8:00am-9:00am | Check in, breakfast, networking, collaboration space open 

9:00am-10am | Keynote and Fireside Chat

Keynote speakers:

Brian Tracy

Leader of Solutions Architecture for State and Local Government

Amazon Web Services

Emre Keskin

Assistant Vice Provost and Managing Director for Research Data Strategy

Harvard University

Jessica Perez-Rossello

Assistant Chief Information Officer

Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services

Panel Discussion:

Chris Sedore

VP of Information Services & Technology and Chief Information Officer

Boston University 

Robin Healey

Chief Information Officer, Executive Office for Administration and Finance  

Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Cyber events continue to be a prevailing issue impacting Public Sector organizations. The cascading effects can be devastating to the citizens and residents within a state. This session will cover cyber trends across government and education sectors, and how organizations are working to overcome these issues by applying best practices and leveraging collective defenseCloud computing plays an increasingly critical role in improving organizational efficiencies, constituents experience, and fostering innovation. Gain insights in cybersecurity and risk management, AI/ML adoption and guardrails, and practical steps to make data strategy to effectively lead your organization through the cloud journey. This learning track is strategy and vision-oriented and does not require technical background.

Intended audience: Executives, IT Directors, line-of-business leaders, and decision makers

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM | Cybersecurity trends and best practices
Cyber events continue to be a prevailing issue impacting Public Sector organizations. The cascading effects can be devastating to the citizens and residents within a state. This session will cover cyber trends across government and education sectors, and how organizations are working to overcome these issues by applying best practices and leveraging collective defense.

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM | 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.

LUNCH

1:30 PM - 3:00 PM | How to become a data-driven public sector organization
Public sector organizations are increasingly leveraging AI/ML capabilities to integrate and analyze large volumes of data to make intelligence informed decisions. A common challenge faced by these organizations is developing an effective enterprise data strategy that supports data-driven initiatives. Achieving success involves a shift in mindset, organization of people and processes for large-scale innovation, and technology deployment that drives mission value in alignment with strategic goals. In this session, you will explore modern data strategy best practices and use cases, along with a guided activity designed to assist your organization transition to becoming data-driven.

3:15 PM- 4:15 PM | People and Organizational Change Management
In this exciting seminar, we will share tips and strategies for how to successfully navigate the most difficult element of change management: people. With extensive background in organizational change management (working with hundreds of customers through their buyer journey), our speaker is well versed in how to inspire groups of people through difficult organizational change. This content will help you capitalize on technology to help you manage change, as well as cover how to help people feel comfortable with technological change in the organization.

Artificial intelligence (AI) brings substantial benefits to the public sector beyond improved efficiency. Learn about the leading edge capabilities of AI, along with practical insights into how higher education and government can implement these technologies to better achieve your missions.

 
Intended audience: Developer and Data Scientist roles interested in learning how to integrate machine learning (ML) and AI into applications

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM | Practical AI for Public Sector

Breakout, 200 level

Public sector customers are trying to understand the purposes, relevancy, and implications of applying generative AI technology to their business challenges. In this session, you will learn about AWS’s approach and capabilities with generative AI. Common public sector & higher education use cases where generative AI can be applied and considerations for using AI in a responsible manner.

Suggested self-paced pre-learning: Fundamentals of machine learning and artificial intelligence

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM |  Generative AI Masterclass

Breakout, 300 level

This masterclass covers the evolution of GenAI technology, practical implementation strategies from prompt engineering to fine-tuning, and critical considerations for production deployment. Demystify common terms and understand why they are important to your outcomes. Learn how to build robust data foundations, implement responsible AI practices, and establish effective GenAI operations in your organization. Discover real-world applications with insights on navigating security, governance, and scalability challenges.

LUNCH

1:30 PM - 3:00 PM |  Workshop: Building Agentic Workflows on AWS

Workshop, 300 level

This workshop is designed for builders ready to create Agentic Workflows on AWS. Agentic Workflows enable large language models (LLMs) to act autonomously, performing tasks or providing assistance on behalf of users. In this workshop, you'll learn to leverage capabilities in Amazon Bedrock to create chatbot workflows. Incorporate features such as orchestrator to manage multiple agents in parallel.

This is a 300-level workshop targeted at software developers. Familiarity with AWS Lambda, using the terminal, and Python coding is helpful. No AI/ML experience is necessary.

3:15 PM- 4:15 PM | Increase productivity and satisfaction with an intelligent contact center

Breakout, 200 level

Adding intelligence to your call center can help you better understand your customer and improve your overall service ratings. AWS and AWS Partners provide a broad set of integrated solutions powered by ML so you can build seamless customer experiences that reduce operational costs, increase agent productivity, and improve customer satisfaction. In this session, learn how AWS Cloud-based contact center solutions can modernize your contact center and drive operational advances and customer satisfaction.

While research is often a compute-intensive activity, most researchers are not IT experts. In this track, you will learn how AWS cloud can help tackle some of the top research challenges, so you focus on science, not servers. It is strongly recommended to attend the full track to gain a holistic understanding of cloud capabilities for research.

Intended audience: VP for Research, Provost, Chief Compliance Officer, Deans of schools, research IT, researchers, principle investigators, faculty, librarians.

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM |  Transforming your research with AWS

Breakout, 100 level

Did you know that AWS has a team dedicated to research in higher education? Come along and meet the team! Discover how AWS is transforming higher education research through powerful cloud computing solutions. This session explores how universities are using AWS to tackle complex research challenges, from genomics to climate modeling, with scalable and cost-effective tools. Learn about AWS Research Credits, and how institutions can leverage cloud infrastructure to accelerate breakthrough discoveries. Perfect for research administrators, faculty, and IT professionals looking to maximize their research potential with AWS. This will be an interactive session.

