Tag: government

China will launch its digital currency February 2022, and the UK and Eurozone have joined the movement for central bank digital currencies (CBDC), but it is the smaller, emerging economies that are leading the charge and have much to gain, experts have predicted. In a recent Global Government Forum and AWS Institute panel discussion, financial technology (FinTech) specialists noted it is the Bahamas and Cambodia who are the CBDC pioneers. The Bank for International Settlements said 86% of central banks are experimenting with CBDCs and 10% are close to implementing them, while banks representing 20% of the global population will launch a digital currency within three years.

AWS recently participated in a technical demonstration, known as “On-Ramp 4,” to test edge computing capabilities for the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS). ABMS is the Air Force’s contribution to the DoD’s Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) vision. Under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with ABMS, AWS tested the ability to successfully integrate and deploy a tactical edge node solution leveraging highly resilient network connectivity and communications.

In 2021, one in six Australians—almost four million people—have hearing loss, ranging from mild to profound. The statistic is part of the larger global picture reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) that approximately 466 million people live with hearing loss; of these, 34 million are children. In addition, 1.1 billion young people are at risk of hearing loss due to exposure to noise in recreational settings and through personal audio devices. AWS offers services that will help organizations build end-to-end solutions with accessibility in mind and improve day-to-day activities such as social interactions, clinical consultations, live media, and public service announcements.

State and local governments (SLGs) are constantly looking for ways to improve the lives and well-being of their constituents. They strive for increased efficiencies in delivering existing government services or potential new services such as those related to assistance with food, health, education, affordable housing, weatherization, and more. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, along with ancillary business systems that support performance-based budgeting, play a key role in providing data insights. The balancing act between tight budgets and enablement of government services is enabled by fiscal health, sound policies, and data insights. ERP systems deployed on the cloud can help with the capabilities and technology tools that governments need to derive efficiencies with existing services and deploy new services.

Addressing climate change requires innovation across the world, across industries, and across startups and multi-national corporations. From distributed energy to storage solutions to efficiency and optimization software—clean technology investment and innovation is surging. With this surge in demand comes a rapid proliferation of startups working to solve today’s biggest energy challenges. To help foster this innovation, AWS is launching the AWS Clean Energy Accelerator.

Even before the pandemic, many people were rent burdened, with a quarter of renters paying more than half their income on rent. US Congress approved two bills containing $45 billion for emergency rental assistance programs (ERAP) that states and local governments can use to support people in need. Distributing these funds quickly and efficiently requires local agencies to rapidly design and deploy new engagement models, programs, and workflows that are easy to use, that can quickly scale up to meet demand, and are flexible enough to adjust to changes in federal and local requirements. Learn how these AWS customers and partners are leveraging the cloud to quickly launch and distribute benefit assistance programs like emergency rental assistance.

Data is at the heart of showing citizens how public services are working, and it enables the public sector to improve policy and operational delivery. Citizens expect accessible and useful services. The public sector aims to demonstrate success through data. To build trust in this relationship and promote accountability, public sector organizations need to communicate the data-driven performance of the services they provide. To help address these challenges, AWS is releasing Performance Dashboard on AWS. Performance Dashboard on AWS is a new open source solution to help you measure and share what’s important in one place and at minimal cost, and you can have the solution up and running in a matter of minutes.

Innovators in the transportation sector can seek additional sources of funding to help advance projects to improve safety, efficiency, system performance, and infrastructure. The US Department of Transportation (USDOT) offers state and local government funding opportunities through discretionary grant programs that encourage transportation agencies to think big. Several AWS customers, including the Contra Costa Transportation Authority and the Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT), successfully won these highly competitive USDOT grants. Learn from the collaborators on these projects, including Haile, Mark Haselkorn, director of the University of Washington’s Center for Collaborative Systems for Safety, Security, and Regional Resilience (CoSSaR), and Jimmy Kim, head of business development for smart communities, transportation, and mobility at Verizon, as they share their suggestions for crafting a successful application.

What if we were to democratize access to data and compute so that anyone, anywhere in the world could contribute to climate science? The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) seeks to accelerate sustainability research and innovation by minimizing the cost and time required to acquire and analyze large sustainability datasets. ASDI supports innovators and researchers with the data, tools, and technical expertise they need to advance sustainability initiatives. ASDI is committed to making climate-relevant data easier to access and analyze. ASDI’s growing data catalog comprises petabytes of open data.

Today, Amazon announced that it is now hosting petabytes of data from the largest and most updated climate simulation dataset in the world. Through two cloud grants from the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) to the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), Amazon is enabling climate researchers worldwide to access and analyze the dataset used for the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC-AR6) on the AWS Cloud. The report—scheduled to be published in May 2022—provides policymakers worldwide with the latest assessment of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation. The climate simulation dataset, also known as the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) data archive, traditionally hosted and distributed through the ESGF servers, aggregates the climate models created across approximately 30 working groups and 1,000 researchers working on IPCC-AR6.