AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog

The best predictor of future safety is a thorough understanding of the past. Traverse, a protective services case discovery platform from the AWS Public Sector Partner Program member Northwoods, uncovers dark data and uses it to present a comprehensive case story.

It allows child and adult protective services agencies to leverage the power of big data and the information they already have to make well informed, more confident decisions. The tool helps to analyze years of information and volumes of case records to build connections that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Northwoods launched Traverse earlier this year to be able to take advantage of this big data and provide protective services agencies insight into information and data they’ve never had before. Using natural language processing and text analytics tools, these empower workers to learn about key topics, people, and events in a case to make informed decisions about safety. Because it analyzes information that workers are already collecting, there is no additional work required.

Traverse is all-in on AWS, using services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS).

In order to store and handle sensitive data, Traverse uses the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256) algorithm to encrypt all data at rest and utilizes TLS 1.2 to secure all data in transit. Cloud resources are provisioned in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network, giving customers a logically isolated section in the cloud.

From foster care to CPS investigations to transportation, Traverse is used by protective services agencies to help caseworkers and social workers quickly understand major topics that impact their cases, such as domestic violence or substance abuse. Because Traverse also surfaces people connected to the case, workers are better able to identify placement options or positive supports for vulnerable children or adults. Traverse not only gives workers the information they need to make the best decisions possible to protect safety, it improves productivity because finding critical information is possible in minutes, versus hours or even days, depending on the complexity of the case.

 “Often times we have to go back and look at history before we make a decision. The ability to navigate through a case using the search function is really important because if there’s information to find, Traverse narrows it down without having to read everything. That’s a huge timesaver and a huge benefit to the agency because we’re able to use our time very effectively,” said Jacob Meetze, Investigation and Assessment Social Worker, Beaufort County Department of Social Services, NC. Read more user stories here.

Watch this On Demand Webinar from the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA) and Northwoods to learn how Fairfield County Child and Adult Protective Services is embracing “dark data” to make informed, confident safety decisions.

In addition to Traverse, Northwoods also offers document management solutions (DMS) for human services agencies that are used in 12 states and one territory, serving over 36 million people. For agencies that are cloud-based, information that previously would be thousands of pages long in a large printed case file is now stored electronically in AWS. Caseworkers and social workers can easily store and retrieve documents, complete forms, and capture more accurate and timely case notes and narratives to improve service delivery, compliance, and audit-readiness. Field-based social workers use a mobile app in disconnected mode and can also capture high-resolution, color images of clients and living conditions.

Learn more about how Health and Human services (HHS) agencies at the state and local government level are leveraging the AWS Cloud for initiatives ranging from the optimization of everyday administrative tasks to delivering a more personalized digital experience for their citizens.

A guest blog by Andrew McMahon, Dcode42

Digital transformation – changing processes and information into a digital form has been a popular trend. It is causing changes in industries from automotive to healthcare to government.

To be able to move forward in digital transformation and the DevOps space, organizations can hire people with more modern technology skill sets. And, in order to support this new civil servant, the appropriate tools and technologies should be in place.

Dcode42 incubates emerging technology companies, providing them with what they need to succeed in the federal market through our comprehensive accelerator programs. We recently announced our newest cohort that focuses on delivering the most promising developer tools and platforms to the government.

By bringing together Dcode42 and AWS, we offer a powerful launching pad for technology companies of all sizes to succeed quickly. Companies accepted into this three-month program receive concentrated guidance and support on crucial aspects of entering the federal market, including:

• Courses with renowned industry subject matter experts on the inner workings of government – from marketing and sales to compliance, procurement, pricing and more;
• Exclusive briefings with key government buyers and industry leaders;
• Access to industry specialists and mentors for expert guidance and networking connections;
• Exposure to an extensive partner network of large and small partners to increase revenue opportunities; and
• Hands on strategic planning and go-to-market support to maximize your resources.

Along with the programming that Dcode42 companies receive, this particular cohort will have the opportunity to work with AWS public sector teams to further speed their time to market. Companies leave the program with tactical plans, close integration with AWS teams, and, in many cases, immediate opportunities for revenue.

Join The Digital Transformation Movement

The Dcode42 program is for established companies with commercial traction. The program has two tracks for companies of different sizes: the startups track, for companies with $1-14M in revenue and/or funding; and the emerging growth track, for companies with $14-150M in revenue and/or funding. Our program is designed for two types of companies:

• Those with some traction in the federal market, but who are still developing a government practice. These companies may have a few contracts or a dedicated federal team with prior experience.
• Companies new to the federal government looking to succeed more quickly who are not sure the best approach to take.

