Category: Open Source

Rideshare demand prediction is a well-explored topic in academia and industry, with abundant online resources offering diverse modeling frameworks tailored to different geographic contexts. A challenge with rideshare demand prediction, however, is that the trip data required to calibrate or train models can be exceptionally large. In this post, we explore the challenges of big data analytics and showcase how ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Engine, a spatial analytics library for the Apache Spark environment, can be used on Amazon EMR to effectively address these problems.

Digital public infrastructure (DPI) describes the foundational digital capabilities nations provide to facilitate efficient and secure interactions within society, such as proving identity, paying for goods and services, proving an entitlement, or sharing data. DPI is a country’s digital backbone, rapidly enabling modern and responsive government, increasing inclusion and economic participation, and stimulating innovation across all sectors. This post provides several compelling examples of governments worldwide that are benefitting from DPI.

Government organizations face challenges that include tight budgets and rapidly evolving citizen demands. They can address these challenges when they collaborate and share resources to accelerate digital transformation. In the UK, 44 local government bodies—called councils—use an open approach to share expertise and pool resources to transform their web publishing platforms using LocalGov Drupal. The GOV.UK Digital Marketplace includes LocalGov Drupal on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This post explains how councils used collaboration and shared resources to develop this digital public infrastructure which has reduced the cost of building council websites by up to 80 percent and delivered better services.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Institute, and Public Digital today announced the recipients of the Future of Government Awards 2023. The awards champion practitioners, teams, and leaders who transform people’s lives by applying digital solutions and leveraging technology to reform the public sector for those it serves.

Northwestern University Libraries’ (NUL) relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped lead to innovative approaches to NUL’s digital collections suite. Read this post to learn how NUL leveraged an open-source standard and AWS Lambda to make it simpler for researchers to examine, compare, share, and cite images and audio/visual files across libraries.

There are 1.5 million people with a learning disability in the UK and globally, it is estimated that 15 percent of the population have some form of learning disability. Read this blog post to learn how Swindon Borough Council, a local authority in England, used Amazon Bedrock to create the Easy Read solution, which helps make vital public information more accessible and inclusive for its constituents.

This quarter, AWS released 34 new or updated datasets on the Register of Open Data. What will you build with these datasets? Read through this blog post for inspiration.

Generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) has the potential to play several important roles in education, transforming the way we teach and learn. This blog post looks at how one EdTech startup, BriBooks, is leveraging generative AI to assist young children with creative writing.

Nominations are now open through December 14, 2023, for the Future of Government Awards, a global awards program that celebrates practitioners, teams, and leaders who are transforming people’s lives by applying digital solutions and leveraging technology to reform the public sector for those it serves.

Swindon Borough Council serves a multicultural community of 230,000 citizens in the south of England. We continuously review emerging and evolving technologies, seeking to leverage them to reimagine and improve services, lower costs, and enhance efficiency. The success of a recent translation project that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud services is a prime example of this.