Mackenzie is the Global Startup Evangelist at AWS. His days are spent traveling the globe to meet startups, share their stories, and connect engineering teams together. Every day there are a large number of startups launching on AWS across every imaginable industry. It’s Mackenzie’s mission to find stories of startups that are helping to improve the world and share these stories with a wide audience.
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Prior to joining AWS, Mackenzie was the Head of Technical Operations at Betterment, the world’s largest independent robo-advisor based in NYC which manages over $8B in assets. Mackenzie was a founding engineer and Head of Technical Operations at Oscar Health, an insurance startup also based in NYC, helping to grow the company to over 400+ employees.
AWS State, Local, and Education Learning Days is a two day, in-person event where attendees can access Amazon Web Services (AWS) training sessions, get one-on-one support with experts, collaborate with peers, and practice their skills in workshops.
Learn about a range of topics tailored to your needs, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), data and analytics, application modernization, security and governance, and more.
Register for just one day or both days, and choose the track that best fits your cloud educational needs. You'll be able to attend as many sessions as you wish. Check out the available tracks and sessions below.
Please note that each track is first-come, first-served
because seating is limited. We suggest you arrive early.
If you have any questions, send an email to awstateandlocallearningdays-support@amazon.com.
AWS Learning Days is recommended for state and local government and education IT professionals, executives, and practitioners.
No experience with AWS is required. Get started today with a no-cost, self-paced online course, AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials, to build your cloud knowledge. Attendees who seek an overall understanding of AWS Cloud are recommended to take this course prior to the event.
Hear from our keynote speakers on how cloud infrastructure enables public sector organizations to modernize constituent services and student success. We'll dive into how the AWS Cloud helps state, local, and education customers overcome challenges to meet their mission.
Warren Santner, Senior Solution Architect Manager, AWS
Chad Mitchell, Chief Applications Officer, City and County of Denver
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Morgan Reed, Leader, Executive Advisory, State and Local Government, AWS
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Orrie Gartner, Associate Vice Chancellor and Deputy CIO, University of Colorado at Boulder
Amy Bhikha, Chief Data Officer, Colorado Governor's Office of Information Technology
AWS Learning Days will be held Tuesday, March 5 and Wednesday, March 6. You can register for just one day or both days.
Each day will kick-off with registration and breakfast, with day one including a keynote fireside chat. Lunch will be provided on both days. Please bring a laptop if you plan to participate in workshops on day two.
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Discover the track that fits you best by exploring the sessions offered below or accessing the full agenda.
A collaboration space will be open both days with activities that include: Ask an expert, AWS Partners and collaborators, co-working space, complementary refreshments and wifi, and more.
Technical track
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This track is intended for technical staff with some knowledge of AWS.
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AWS Technical Essentials
This course introduces you to essential AWS services and common solutions. It covers the fundamental AWS concepts related to compute, database, storage, networking, monitoring, and security. The course will also cover the concepts necessary to increase your understanding of AWS services, so that you can make informed decisions about solutions that meet business requirements. Throughout the course, you will gain information on how to build, compare, and apply highly available, fault tolerant, scalable, and cost-effective cloud solutions.
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Executive track
This track is intended for leaders and decision makers in state and local governments and education. This track is not intended for AWS Partners.
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Generative AI/ML and AI governance for the public sector
AWS generative AI offers public sector customers advanced AI solutions, enhancing public services, streamlining operations, ensuring data privacy, and driving innovation for smarter, efficient governance. In this session, we will also discuss the intentional actions that will ensure the development, deployment and use of AI are done in a responsible manner.
Cyber trends and best practices
Cyber events continue to be a prevailing issue impacting the public sector. The cascading effects can be devastating to the citizens and residents within a state. This session will cover cyber trends across public sector organizations, and how agencies and institutions are working to overcome these challenges by applying best practices and leveraging collective defense.
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Building a modern data strategy in public sector
Public sector customers are collecting more data than ever before. Creating a comprehensive data strategy is a common challenge. Success requires shifting mindset, organizing people and process to innovate at scale, and deploying technology that accelerates value in direct support of your strategic objectives. This topic covers best practices and examples based on our experience with public sector customers who are becoming data-driven.
Executive track speakers
Sergio Ortega
AI/ML Business Development Lead, AWS
Sergio is an executive with 20+ years of expertise in AI/ML, and public sector industries, holding significant roles at AWS and Microsoft, focusing on go-to-market strategies and business development.
Maria Thompson
Executive Government Advisor, AWS
Maria works with security and technology leadership for customers, identifying trends, best practices, and assisting them in developing holistic security strategies.
Jason Moldan
Principal Solution Architect, AWS
Jason brings over 25 years of experience in technology. He works with EDU and State & Local Government leaders to design cloud strategy for their organizations and the technical platforms that support it.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) track
AI/ML for your organization (Level 100)
Join this session to learn how AI/ML fits into your organizational goals. Learn how these managed services and tools bring value to your mission faster, at lower cost, and without requiring your own data science team. This session explains the more frequently used AI/ML services, example use cases, and examples from other organizations who have successfully leveraged these services.
