Category: Nonprofit

The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London is a world-class visitor attraction and a leading science research center. NHM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have partnered up to transform and accelerate scientific research by bringing together a broad range of biodiversity and environmental data types in one place for the first time. In an earlier post, we discussed NHM’s overall vision for using open data in combination with large-scale compute, data systems, and machine learning (ML) to create the Planetary Knowledge Base (PKB), a knowledge graph of global biodiversity. In this post, we focus on the underlying services and architecture that comprise the PKB.

Earlier this month, for the first time, the IMAGINE: Nonprofit conference was hosted in Australia in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. This event brought together leaders, technologists, and mission-driven innovators in the nonprofit sector to learn, connect, and inspire. Over the three days, attendees explored the ways technology helps nonprofits make a positive impact around the world. Read this post to learn about some of the top moments from IMAGINE: Nonprofit Australia.

Nonprofit organizations are typically frugal and responsible. They strive to improve the human condition in innumerable ways, yet they cannot raise capital like a commercial organization, so they have to make the most of the resources they have. They apply that frugal approach to IT: they build and operate only what they need to pursue their mission, and constantly innovate both to meet mission objectives and optimize cost. Even with these constraints, nonprofits aspire to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, and often, they use innovative IT architectures on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to do it.

In April 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, while frontline workers were under immense pressure, three experienced live event professionals wanted to thank all of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) workers and paid care workers. They combined their extensive experience and knowledge to launch the not-for-profit charity Concerts for Carers, whose mission is to promote the mental health and well-being of all NHS workers and paid caregivers and to provide them with free tickets to live events in the UK as an ongoing gesture of thanks. This post highlights how they’ve used Amazon Web Services to meet their mission.

The Prosper Africa Tech for Trade Alliance is a collaboration uniting leading American and African tech companies behind the mission of accelerating e-commerce and digital trade in Africa. The recently announced collaboration between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Choppies, a leading supermarket chain in Botswana, exemplifies the Alliance’s model of impact-oriented public-private partnerships. This post highlights the AWS-powered deployment of Choppies’ state-of-the-art Farmer’s app across its supplier network.

Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are transformative technologies, enabling organizations of all sizes to further their mission in ways not previously possible. But, it is critical to think responsibly about these technologies so that all users are treated fairly, data is appropriately protected, and individuals can make informed choices about consent. In this post, we discuss responsible AI and how you should think about your workloads. This approach will help ensure your AI systems are fair, transparent, and secure.

The Climate Risk Research Foundation is a nonprofit that supports data-driven climate research. Their goal is to help decision-makers identify the potential impact and magnitude of climate-related risks and develop possible mitigation strategies. We chatted with the organization’s chairman, Brendan Reilly, to learn how its Sustainable Africa Initiative (SAI) is empowering agricultural experts in Nigeria to analyze climate risk models on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to prevent future food insecurity in their local communities.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is investing $4 million to support the work of the HALO Trust and trial the use of artificial intelligence (AI) with drone imagery to locate minefields and other explosive remnants of war in Ukraine. Innovating with AWS will enable HALO to make wider use of the high-resolution drone footage it collects, including testing machine learning (ML) models for identifying mines.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) innovation and inspiration dominated today’s AWS Summit Washington, DC keynote. But there was no shortage of newsworthy moments and key takeaways that extended beyond generative AI. Dave Levy, vice president of Worldwide Public Sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS), delivered the keynote and was joined onstage by three guest speakers who helped him set the tone for the annual two-day event that brings the public sector cloud community together in the nation’s capital.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing public agencies by streamlining services and providing valuable insights from large datasets. However, adding generative AI to your agency is not a simple process. SMX, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services Partner, helped one nonprofit agency build a robust architecture in the AWS Cloud that provided them the foundation for building and implementing generative AI tools. In this guest post, experts from SMX explain five best practices they used to help this agency prepare for generative AI.