Space is the next frontier for the democratization of advanced technology, and general availability of Amazon Web Services Inc. Ground Station makes satellite uplink/downlink accessible and inexpensive. That’s opening up the potential to revolutionize earth imagery and spread a global blanket of connectivity across the globe.

“It’s a Christopher Columbus moment,” said John Furrier, co-founder and co-chief executive of SiliconANGLE Media. “The connectivity with Ground Station literally makes a new IoT surface area of the Earth.”

But although Ground Station might prove groundbreaking, small and inexpensive satellites have been around for years. One of the pioneers is California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, which along with Stanford University’s Space Systems Development Lab launched the first CubeSat in 1999. Since then, more than 2,000 CubeSats and nanosats have been launched. But retrieving data has always been an issue.

“You can put the satellite up; the problem was the infrastructure to communicate back with it,” said Alison Robinson (pictured), associate vice president of information technology services at Cal Poly.

The university’s collaboration with AWS for the Satellite Data Solutions or SDS initiative solves that problem. “You can now bring the data, process it, store it, analyze it, and then ultimately share it,” Robinson said.

Robinson spoke with Furrier and Rebecca Knight, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. They discussed the budding ecosystem around AWS Ground Station and how cloud technology is transforming life on campus (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Alison Robinson in its Women in Tech feature.

The path to space is through the cloud

As director of daily operations for Cal Poly’s active Information Technology Services Division, Robinson leads the university’s cloud transformation efforts.

Robinson’s extensive experience in higher education and IT, and specifically her in-depth knowledge of AWS, make her a critical member of the ITS team. But it was Cal Poly’s philosophy of “Learn by Doing” that made Robinson excited to join the university. “In the field of technology, you must constantly be learning, applying that knowledge, and innovating,” she said in a press release announcing her hire.

Tasked with creating a technology service delivery model to be a standard for the California State University system, Robinson and the ITS team created the Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub. Powered by AWS, the DxHub is a resource for the entire university. By asking, “Who do we serve and what are they trying to accomplish?” ITS focused on an agile, DevOps-style approach to problem solving.

“We became a service management group,” Robinson said.

Robinson has directly impacted the culture at Cal Poly ITS by encouraging staff to be inventive and experiment. “IT people are usually very analytical and there’s a right and a wrong,” stated Robinson, who was determined to change the status quo, thanks to personal experience with a workplace where failure was punished.

“Try and get somebody to try something innovative if you have a problem, and it goes on your permanent record,” she said.

She also told the Cal Poly ITS department, “It’s okay to get it wrong. We might get parts of it wrong, we adjust. We’ve got to figure things out; all of this is new.”

Having the support of AWS infrastructure encourages employees and students to innovate and experiment. “You can work so fast in the AWS environment that if it isn’t right, blow it away and start over again,” Robinson said.

Digital-from-birth Millennials transform higher education

“This past fall’s incoming class was born in the year 2000,” Robinson noted. “They’ve never known a time without computers. They’re very mobile-engaged, very digitally engaged.”

One thing this incoming generation cares about is social transformation through technology. And the DxHub is the perfect tool for this, according to Robinson. “[The DxHub] exists to do innovative things for the greater good through the public sector and help with challenges that [students] are trying to learn more about,” she said.

The ripple effect of the DxHub is showing up in student work. Each year, Cal Poly seniors give presentations to demonstrate the processes taken to achieve an end product. This year, Robinson noticed an interesting trend in the showcase for the Cal Poly graphic arts department.

“Even though it is graphic arts, in every way technology is key to what they do,” she said. “They’ve had some great access to information and technology and really think differently about it.”

Data science for public good

The SDS initiative brings access to even more powerful data resources for students, and for everyone.

“We announced the initiative to do CubeSat in connection with Ground Station at AWS to be able to help people … to test these satellites and collect data and share it, ultimately, with others,” Robinson said. “Being for the public good, we want to make sure the data we’re collecting is in the AWS data set registry so that people can access that information. That’s important.”

Potential uses range from GPS tracking to save livestock that wander into dangerous situations, such as cattle trapped in a canyon, to mapping safe evacuation routes in the event of natural disasters such as earthquakes, wildfires and tsunamis.

Students will benefit from the opportunity to learn critical digital economy skills and apply data science and machine learning to solve real world problems. “[We are] giving students actual hands-on experience to work with the public sector,” Robinson said. “They are engaged with professionals and learning about problems and solutions.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE was a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector Summit. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE