Tag: education

An Amazon Alexa badge with 10-15 hours of dedicated Alexa skills training is now available through AWS Educate. Alexa is Amazon’s voice service and the brain behind tens of millions of devices like Echo Show and Echo Spot. Alexa provides capabilities, known as “skills,” that enable developers to create a more personalized experience for their products and build natural voice experiences that offer consumers a more intuitive way to interact with the technology they use every day.

Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning are cutting-edge technologies that are changing and enhancing many of our daily tasks from natural language processing and self-driving cars to enhanced data mining and medical informatics. But what do these terms mean, and how can we use these technologies?

While the fires spread in Sonoma County in October 2017, the focus was on fighting the flames that burned more than 110,000 acres and on helping the citizens displaced from their homes get access to emergency response resources. In addition to shelter, food, and water, time was another important resource. Citizens have high expectations for government services, whether at the state or municipal level, especially in the aftermath of a disaster. Immediately following the Sonoma County fires, the staffing resources in place could not handle the demands required to provide services and educate the public on what resources were available. To scale to meet the demands of citizens, QLess, an innovator in customer-interaction management (CIM) technology, worked around the clock to deploy its Amazon Web Services (AWS)-hosted solution for Sonoma County in a single weekend.

The Korean Ophthalmological Society migrated its legacy Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) server to Amazon AppStream 2.0 to stream ophthalmologic imaging studies, such as retinal photographs, optical coherence tomography images, visual field tests, and optical biometry, to 80 university eye doctors nationwide.

AWS EdStart helps EdTech entrepreneurs build solutions that are secure, smart, scalable, cost effective, and most importantly, ones that positively impact the education sector. Check out how GlyphEd, Exploros, and WayUp, members of the AWS EdStart community, are building smart solutions to revolutionize education.

Pressure on schools to provide more Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) resources to students, combined with the needs of business for a properly trained 21st century workforce have driven Marmion Academy to create the Computational Prototyping and Research Center (CPARC).

I had the pleasure of taking the stage in Brussels and giving the keynote presentation at our first-ever European Public Sector Summit. I was inspired by the hundreds of organizations in attendance and by the number of whom have embraced the cloud to support their digital transformation initiatives. I also was awed by how much our customers have been able to achieve using AWS technology, notably the European Commission and Santillana. These leaders shared stories of saving money and delivering innovative digital solutions through AWS that are helping to build a better future.

Today at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Brussels, we announced that AWS EdStart, a program that is designed to help startup educational technology (EdTech) companies build teaching and learning solutions on the AWS Cloud, is now available in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

The AWS Educate program has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, expanding the number of students and educators globally who can use its free tools, resources, and AWS Promotional Credits to gain cloud computing skills and knowledge. AWS Educate’s four job families (Software Developer, Cloud Architect, Analytics and Big Data, and Operations/Support Engineer) all have newly translated content and subtitled videos available for students ages 14 and up* as well as educators.

The City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge is now open! The City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge is a global program recognizing how local and regional governments are innovating on behalf of their citizens around the globe. Last year, we opened up the competition to school districts who are using the cloud to enrich learning, help teachers reach more students, and improve school or district operations. This year, we are adding a new category to the Challenge: We Power Tech.