Session type: Breakout
Building AI and ML powered applications without machine learning expertise (Level 100)
Developing data sciences and data engineering skills to create and maintain ML models can be time-consuming. In this session, learn how to integrate AIL and ML into your products and applications with a few lines of code and without having to write any code.
Session type: Breakout
Intelligent document processing (Level 200)
Documents are a critical part of many government and higher education organizations. Within the massive volume of documents lies strategic data and insights. In this session, learn how your organization can process and analyze documents at scale with AWS ML. Minimize manual intervention and scope for human error with ML and reduce costs by automating manual, complex, and expensive document processing approach.
Session type: Workshop
Use no-code machine learning to solve real-world challenges (Level 200)
Give business users and analysts the ability to do ML without any code, scaling the number of people who can create ML powered insights, forecasts, and predictions using Amazon Sagemaker Canvas.
Session type: Breakout
Build a bot (Level 300)
Using machine learning to improve engagement with your constituents doesn't have to be data science. In this workshop, you will configure a question and answer bot to reply to common inquiries from your end users. Come prepared with your own laptop and a willingness to learn in order to participate in this session.
Session type:Â Workshop
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Data and analytics track Â
Building a modern data strategy (Level 100)
Data is growing exponentially and coming in more diverse formats than ever before. This makes it challenging to extract value. A modern data strategy can help you manage, act on, and react to your data so you can make better decisions, respond faster, and uncover new opportunities. In this session you will learn about the AWS Modern Data Strategy. How to modernize your data infrastructure, how to unify data by breaking down silos, and how to leverage machine learning (ML) to reduce the burden of manual processing and analytics.
Session type: Chalk talk
Democratizing your organization's data analytics experience (Level 100)
In this session, learn how AWS can democratize analytics with ease of use and better price performance, making it easier for analysts and data scientists of all skill levels to use ML.
Session type: Breakout
AWS Data Lake and visualization (Level 300)
Build your own visualization dashboard in minutes using Amazon QuickSight. With Amazon QuickSight, all users can meet varying analytic needs from the same source of truth through modern interactive dashboards, paginated reports, embedded analytics, and natural language queries.
Session type: Workshop
AI/ML for data and analytics (Level 200)
Organizations view analytics, AI, and ML as a continuum. This continuum enables them to make data-driven decisions across all levels of their enterprise and guides them in defining their customer experience. Within each of these organizations, there are multiple use cases, data types, users, and applications that require different tools. In this session, learn about the services, tools and techniques of employing AI and ML to provide an end-to-end data analytics strategy for the public sector.
Session type: Breakout
Post call analytics for your contact center with Amazon language AI services (Level 300)
Adding intelligence to your call center can help you better understand your customer and improve your overall service ratings. Contact center analytics, or Post Call Analytics (PCA) supports the transcription and analysis of call recordings to gain insights into customer interactions and the operational efficiency of your contact center. PCA also helps contact center analysts and owners better understand customer sentiment, call center operational metrics, call drivers, and emerging trends. In this session, learn how to enhance the customer experience with AI-powered post call analytics and conversation insights.
Session type: Workshop
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Application modernization, security, and governance trackÂ
Serverless architectures - Why is everyone moving to serverless? (Level 100)
By using serverless architectures, your organization can benefit from value such as reduced operational and maintenance overhead, reduced costs, improved scalability, and an improved security footprint. Learn how leveraging serverless architectures can help you achieve better outcomes.
Session type: Chalk talk
Building and governing your cloud environment (Level 200)
Customers of every size and industry type are moving to the cloud to increase their security, agility, cost efficiency, scalability, and ability to deploy more easily. In this session we will cover the AWS governance strategy and the tools and services available to customer to meet their control objectives.
Session type: Breakout
Amazon Connect (Level 200)
Deploying a secure, operational contact center can be challenging. Let AWS show you how to integrate Amazon Connect to efficiently streamline this process. In this builders’ session, walk step by step through deploying experiences using voice and chat. Additionally, see how to secure information in your interactive voice response (IVR) to help you remain compliant. Come prepared with your own laptop and a willingness to learn in order to participate in this session.
Session type: Workshop
Security is top priority (Level 100)
Cloud security at AWS is the highest priority. Security in the cloud is much like security in your on-premises data centers—only without the costs of maintaining facilities and hardware. In this session, get an introduction to AWS Cloud security services and learn how to scale and innovate while maintaining a secure environment and paying only for the services you use. You will also get an introduction into how to protect your organization from ransomware threats.
Session type: Breakout
Zero trust (Level 300)
This workshop demonstrates a Zero Trust architecture for service to service workloads. We will discuss the principles of Zero Trust and how AWS enables you to implement them in the most appropriate way for your workloads. This includes how a good Zero Trust architecture is not a single product, service, or architecture, but instead the application of principles and tenets to strengthen your designs. When complete, you will have had hands-on experience implementing combined network and identity controls to help eliminate lateral network mobility risk and improve the overall security posture of your workload.
Session type: Workshop
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If you have any questions, or need assistance with accessibility services, send an email to awstateandlocallearningdays-support@amazon.com.
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