AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog

This is the second post in a three-part series around smart and collaborative cities, showing how AWS can help cities of all sizes benefit from the cloud. If you missed our first post in the series, Cities of the Future, Today, you can read it here. In this post, we will explore how cloud computing can help cities collect data from both people and devices to provide enhanced citizen services.

Today’s “always on” and “always connected” world can lead to powerful transformations in our cities. These new mobile technologies allow city leaders to gather data in ways they never could before. Citizen data and sensor data can help provide better intelligence, understand citizens’ needs, and ultimately, provide improved services. The cloud can help lower barriers to entry, helping them create new services with the goal of making our lives easier, but also help quickly create low-cost and easy-to-apply services.

Citizen Data

It is inevitable that you will see people glued to their phones. Whether you are at dinner or on your morning commute, instead of getting annoyed, think about how these little computers make life easier. Citizens now have access to mobile applications that allow them to voluntarily provide data to the city by participating in surveys or by using mobile applications. These applications leverage smartphone features, such as accelerometers and GPS functionality, to track the location and movement patterns of their users. And this data can help cities make effective changes.

For example, the City of Boston, with technology partner Connected Bits, has created the Street Bump program to tackle tough local government challenges through innovative, scalable technology. With an app that uses a smartphone’s sensors they are able to capture enough (big) data to identify bumps and disturbances that motorists experience while they drive through the city. The data helps Boston’s Public Works Department better understand roads, streets, and areas that require immediate attention and long term repair.

AWS allows them to create a scalable, open, and robust infrastructure for this information to flow to and from city staff via the Open311 API. This solution developed by nonprofit OpenPlans, was created as a large multi-tenant software-as-a-service platform so other cities can also leverage the same repository, creating one data store for all cities.

GPS is one way to gather data, but another source of data comes from social media streams. City leaders can track whether their citizens are struggling with traffic jams, train delays, or other issues. They can learn about their citizens by analyzing social media, such as the Twitter Firehose, which provides data on public tweets around the world. Every tweet includes location information (if allowed by user), and users can create a geographical bounding box to monitor tweets published in or near to their city.

One common analysis of social media streams is sentiment analysis, a method that uses language processing and text analysis to understand the sentiment of a specific string. This can be beneficial to a city looking to understand how changes are affecting their population and the status of public services. For example, is there a hotspot of citizens complaining about waste collection? The below diagram shows how you could use AWS services to build a real-time social media analysis application.

Using AWS services and social media, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia, in partnership with the Black Dog Institute, created the We Feel project. This project explores whether social media – specifically Twitter – can provide an accurate, real-time signal of the world’s emotional state. It uses several Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to capture tweets from Twitter’s public API at an average of 19,000 tweets per minute. A separate Amazon EC2 instance processes the tweets, analyzing usernames to determine gender and identifying phrases that reveal emotional content. The information is funneled into an Amazon Kinesis stream, and then the tweets are copied to a scalable Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storage. The stream is monitored by another Amazon EC2 instance, which produces a summary of results every five minutes and transcribes it in an Amazon DynamoDB database.

Social media and mobility have the power to share useful information to city leaders to help them understand challenges, solutions, and opportunities within their cities.

Sensor Data

Changing cities for the better is, of course, bigger than social media. Internet of Things (IoT) technologies enable new and intelligent ways to collect data across many different industries, including health, transportation, energy and utilities, and agriculture.

AWS IoT is a managed cloud service that provides the ability for ‘things’ to easily and securely interact with cloud services and with other devices, at a massive scale. The connection to the cloud is secure, fast, and lightweight (MQTT or REST), making it a great fit for devices that have limited memory, processing power, or battery life. The AWS IoT service includes a message broker and a rules engine that allows things to interact with other AWS services. AWS IoT also includes “thing shadows,” a service that maintains a current state for each thing you connect. You can use “thing shadows” to get and set the state of a thing over MQTT or HTTP, regardless of whether the thing is connected to the Internet. Learn more about AWS IoT here: https://aws.amazon.com/iot/

By connecting all of the available resources in place throughout cities, authorities can leverage data to make smart decisions and create smart cities! Check back for our next post in this series, where we explore how customers can use big data and analytics to analyze and gain intelligence from  data.

