Driving Disaster Management Innovation for Federal Agencies
The potential of technology to improve the delivery of public services never ceases to inspire me. My time at Amazon Web Services (AWS), supporting Abt Associates, stands out for getting to work on this kind of innovation. One of our projects was testing new machine learning tools for projects that could benefit agencies like the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Our goal was to adapt technology proven in the commercial realm to disaster readiness and expedite response times. Abt sought a proactive intelligence solution using precision geography and sophisticated modeling of federal datasets. My role was to bridge Abt's vision with AWS's cloud capabilities, including edge computing, satellite communications, and real-time geospatial analysis, orchestrating resources and guidance to shepherd the collaboration from concept to reality.
Abt wanted to merge satellite imagery and diverse datasets—climatic, health, historical—with highly precise geospatial data, such as elevation models, to generate actionable intelligence. This approach was designed to strengthen critical infrastructure, like vital transportation links in African regions, safeguarding disaster relief supply chains from the impact of flooding.
Amazon SageMaker was instrumental, streamlining the machine learning model development process. It greatly facilitated work with training data, accelerating the development of various applications, which could range from predicting disease outbreaks and enhancing targeted mosquito control efforts to predicting the location of drought affected communities.
The wide array of applications underscores the potential for the impact of this work, ensuring that federal initiatives are both timely and well-informed. This project represented a new frontier in applying AI and machine learning to enhance our collective well-being, with a focus on those at the highest risk. I am proud to have contributed to this transformative work and am excited about its ongoing positive effects on public health and safety.