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM | High Performance Computing (HPC) on AWS

Breakout, 100 level

This session will explore how researchers can leverage cloud bursting to meet the computational requirements of their HPC workloads. We will discuss customer case studies showcasing the successful integration of cloud bursting capabilities into HPC environments, as well as best practices for architecting hybrid cloud solutions that dynamically scale on-premises resources with the cloud.

LUNCH

1:30 PM - 3:00 PM | Workshop: Research on AWS

Workshop, 100/200 level

This hands-on workshop walks through the first steps for running and supporting your scientific workflows in the cloud. It explores services in compute and storage using the console and command line. In doing so it gives a practical introduction to the foundational concepts that you will need for you cloud journey. This workshop introduces AWS and core services, so your institution can confidently move forward to setting up more complex workflows for your HPC, AI/ML, Analytics and other technical computing workloads on AWS. *For more advanced AWS users, an alternate hands-on lab session with more advanced use cases in ML will be offered. *This workshop is designed for researchers and research IT.

3:15 PM- 4:15 PM |  Building a robust research environment

Breakout, 100/200 level

In today's interconnected global research landscape, research institutions worldwide face increasing pressure to establish secure research environments that meet stringent compliance requirements. Funding bodies across the globe, including national research councils, international organizations, and private foundations, are emphasizing the critical importance of robust cybersecurity practices and the protection of sensitive data. In this session, you will learn how to successfully meet these diverse compliance requirements and maintain the trust of funding agencies worldwide, it is imperative for research organizations to build robust secure research environments. You will also explore the purpose-built solutions that can secure your institution’s research environment.

The public sector collects large volumes of data through everyday operations. Learn how to design a modern data architecture to securely move, store, share, and analyze your data, and best practices to maximize the value out of your data with or without AI/ML tools.

Intended audience: This learning track is designed to help Developers, Data Analysts, and Data Engineers design, build, secure, and maintain analytics solutions.

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM |  Building a modern data strategy

Chalk Talk, 200 level

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.

Suggested self-paced pre-learning: Data Engineering on AWS - Foundations

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM |  AI/ML for data and analytics

Breakout, 200 level

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.

LUNCH

1:30 PM - 3:00 PM |  Workshop: The power of GenAI in data transformation and visualization

Workshop, 200 level

In this workshop, participants will transform data in an existing data lake using Q for Developers in AWS Glue and then use Amazon Q in QuickSight to create insights, data stories and more.

3:15 PM- 4:15 PM |  Data foundations in the era of GenAI

Breakout, 300 level

Generative AI has created many new opportunities both for improving data analytics capabilities and also for delivering impactful solutions that draw on the vast amounts of data organizations possess to create unique experiences for their constituents and powerful autonomous solutions to improve their business processes. In this session, you will learn about how you can leverage your existing data environment and evolve a strong data foundation and governance to enable and differentiate your Generative AI solutions and to benefit from the advanced capabilities Generative AI brings to your data & analytics operations.

Modernization is key to enhanced productivity and secured IT environment. You will explore cloud’s role in modernizing your IT infrastructure, best practices for adoption and innovation in the cloud for public sector, and identify the modernization roadmap for your own organization.

Intended audience: Customers new to the cloud, central IT, program/project managers

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM |  Cultural Transformation Through FinOps: Beyond Cost Management

Breakout, 200 level

Discover how FinOps drives organizational change by bringing together Finance, Engineering, and Business teams in a collaborative cloud financial management practice. This session explores the four pillars (See, Save, Plan, Run) of Cost Optimization while emphasizing the cultural shift needed for true FinOps success. Learn how AWS services enable cross-functional teams to make informed decisions balancing speed, cost, and quality, ultimately driving efficient growth rather than just cost savings.

Suggested self-paced pre-learning: AWS Application Migrations - Getting Started

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM |  Cloud architectural patterns: Platform and application best practices

Breakout, Chalk Talk, 200 level

Explore foundational cloud architecture principles for building secure, reliable, and operationally excellent platform and applications on AWS. This introductory session provides a comprehensive overview of core cloud design strategies, covering essential architectural patterns, security best practices, and operational frameworks. Learn how to create robust, scalable cloud infrastructure that meets enterprise-grade performance, security, and reliability standards.

LUNCH

Suggested self-paced pre-learning: Getting Started with AWS Security, Identity, and Compliance SkillBuilder Course, AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials

1:30 PM - 3:00 PM |  Cloud Lab Potpourri: Multi-Path AWS Hands-On Workshop

Workshop, 200 level

Dive into a flexible, choose-your-own-adventure cloud lab experience. Participants will have the opportunity to explore and practice multiple AWS technical workshops ranging from beginner to intermediate complexity. Select from pre-configured lab environments covering topics such as building servers, security & threat detection, network design, and containerization techniques. *Each participant can customize their learning journey based on skill level and interests. Bring your own laptop to participate*

3:15 PM- 4:15 PM |  Designing modern applications in AWS

Chalk Talk, 300 level

By using modern cloud native architectures, your organization can benefit from value such as reduced operational overhead, reduced costs, improved scalability, and stronger security footprint. Learn how leveraging serverless architectures can help you achieve better outcomes.

Suggested self-paced pre-learning: Introduction to Serverless Development

If you have any questions, or need assistance with accessibility services, send an email to awstateandlocallearningdays-support@amazon.com.