Tag: EMEA

How is the current global skills gap impacting governments, educational institutions and nonprofits in the UK? How are UK-based organizations overcoming this skills gap to build a diverse and inclusive workforce? What more can be done?

The world’s leading digital governments rely on the cloud’s flexibility, innovation, and scale to empower officials with the insight they need to deliver top-tier public services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) helps governments become digital organizations, which enables them to focus on their core mission – serving citizens.

In the current environment of digital transformation, there is a lot of talk on how best to educate students for new job profiles. Attempts to increase graduation numbers in software engineering programs are only part of the answer. All students need to improve their digital literacy and collaboration skills.

For the second year, AWS hosted our AWS Public Sector Summit in Brussels, Belgium, on Tuesday, April 9. This year, we welcomed over 700 attendees from across the European Union. The Summit focused on key public sector themes across the region including training and workforce development, migration and transformation, data privacy and security, and machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Ada, Bolton College’s chatbot, has been supporting students since April 2017, answering a broad range of questions about the College and its services. Recently, the college launched its staff-facing chatbot, which responds to questions from teachers and support teams regarding campus services, student progress, and more. Through the voice-first Alexa Skill, students, teachers, and support teams can get information about the College, their studies, and their work through their Echo smart speakers or via their Alexa smartphone app.

Today at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Brussels, Munich University of Applied Sciences (MUAS) and CODE University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, announced the launch of their innovation labs designed to accelerate the digital transformation of the public sector. The centers will focus on driving innovation in Germany, helping government, education, and nonprofits tackle some of the most pressing challenges to delivering a wide range of citizen services. With this initiative, students will have access to AWS technologies, innovation methodologies, and technical expertise to experiment with ‘born-in-the-cloud’ solutions.

Today, the Sciences Po School of Public Affairs, an international research university ranked among the best institutions in the world in the fields of humanities and social sciences, announced the launch of a new Public Innovation Lab, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Public Innovation Lab will focus on building innovative and practical solutions to challenges faced by French public and private organizations, including government, education, and nonprofits.

Matific supports national mathematics curricula and popular textbooks in more than 40 countries and 30 languages. Since founding the company in 2012, the mission was to impact mathematics and science education around the world. To go global, the company needed both scale and reach. And with the complexity of local education regulations, they also needed to meet the security and compliance requirements for each country.

Managing water crises is one of the Sustainable Development Goals and the decline in the available quality and quantity of fresh water is ranked as one of the top ten most serious societal risks by the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Global Risks report. Using satellite imagery available through the AWS Open Data Program and the AWS Cloud, BlueDot Observatory is establishing a global monitoring system for all at-risk water bodies. This monitoring reveals a sad truth – the total loss of water bodies is in the not too distant future.

We invited Anze Zupanc, a data scientist who manages the BlueDot Observatory at Sinergise, to share how the AWS Open Data Program and the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative support this work.

Imagine this scenario: two people are on a date, and they each bring something else along – their phones. Society is beginning to tolerate, and even accept, the influence of digital technology into our worlds. But voice technology may have people looking away from their phones and talking to each other (and to Amazon Alexa).