Post authored by Steven Bryen, Manager, Solutions Architecture, Engineering, AWS and Giulio Soro, Senior Solutions Architect, AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce that we recently signed a Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Security Addendum with the State of Minnesota, making AWS GovCloud (US) services available to law enforcement customers through the state’s approved service catalog. The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s (BCA) vetting process of AWS is underway, including performing any required employee background checks as prescribed by the FBI’s CJIS standard.

With a constant flow of new requirements and new business drivers across the law enforcement community, the state of Minnesota can deploy workloads on the AWS GovCloud (US) Region with the goal of reducing IT burdens and delivering services securely, and more efficiently than ever before.

By signing the addendum, this enables local law enforcement agencies in Minnesota to run CJIS workloads on the AWS Cloud, including biometric, identity history, person, organization, property, and case/incident history data, with confidence that they are compliant with CJIS standards.

Information security is a top priority for law enforcement throughout the country. To satisfy CJIS requirements, and enable extremely high security levels for all of our customers, AWS employs a rich set of security technologies and practices, including encryption and access control features that surpass the capabilities of all other providers. As part of CJIS agreements, we require AWS employees with physical and/or logical access to complete a fingerprint-based background check and security awareness training. Learn more about what makes the AWS Cloud secure and the recognized leader in cloud security by top third-party analysts here.

Partnering for mission success

Working with AWS Partner Network (APN) partners, we are committed to bringing top solutions specifically suited for our customer’s mission needs. For the State of Minnesota, we worked with iCrimeFighter, to provide a mobile forensics software and evidence gathering system, with a mobile app and an AWS Cloud-based evidence tracking capability that was designed and developed by law enforcement officers striving to bring true mobility to the everyday work life of law enforcement.

“Security is a top concern for iCrimefighter, and the AWS Addendum with the State of Minnesota substantiates our commitment to securely store and manage critical digital evidence in the AWS GovCloud (US) for our law enforcement partners in MN—and across the country. By working with AWS, we are able to simplify access to digital evidence by uploading that evidence to a secure cloud,” said Steven London, CEO of iCrimefighter.

Confidence in your data security

These CJIS security addenda give our law enforcement customers, like the State of Minnesota and the California Department of Justice, the confidence that their data will pass CJIS-compliance audits and that their data is secure in the cloud. We comply with the FBI’s CJIS standard, and will continue to sign CJIS security agreements with our customers, including allowing or performing any required employee background checks.

Please reach out if you would like to get started.

LiveSafe, a mobile safety communications platform for crowdsourced intelligence, was born from a spirit of triumph over tragedy and the desire to make the world a safer place. The founding team saw an opportunity to mobilize and connect people through technology. As a victim of assault and a survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting, Shy Pahlevani and Kristina Anderson wondered if they could build tools with the goal of preventing incidents like those they experienced before they occur.

How it works

LiveSafe is putting safety in everyone’s hands to prevent incidents and directly connect people to the help they need. Via the mobile safety app installed on individuals’ smartphones, every submission via text, photo or video is collected with location data to facilitate two-way communication between students and campus security and actionable responses from real-time information. Data can also be submitted anonymously, protecting an individual’s identity while still providing critical information to relevant officials.

Top considerations in a mobile world

To scale rapidly during times of instances, like a security threat on campus or at a stadium, and provide end users with the information to connect, inform, and mobilize, LiveSafe turned to the AWS Cloud.

“When LiveSafe was originally starting up, the team attended an AWS conference and took a hands-on class. Once they saw the ease of use and breadth of services (plus the startup-friendly pricing) they decided it was the right platform for us, and we have been using AWS ever since,” Matt Hagopian, VP of Technology, LiveSafe, said.

When considering the technology needed to run mobile apps, LiveSafe looked at many elements including:

• Scalability: The ability to test and monitor apps without worrying about provisioning, scaling, and managing the infrastructure was a top priority. Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) helps scale LiveSafe’s API services layer as they see additional demand from end users.
• Reliability: The app needs to work with users no matter where they are, and on the devices of their choice, without disruption.
•  Security: The data needs to be secure, and the information shared needs to get into the hands of the right person, securely. LivesSafe utilizes Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to help separate public from private data, as well as production from staging environments. They then make sure to encrypt clients’ data at rest, both in the file system (leveraging Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) file level encryption) and at the row level (utilizing AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to help manage their keys external from the encrypted data).
• User Engagement: Tracking usage and user engagement with push notifications remains a key success factor for the app. When an emergency incident occurs, LiveSafe suddenly needs to send out tens or even hundreds of thousands of communications in an instant. When that happens, they leverage Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to spin up new machines to deliver those messages as quickly as possible.
• Low Cost: Paying only for what they use,  they can add, configure, and remove services at any time as needs change, making the cloud the right choice.

