Tag: open data

The recent Winter Innovation Summit in Salt Lake City, Utah, showcased a breakthrough Sundance documentary, Dying in Vein. Its filmmaker, Jenny Mackenzie, joined a panel of public health and technology leaders, including Dr. Bill Hazel, former Secretary of Health and Human Resources for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and Alex Chan, CEO of the Clinton Foundation Health Initiative, to discuss opiate and heroin addiction, which, as the film highlights, claims an average of 90 lives in the U.S. daily. A prevailing theme that emerged cast the opioid epidemic as an issue of public health – rather than one of criminal justice – and pressed the role of technology in mitigating its risks.

When the team at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services wanted help addressing the nation’s opioid epidemic, they decided to do something simple – invite in the country’s brightest minds and give them API-enabled, up-to-date data.

In this blog post, we explore a use case for government organizations using the OpenStreetMap (OSM) dataset, a free, editable map of the world, created and maintained by volunteers and available for use with an open license. Using open source tools, we generate and render custom maps for a government’s digital property. By leveraging Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, and multi-tiered architectures, map tiles server can run in an efficient and highly available infrastructure.

The United Nations (UN) has named 17 goals that will help boost sustainable development worldwide. Technology and cloud-based solutions will be a critical part of achieving the Global Goals for Sustainable Development (SDGs). DigitalGlobe, one of the world’s leading providers of high-resolution Earth imagery, data and analysis, with support from Amazon Web Services (AWS), has launched the GBDX for Sustainability Challenge. We are looking for passionate participants who can leverage machine learning and high-resolution satellite imagery for geospatial solutions that support these sustainable development goals, such as disaster response, food security, poverty elimination, and ending malaria, to name a few.

We strive to meet our customers not only where they are now, but also where they want to be in the future. This requires constant innovation and rapid development of public sector solutions each year. In 2017, this took the form of the AWS Secret Region, achieving DoD Impact Level 5, and making AWS Educate available to students ages 14 and older – just to name a few highlights.

The China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) satellites are the result of a cooperation agreement between Brazilian and Chinese space agencies (INPE and CAST, respectively) started in 1988. Since then, five satellites have launched (CBERS-1/2/2A/3/4).

AWS customers did amazing work with open data this year. Here are some of the stories from the year, including releases of massive new datasets, tutorials on how to work with data in the cloud, and stories of how people are using AWS to put open data to work.

The Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle and the University of Washington recently hosted a two-week, intensive workshop on computational neuroscience. It offered advanced graduate and post-graduate students an introduction to the current state of the neurobiology of sensory processing, including anatomy, physiology, and neural coding. For the first time, attendees had the opportunity […]

In a previous post, we shared a Q&A with Sinergise’s Grega Milcinski on Sentinel-2, an ongoing collection of satellite imagery of all land on Earth. We also discussed how to process and serve large amounts of data using serverless technologies, such as AWS Lambda. To date, Sentinel-2 has already produced more than 1 PB of […]

Form 990 is used by the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to gather financial information about nonprofit organizations. In July 2016, the IRS started making electronic IRS 990 filing data available via the AWS Public Datasets Program. By making electronic 990 filing data available in this way, the IRS made it possible for anyone […]