The deadline to apply for the upcoming cohort is July 17th. Companies that wish to apply can visit www.dcode42.com/apply or find more information at www.dcode42.com/programs.

There are 500 million smallholder farmers in the world, most of whom live on less than $1 a day. Small-scale farmers are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change – and they face many challenges including lack of access to traditional markets, agricultural inputs, and finance. Every day small-scale farmers develop a diverse range of innovative, low-cost solutions in response to the many challenges that they face. But with the majority of farmers living in remote areas without internet access, they could not share this information with other farmers, until now.

Created in 2016 as a project for the Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation (CPF), a UK-based non-profit, WeFarm has since spun out to form its own venture-capital backed social enterprise. WeFarm is a free peer-to-peer knowledge sharing service that enables farmers to exchange information via SMS – without the internet and without having to leave their farm. Farmers can ask questions about anything agricultural and receive crowd-sourced answers from other farmers around the world in minutes.

How WeFarm works

How WeFarm works is simple. Take, for example, farmer Rose in Kenya.

Rose’s crop is suffering from a disease, so she sends a simple, free SMS to the local WeFarm number, outlining the symptoms of her problem.

Her question is instantly posted online and sent to selected members of the WeFarm community via SMS. Joseph, who is suffering the same problem in Uganda, poses a solution he has recently found for that very thing. Rose receives useful, relevant knowledge within minutes – and Victor receives confirmation that his knowledge is valuable.

To be able to quickly provide responses, WeFarm is bringing machine learning and crowd-sourcing to these offline populations since 99% of users are using WeFarm through SMS.

The lifecycle of a question

When a farmer asks a question it goes through an SMS aggregator. An API then allows WeFarm to consolidate the aggregator into a uniformed method. AWS Lambda takes the inbound messages and creates a queue. Then there is the process of cleaning the data and spell-checking, which can be a challenge since a lot of these questions are in exotic languages, like Swahili. The question is run through a series of filters and algorithms such as the location, intention, and the use that information in order to direct that question to 10 people in the network who would be best able to answer the question. Then, they also rate responders tagging them with timeliness, language, and who has responded well in the past. So whether a farmer in Peru has a problem with coffee plants or another farmer in Uganda has a problem with diseased sweet potato plants, they can get the answers they need.

Using AWS services like AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), WeFarm is able to interact with 7000-8000 users per day and has reached over 24 million interactions since it launched. They keep a live activity tracker here.

“AWS has been a tremendous asset for our ability to scale quickly and still maintain quality of service. Without efficient and effective back-end technology, it would be impossible for us to bring our services to the world’s small holder farmers,” said Kenny Ewan, CEO, WeFarm.

Deriving socially valuable data

Currently, WeFarm is serving one of the largest populations in the world of agriculture with a mandate to scale their network, but looking ahead they see commercial use of the data produced from the more than 24 million pieces of information exchanged via SMS. WeFarm plans to turn the data collected into socially-valuable insight – focusing on everything from tracking disease to predicting global food crises.

Learn more about WeFarm here.

Photo credit: Lam Thuy Vo

Prince George’s County created a summer internship for 20+ underserved high school and college students, focused on teaching the students how to develop apps using Amazon Alexa, Amazon Lex, Echo Dot, and Echo Show.

The program is being led by the Prince George’s County IT Department as part of the Tech Prince George’s initiative focused on the development of a career pipeline and interceptive strategies to improve student matriculation and eventual career success in technology fields. AWS is collaborating with Prince George’s County to help build a pipeline of technical talent and expose more students to emerging technologies from Amazon.

Starting this week, the 24 interns will work in teams of six to develop an application based on Amazon Alexa, Echo, Dot, and Show, utilizing AWS Lambda and other AWS cloud services. The applications will address challenges faced by some public school students, such as reading impairments. The teams will be led by six college students (all computer science majors) acting as mentors and advisors.

The teams will have five weeks to develop the program with the goal to roll the winning app out in schools within the county. This is a competition-based internship, with the winning application selected by a panel including the County Executive, County CAO, a School Board Member, an AWS representative, and others. The winning team will also have the opportunity to publish the skills on the Amazon Alexa site.

“This is the best part of my job working with the young adults and watching the light bulb come on and seeing the growth in them as well as confidence as professionals. The fact that we are using a concept that they can personally connect with is a winning strategy. When I shared with the teams that the device was the Amazon Alexa this year, they were so excited and that same day the brainstorming process was in motion. I can’t wait for everyone to see how amazing my students are and what creative ideas come from these future IT Professionals,” said Sandra Longs Hasty, Program Director, Prince George’s County.