“For us, AWS has been an amazing platform as we have grown. We started with only a small subset of services. As we have grown in size and complexity, it has been very easy to leverage other services offered by the AWS platform to extend our offerings. We are also able to leverage resources for doing stress testing on demand or prototyping that we would not have had machines to use in a traditional self-hosted environment,” Matt said.

Whether you are creating a brand new mobile app or adding features to your existing app, AWS Mobile Hub lets you leverage the features, scalability, reliability, and low cost of AWS in minutes.

AWS can help you get started building mobile apps quickly, driving your mission forward in this mobile-first world and have more time to focus on things that make your app great.

Register for the AWS Public Sector Summit to hear how AWS can help you achieve your mission. Register now.

Scientists, developers, and many other technologists are taking advantage of AWS to perform big data analytics and meet the challenges of the increasing volume, variety, and velocity of digital information.  We sat down with Angel Pizarro, member of the Scientific Computing team at AWS, to talk about how the cloud is transforming genomic research.

Prior to joining AWS, Angel was a bioinformatics researcher (a data scientist focused on biological models and systems). In addition to his own research, Angel ran infrastructure for other researchers at a university. Back in 2006, he had an idea for an experiment, but at first glance it would take more RAM than available on the university’s compute cluster. Upgrading the RAM would have cost more than $40,000 for just this one experiment. They turned to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) where they could access enough RAM for the short period of time required to test out the idea.

It is a good thing they decided to use AWS, because the experiment didn’t work as expected, but AWS did. The moral of the story is: they tried! AWS allowed them to experiment at a reasonable cost. The ability to experiment became a great driver for change in Angel’s own research, and across the entire genomics field.

“When we calculated the compute and storage that we needed for the sequencers on campus, we found that we only had about 20% of the needed capacity. Second, even if we had unlimited funds to expand the compute and storage infrastructure, we didn’t have the real estate to put the equipment into.” Angel said. “We asked ourselves, ‘what is our real need?’ and the answer was a reactive compute resource that scales based on just-in-time data production. By moving workloads to AWS during peak times, we were able to service our researchers and not slow down the science.”

A lot has changed in the last decade within cloud computing and genomics. The sequencing instrumentation kept improving to output more data at much lower price points. The combination of more sequence at cheaper prices resulted in a virtuous cycle: prices fall, driving more people to use genomics for their research, thus driving more price drops as economies of scale kicked in.

Reducing time to science

The type of questions researchers could ask were largely dependent on the amount of compute they could get their hands on. Prior to the cloud, researchers were limited to three choices when it came to compute-intensive research:

1. If you had the money to buy big compute clusters, you often had unused infrastructure, which is a waste of money.
2. If you had no money, you would request access on a shared cluster, often waiting in a large line for the resources to become available.
3. Or you would just forego the initial question and ask another question.

The cloud breaks this mold by giving immediate and temporary access to an unlimited amount of compute power, and allows you to ask questions that may not have otherwise been possible. And having more computation allows you to ask even better questions about data.

Reducing time to science is something every researcher should experience. Nothing is sweeter than that first moment when you launch a HPC cluster in ten minutes. Once that light-bulb moment happens, you quickly start to realize that you can launch many clusters and perform parallel analyses of the same data set.

The second part of accelerating science is sharing results. In the cloud, everyone is able to use the same tools, language, and security that you did. More than just sharing a manuscript or a script to go along with your data, virtual infrastructure allows you to share the code that created your entire environment. If you have ever tried to install and use someone else’s badly documented code, you know what a big a deal this is.

Another goal of this approach is to democratize science by putting petabyte-scale data sets and 10,000 core clusters within the reach of researchers at institutions that may not be able to afford to buy something for local installation. When you can temporarily utilize massive amounts of compute, you lower the bar of entry for researchers.

Science shared securely

Within the scientific community, security is discussed in the context of data security, as in who has access to it and when. With AWS, you are able to provide standard operating procedures (SOPs) and share them with other researchers. There’s also a template so you and other researchers can meet these controls. That’s a powerful model – you have guidance and provide the steps.

