Tag: EMEA

Located in Aragon, the new AWS Europe (Spain) Region will consist of three Availability Zones, giving organizations of all sizes—from startups to enterprises and public sector—access to local infrastructure, while meeting the highest security standards, regulations and data protection, reducing latency, increasing security, improving scalability, and boosting innovation and digital transformation in Spain.

This is a guest post by Maria Teleńczuk, research engineer at the Paris-Saclay Center for Data Science (CDS), and Alexandre Gramfort, senior research scientist at INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology. Maria and Alexandre explain how they adapted their open source data challenge platform RAMP to train the models submitted by student challenge participants using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot instances, and how they leveraged AWS to support three student challenges.

The maturing of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought ready-made services that organizations can use, not only to automate data entry work but also to apply intelligence into the business process. Using modern AI capabilities on AWS, organizations can transform approaches to document management. This allows public sector organizations to save time (enabling faster throughput especially during higher volume paperwork times), so they can help get constituents their services faster, and focus on the most valuable work of the high-touch or high-need cases. Document automation helps reduce human entry error and provide backup services in case of natural disaster.

Organizations across the public sector are leveraging the cloud to drive their missions forward with cutting-edge innovation. At the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Sector Summit Online, vice president of worldwide public sector and industries Teresa Carlson and vice president of worldwide public sector Max Peterson at AWS shared the latest updates and spoke with leaders who are reinventing what’s possible using the AWS Cloud. Here’s what you missed.

In 2020, education transformed like never before. Educational institutions needed to be able to provide students, teachers, and staff with immediate access to education and AWS helped customers and partners modernize their systems and applications and reach learners remotely, quickly, and at scale. In 2021, innovation continues in the world of teaching, learning, and research—as well as the use of technology to automate processes and drive better student outcomes.

In Europe, government agencies and policy makers see the value in using new technology to unlock digital transformation and deliver better, more innovative citizen services. Using data for statistics initiatives, including open data, can help researchers produce innovative products and tools, including visualisation, to inform government officials ahead of making policy decisions that impact their citizens. When it comes to big data, policy makers need to collaborate with researchers to address issues and challenges in using these new data sources. To work toward this goal, Eurostat, the statistical office of the EU, hosted its bi-annual European Big Data Hackathon.

Times Higher Education (THE) is a data-driven business that, with the help of AWS, is now realising the value of their data, which enables them to be better informed and make faster decisions for customers. THE provides a broad range of services to help set the agenda in higher education, and their insights help universities improve through performance analysis. THE worked with the AWS Data Lab to create a centralised repository of their data. Launching a data lake helped with providing a cost-effective platform and cataloguing data so they could understand their data and design new products to make use of it.

Research exploring how humans work with machines to solve problems in fields ranging from space to sustainability has established the potential to create far-reaching change in children’s education. The test-bed project is part of a wider program set up by Oxford University with support from AWS. Researchers have been as surprised by how quickly they have reached results as they are pleased with the outcomes. One of the test-beds, the Oxford X-Reality Hub Ed Tech project, set out to investigate how virtual reality (VR) could transform the classroom experience and close the gap between disadvantaged groups of pupils who statistically do less well than their peers.

Looking at information security as an enabler for change, not a blocker, was the mind shift that contributed to digital transformation in UK government. The UK modernization of data classification concepts and processes enabled more responsive public services, as well as massive savings (£1.7bn in 2014 alone). From 2012 through 2015, the authors of this blog worked together in the Cabinet Office in the UK to reform a decades-old information security policy. This effort helped unlock widespread cloud adoption in the UK public sector and the advantages that come with it.

COVID-19 highlighted the existing shortage in personnel within healthcare and is now challenging many hospitals with high staff turnover and sick leave. Planerio created workforce management solutions that help healthcare organizations modernize their workforce administration. Their shift planning software uses artificial intelligence (AI) and takes into account a range of planning variables such as employee qualifications and availabilities, employee preferences and requests, requirements of different shifts and workplaces, legal regulations and tariffs, and more.