AWS Educate, Amazon’s global initiative to provide students and educators with the resources needed to accelerate cloud-related learning endeavors, is offering developer account credits and online education accounts through mentors for the interns as part of the program.

Good luck to all of the interns!

Learn more about AWS Educate here and how we work to build skills, get engaged with the community, and inspire the next generation here.

Amazon has opened a call for proposals for the 2017 round of Amazon Research Awards (ARA) in a number of areas, including machine translation, natural language understanding, search, robotics, and more. The program is open to faculty members at academic institutions in North America and Europe and awards up to 80,000 USD in cash and 20,000 USD in AWS promotional credits. ARA aims to fund projects leading to a PhD degree or conducted as a part of post-doctoral work. Check our Call for Proposals page for a list of focus areas supported this year. Proposal submissions are accepted until September 15, 2017.

AWS is working with ARA to help researchers process complex workloads by providing the cost-effective, scalable and secure compute, storage and database capabilities needed to accelerate time-to-science.

From Open Earth Observation to the Human Genome project to studying social media sentiment, researchers have used the AWS Cloud for their groundbreaking research. With AWS, scientists can quickly analyze massive data pipelines, store petabytes of data and share their results with collaborators around the world, focusing on science not servers. Learn more about AWS for research here.

For ARA call for proposal details and to apply, visit https://ara.amazon-ml.com/proposals/#apply or contact research-awards@amazon.com.

Cloud procurement presents an opportunity to reevaluate existing procurement strategies so you can create a flexible acquisition process that enables your public sector organization to extract the full benefits of the cloud. Download the whitepaper for “10 Considerations for a Cloud Procurement” for the public sector.

Are you ready to move to the cloud but looking for practical guidance? The following are key components to help streamline your cloud procurement strategy. Take a look at the tips below and download the full whitepaper here for more details.

1. Understand why cloud computing is different
2. Plan early to extract the full benefit of the cloud
3. Avoid overly prescriptive requirements
4. Separate cloud infrastructure (unmanaged services) from managed services
5. Incorporate a utility pricing model
6. Leverage third-party accreditations for security, privacy, and auditing
7. Understand that security is a shared responsibility
8. Design and implement cloud data governance
9. Specify commercial item terms
10. Define cloud evaluation criteria

Thousands of public sector customers use AWS to quickly launch services using an efficient cloud-centric procurement process. Keeping these steps in mind will help you deliver more quickly on citizen-, student-, and mission-focused outcomes.

For more detail, visit the AWS “How to Buy” page for the details you need to get started. Check out the latest procurement sessions from the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC: So You’ve Decided to Buy Cloud, Now What? and Get Started Today with Cloud-Ready Contracts for practical insights that will help you along your path.

We have seen a push for innovation in distance learning across higher education in recent years. The University of Georgia’s virtual exercise course is one example of a university addressing this challenge. The goal of the online course is for students to learn to manage heart rate activity during exercise for optimal fitness results.

Initially, students had to manually export the data from their fitness tracker, then send it to the instructor. But this approach wasn’t ideal. “As a student, this process could be confusing because there were multiple reports and file types to choose from when downloading the data. With the wrong report or the wrong format, the data could be unusable. For some students, data management became a barrier to learning,” said James Castle, Lead Instructional Designer, University of Georgia Office of Online Learning.

To alleviate the burden on the students, James worked with a student majoring in computer science to develop an alternate solution. The team looked to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for an inexpensive way to run the application and seamlessly collect the data. They needed to make the data collection and analysis easier for both the students and the professor.

“I had to look up a lot of the documentation for AWS. I watched a lot of videos and it was fun learning about it,” said Chuma Atunzu, a junior at the University of Georgia majoring in computer science. “Starting with little experience with these technologies, I was able to build a modern, serverless application using many different AWS services.”

With AWS, they designed a serverless application that uses AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) along with Desire2Learn (D2L) and Fitbit. In anticipation of the start of the summer semester, they tested the application last month and received a bill of $0.01.

Now, students give access to the instructor once with a single click at the beginning of the semester—that’s it. And then, they walk. For professors, once given permission, they can request the data after each module and do the necessary analysis for the course.

The online fitness course is now live with Fitbit and the new serverless application monitoring the heart rate data of University of Georgia students across the globe, from Switzerland and South Korea to Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. “So far it all seems to be working smoothly,” said James. “Our students are able to earn the physical education credit they need from almost anywhere on earth.”

Two workloads were built (for just a penny!) – one for students and one for professors.

