, servers, and IT maintenance.”

In addition, the system needed to accommodate the stringent requirements of the Texas Department of Information Technology including encryption of data in transit and at rest, which was achieved by hosting on AWS GovCloud (US). The AWS GovCloud (US) region is designed to address the specific regulatory needs of United States federal, state, and local government agencies. It is an isolated AWS region purpose-built to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud.

Myers continues, “Using cloud storage also gives us geographical dispersal of multiple copies of our data which is a key digital preservation requirement.”

Chubb also believes the cloud is the best solution for TSLAC: “You don’t have to be afraid of the cloud. Many government agencies are looking into cloud solutions because it means that they don’t have to build something from the ground up or worry about hardware and software, or have in-house IT support. It is one of the reasons we are now sharing our original Request for Proposal (RFP) with other state governments interested in leveraging the cloud to preserve and provide access to their own long-term and permanent digital records.”

Learn more about the Texas Digital Archive. And learn more about Preservica’s Cloud Edition hosted on AWS GovCloud (US) and how it delivers secure, digital preservation, and public access for the state’s archives.

 

Exatype: Cloud for HIV Drug Resistance Testing

on | in Education, Nonprofit |

Professor Simon Travers and his team of researchers based at the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) have launched the Exatype platform, which runs on AWS. The Exatype platform provides rapid, accurate HIV drug resistance analysis at affordable rates. Users upload HIV sequence data files directly from high-throughput sequencing machines and receive a detailed drug resistance genotype report for each sample.

What started as an idea from Professor Travers to help the over six million South Africans living with HIV has now gone commercial and can test hundreds of people per machine per day in a more cost effective, scalable way.

In 2011, when this idea became a reality, the team realized the number of approaches available for HIV drug resistance testing. They could use software with the sequencing machine, and then analyze the data locally. With this approach, they recognized support issues and the hurdle of keeping the software up to date, thus increasing the cost per test. Or they could perform the data analysis in the cloud. Without needing to buy servers, Professor Travers realized they could drive down the cost of data analysis substantially and have unlimited scalability.

“Being able to access the computation requirements we need for a specific amount of time instead of buying high-end computing hardware that we don’t use most of the time was a no brainer,” Professor Travers said. “When we migrated to AWS, we got the computing power we needed at a much cheaper cost.”

How does it work?

The goal of HIV drug resistance testing is to identify mutations present within the viral population of an HIV-infected individual.  These mutations can cause resistance to one or more drugs, so accurately identifying their presence/absence can help determine the best path for treatment. Now with new ways of generating the sequencing data quickly, vast quantities of complex data is produced. Data production is relatively easy, but analyzing it can be difficult.

Simon and team have developed a tool that takes data directly off of the sequencing machine and produces an easy-to-read PDF report within an hour. But it isn’t just about the speed to result; Exatype is highly accurate and can distinguish between background errors in the data and true mutations.

“With AWS, we could analyze data from every HIV-positive person in the world and use every sequencing machine possible, and still be able to generate the reports without any delay,” Professor Travers said. “This is not possible with anything other than the cloud.”

In addition to being scalable and more cost effective, the current approach provides greater sensitivity to detect resistance at low prevalence. The traditional way identifies a drug resistance mutation only if it is present in greater than 20% of the virus in the individual. Theoretically, this new approach to sequencing means that drug-resistant viruses present in less than 1% of the viruses circulating within a HIV-infected individual can be identified.

Looking ahead – What’s next?

Based on the possibilities of the cloud, the team is looking to move into other microbial resistance disease lines, such as Staphylococcus aureus, tuberculosis, and Hepatitis C. Exatype is a disease-agnostic application, and the set of references and rules applied to various diseases can be altered without having to tailor computing requirements. This will enable fast, accurate, and secure interpretation of next-generation sequencing to help as many people as possible get the right treatments.

AWS Signs CJIS Agreement with the State of Louisiana

on | in government |

 

 

 

 

 

AWS recently signed a Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) agreement with the State of Louisiana, allowing state and local police to leverage the AWS Cloud for CJI data, including biometric, identity history, person, organization, property, and case/incident history data. As with the CJIS agreements we have signed with other states, including California, Minnesota, Colorado, and Oregon, this agreement allows law enforcement agencies throughout Louisiana to benefit from secure, reliable, and cost-effective cloud technology.

Cloud technology has the power to help increase transparency and build trust in communities across the country. By enabling inter-agency data sharing, police departments will be able to arm their officers with data that will help them to make better-informed, real-time decisions.

“Law enforcement agencies are the heart of communities across the nation and Louisiana is no exception. In an effort to increase safety, transparency and instill trust, it is our hope that cloud technology will empower officers with tools to help in the improvement of police-community relations in the years to come. With more control, improved security, and greater flexibility, police departments can focus on more efficiently managing operations and investigations to protect their citizens,” said Teresa Carlson, VP of Worldwide Public Sector at Amazon Web Services.

AWS cloud technology and our AWS Partner Network (APN) ecosystem are helping to solve increasing demands for body camera implementation, video data storage, and digital evidence management, which will decrease the burden of administrative pressures so that law enforcement can focus on what matters most: protecting their citizens.

Currently, the Louisiana Department of Corrections is leveraging AWS to improve inmate education and post-prison outcomes by implementing a new secure and reliable online learning solution using Amazon Workspaces. By leveraging the cloud, Louisiana enables better inmate outcomes and security, ensures high availability, speeds technology deployment, and reduces the need for IT staff. Read the full case study here.

From prisons to the front line, the AWS platform is secure and helps justice and public safety organizations meet CJIS security requirements. Louisiana joins over 2,300 government agencies across the globe who trust the AWS Cloud for their workloads from the DHS to NASA to FINRA.

To learn more about how AWS and our partner community are supporting Justice and Public Safety, please visit – https://aws.amazon.com/stateandlocal/justice-and-public-safety/

Whiteboard with an SA: AWS Code Deployment

on | in Education, government, Nonprofit |

How can you easily deploy your code on AWS? AWS has several services which would allow you to do this. Whiteboard with Leo Zhadanovsky, AWS Solutions Architect, as he shows you how to use AWS CodeDeploy and other services to make it easier for you to rapidly release new features, help you avoid downtime during application deployment, and handle the complexity of updating your applications.

With several options available to deploy your code on AWS, Leo shares a proposed architecture and gives step-by-step instructions on how you can store your code in a git repository, or an S3 bucket, and use AWS Elastic Beanstalk to provision EC2 instances, deploy your code to them, set up autoscaling groups, configure your Elastic Load Balancer, and provision your RDS database.

Watch this video to learn how to make deploying your code on AWS as easy as possible!

Continue to whiteboard with our AWS Worldwide Public Sector Solutions Architects for step-by-step instructions and demos on topics important to you in our YouTube Channel. Have a question about cloud computing? Our public sector SAs are here to help! Send us your question at aws-wwps-blog@amazon.com.