Figure 1: Student workflow

Figure 2: Professor workflow

Learn more about the AWS Cloud for higher education here.

Cloud adoption is a key priority for higher education. As colleges and universities continue to transform to meet changing student expectations, institutional leaders want to help students access advanced, easy-to-use solutions anytime, anywhere. They also need better and timelier access to institutional and student data to inform decision-making, amidst pressure for increased accountability.

Ellucian, an AWS Education Competency Partner, provides technology solutions and services that remove barriers, helping higher education institutions achieve student success. Ellucian’s work with AWS supports the company’s cloud strategy, offering colleges and universities a secure move to the cloud, at their own pace.

Focused on the mission-critical systems on campus, like student information, Ellucian chose AWS as its global cloud provider to deliver scale, security, and a rapid pace of innovation. Working with AWS enables Ellucian to efficiently deploy a broad and deep portfolio of cloud products to the higher education market in more than 20 countries around the world.

 “The AWS platform has given Ellucian a global, scalable, highly secure, and highly innovative platform to run all of our cloud applications and better serve our higher education clients worldwide,” said Toby Williams, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Ellucian.

Security and scalability were key elements evaluated when Ellucian chose AWS because of its relationships to a broad range of higher education institutions and the sensitive student data that its customers manage. Fourteen of the top sixteen Ellucian products are currently deployed on AWS.

Ellucian’s relationship with AWS, its expansive application footprint, and large user base allows universities to scale up during peak registration times and then scale down to save costs and resources for their customers delivering a better time to value. This will give educational institutions access to critical data and analytics that influence teaching decisions and enable successful learning outcomes campus-wide.

Watch this video to learn more about how Ellucian uses AWS to host mission-critical apps to deliver scale, security, and innovation to higher education. And check out the fireside chat from Ellucian Live featuring Teresa Carlson, VP of Worldwide Public Sector, AWS and Jeff Ray, CEO, Ellucian.

Continue to learn more about how cloud computing is changing education and learning by watching Jeff Ralyea, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cloud at Ellucian, at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C.

From computer vision systems for autonomous driving to FDA-approved medical imaging, artificial intelligence (AI) is driving public sector innovation. Governments, defense agencies, and other public sector organizations are adding AI into their platform, solutions, and products to perform tasks that usually require human-level intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision making, or translation.

In order to change the way services are delivered to the blind or to inspire the next generation of space explorers, organizations need to overcome hurdles related to the scale of data, scale of compute, and variety of devices and platforms that intelligent systems need to ultimately run on. To be able to realize impactful results, Amazon AI breaks down services into three main layers, which sit on top of the AWS infrastructure and network:

• AI Services: Application developers can easily add built-in intelligence into their solutions using the Amazon AI Services. AI Services are powered by machine learning and deep learning, but provide higher level services to add intelligence into your applications. These AI Services include: Amazon Rekognition for image and facial analysis, Amazon Polly for text-to-speech, and Amazon Lex, an automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding service for building conversational chat bots. Within the public sector, Rekognition is being used to build facial search databases, user verification, sentiment analysis, and image classification and tagging of entities.
• AI Platforms: If you have existing data and want to build custom models, we provide a set of AI platforms which remove the heavy lifting associated with deploying and managing AI training and model hosting: Amazon Machine Learning (with both batch and real-time prediction on custom linear models) and Amazon EMR (with Spark and Spark ML support).
• AI Engines: A collection of open-source, deep learning frameworks for academics and data scientists who want to build cutting edge, sophisticated intelligent systems, pre-installed configured on a convenient machine image. Engines, such as Apache MXNet, TensorFlow, Caffe, Theano, Torch, and CNTK, provide flexible programming models for training custom models at scale. For example, Apache MXNet scales almost linearly across hundreds of GPUs, training efficient models which can be run anywhere from new, custom Intel processors and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to embedded devices on robots and drones.

AI in the Real World

The below organizations serving the public use some of Amazon AI services:

Nonprofits: The Royal National Institute of Blind People is able to change the way services are being delivered to the blind by using AWS. “We are currently using Amazon’s Speech-to-Text technology to create and distribute accessible information in the form of synthesized audio content for our many B2B and B2C customers, including utility companies, financial institutions, and media companies, as well as other customer-facing material such as magazines and publications. With the announcement of Amazon Polly, we’re excited about the ability to provide an even better experience to these customers by delivering incredibly lifelike voices that will captivate and engage our audience,” said John Worsfold, Solutions Implementation Manager, Royal National Institute of Blind People.

Health: Ohio Health, a nonprofit health organization, is utilizing evolving speech recognition and natural language processing technology to enhance the lives of its customers. “Amazon Lex represents a great opportunity for us to deliver a better experience to our patients. Everything we do at OhioHealth is ultimately about providing the right care to our patients at the right time and in the right place. Amazon Lex’s next generation technology and the innovative applications we are developing using it will help provide an improved customer experience. We are just scratching the surface of what is possible,” said Michael Krouse, Senior Vice President Operational Support and Chief Information Officer, Ohio Health.

Government: Leveraging Lex, the backend that powers Amazon Alexa, NASA, in order to spark innovation, has built a voice activated version of the MARS robot. A star robotic ambassador is “Rov-E,” a close replica of real NASA Mars rovers. NASA staff can easily navigate Rov-E via voice commands. Multi-turn dialog management capability enables Rov-E “to talk,” answering students’ questions about Mars in an engaging way. Integration with AWS services allows Rov-E to connect and scale with various data sources to retrieve NASA’s Mars exploration information.

Financial Services: Using Amazon EMR, FINRA is able to capture, analyze, and store a daily influx of 75 billion records in order to identify fraud and other anonymous activities.

Law Enforcement: Using various models, ShotSpotter delivers real-time gunshot notifications to law enforcement so they can dispatch to the precise location of the gunshot, engage with the community, look for evidence and occasionally help victims and make arrests. Their goal is to help drive down illegal gun use. Also, Washington County Sheriff’s Department uses Rekognition to be able to cross reference persons of interest with mugshots in their system. This allows for the department to drive leads quicker and allow investigators to focus on valuable leads.

Defense Agencies: The defense community is also starting to use machine learning systems to identify advanced persistent threats in their networks. They are using machine learning to provide enhanced endpoint protections and predict the potential threat of certain behaviors by privileged users with system admin roles.

Education: Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana uses machine learning for more than 70% accuracy in predicting students who are struggling, enabling faster intervention.

Learn more about AI at AWS here as well as in Werner Vogels’ keynote from the AWS Public Sector Summit and other AI-related sessions.

Seminole County Public Schools (SCPS), the 12th largest school district in Florida with more than 67,000 students and 10,000 employees, required a secure and mobile responsive website that could keep up with the growth in Seminole County.

As a premier district nationally, they wanted a website that reflected their high standards. Their old website, created in house by their IT department almost five years ago, was filled with outdated information (wrong numbers and incorrect contact information) and spanned over 2,000 pages. The dated aesthetic, combined with a cumbersome back-end system for web authors, led the IT team to look to streamline their website, one of the biggest marketing tools available for a school district.

SCPS chose Solodev Web Experience Platform to provide the face lift for their internally and externally facing websites. Now the SCPS team has inline editing tools, SEO-optimized web pages, enterprise permissions, SEO-friendly URLs, dynamic site navigation and breadcrumbs, content scheduling, and the ability to create custom apps or easily add entries to existing apps.

APN Partner Solodev runs on the AWS Cloud, thus providing SCPS with everything from load balancing to auto-scaling and elastic file storage. Solodev uses Amazon CloudFront to increase the delivery speed of SCPS’ website. By leveraging the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Solodev can quickly auto-scale capacity up and down as SCPS’ computing requirements change. Solodev implemented Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), which gives the SCPS website elastic storage capacity, growing and shrinking automatically as SCPS adds and removes files. And SCPS applications have the storage they need, when they need it.

In addition to scalability and speed, SCPS also needed to implement ADA compliance and find a solution to prevent website security concerns. AWS security capabilities and services increase privacy and control network access with network firewalls built into AWS, providing SCPS with world-class security.

“With the anticipation of a new school year, application deadlines, and hurricane season, SCPS is confident that we have the infrastructure to weather any storm,” said Michael Lawrence, Communications Officer, SCPS. “By using an AWS cloud-based system, we have a powerful system where parents and students can access grades, homework assignments, and latest news with just one or two clicks.”

Since the launch of the new website in January 2017, the district has experienced a 13% increase in returning visitors and a 3% increase in new visitors. They also can utilize advertising on their site, creating a new revenue stream for the district.

“Our new website allows us to tell our story. We now have the capabilities to highlight videos, stream board meetings, and provide our users with an interactive calendar,” said Maria Iftikhar, Information and Communication Manager, SCPS. “The next phase is to bring this technology into every school within our district to continue to bolster the district’s culture and reputation.”

Seminole County Public Schools now has a beautifully crafted design and the infrastructure to support it, providing SCPS with the peace of mind that their website runs on the cutting edge of modern web technologies.

Learn more about other City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge winners here.