Sharing findings allows researchers to rely on more data to help get to where they want to be in their own research. For example, researchers at Johns Hopkins University are developing a new algorithm on top of Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) to analyze all public RNA-Seq data in public repositories. The system actually gets cheaper the more data you give it. It works directly off of Amazon S3 to read input data, store results, and takes advantage of the Amazon EC2 Spot pricing. Amazon EC2 Spot instances allow you to bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity, significantly reducing the cost of running your applications, growing your application’s compute capacity and throughput for the same budget, and enabling new types of cloud computing applications. By being able to analyze all of the public data at a reasonable cost, Johns Hopkins found new insights into how genes are spliced together, resulting in the formation of proteins and cells. They discovered evidence for over 58,000 new pieces to that enormous jigsaw puzzle, our body, all without ever having to worry about the size of the infrastructure. They just needed to ask their big research question and access pay-as-you-go infrastructure to answer it.

“There is a large consortium of data, because the human body is complex. But what we know about  human biology is low hanging fruit. There is so much more out there, if we can share the data we have across different groups. The hope of the cloud model is to really start understanding human biology and make strides in research that impacts the world,” Angel said.

Learn more about AWS and genomics in this post by Angel and Jessica Beegle on How the Healthcare of Tomorrow is Being Delivered Today and visit the AWS Genomics in the Cloud page.

Earlier this month, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited Seattle as part of a West Coast swing aimed at strengthening ties between the Department of Defense (DoD) and the tech community. During his visit, he met with Amazon leaders and spoke with many of our Amazon Military Exchange students, including our Department of Defense Fellow assigned to work with AWS.

While at Amazon headquarters, Secretary Carter sat down with Amazon Founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, and AWS leadership including Andy Jassy, Charlie Bell, Adam Selipsky, Bob Kimball, Bill Vass, and Teresa Carlson to discuss innovation topics and ways to strengthen military exchange programs and partnerships with the technology industry.

“If we’re going to have the best military in the world, as we must have, 10, 20 years, 30 years from now, we need to strengthen our partnership with companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing and many others that I’ve met out here.  I’m determined to do that.  It’s part of the responsibility of the department, not only to fight today’s fight but to make sure that we’re superior for tomorrow’s.  And the most important ingredient is our wonderful people, but secondly, it’s technology,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter said following his visit to the Amazon Headquarters in Seattle.

Commercial cloud services and other emerging technologies can enable the DoD to achieve its mission, innovate faster, improve agility, and enhance the Department’s security posture, while also cutting costs.  In addition to cloud computing, business practices can be shared from industry to military, because talking to others about how they run their business forces us to hold up a mirror to ourselves, which is a very healthy thing for any organization.

One way we are doing this is through the Amazon Military Exchange program and DoD Fellowship designed to expose active duty military to AWS’s technology and Amazon’s leadership principles. Currently, we have three military exchange students and one DoD fellow working at Amazon and AWS. We are able to work alongside our military fellows to learn from them how we can better help the different branches of the military save money, innovate faster, and deliver capabilities that help achieve their mission. Meet some of these military professionals and learn more about this program in our blog series here, here, and here.

We are dedicated to contributing to the military’s mission and the enterprise and appreciate the Defense Secretary’s visit to Amazon. See below for the pictures from his visit to Amazon HQ.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter, center, tours Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle, March 3, 2016. DoD photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Tim D. Godbee

Lt. Col. Maria Schneider, one of the DoD Fellows, meeting and greeting the Secretary of Defense during his visit with the Amazon leadership team.

For years, people have been dreaming about going to Mars. Now NASA has made the Red Planet a top priority. While the space agency works on developing the rockets and technologies that would take astronauts further than they have ever traveled before, The Washington Post has created a virtual reality experience to take you there today. Please join us on the journey, which was created using actual imagery from NASA’s rovers. The Post experience is underwritten by AWS and Intel, and features content about our work with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Experience the virtual reality here.

NASA is the foremost space research organization in the world, helping shape our view of the world, space, and the possibilities in between. How did NASA use the cloud to meet its mission in space and on Earth?

• In Space: NASA inspired a new generation of space explorers and citizens by giving them front row seats to space exploration with the live streamed images of the Curiosity’s landing on Mars. NASA JPL serviced hundreds of gigabits/second of traffic from viewers around the world. Once on Mars, the Curiosity Operations Team used the AWS Cloud to scale out and process all incoming data in a matter of minutes. They were able to spend time making scientific progress, without waiting for data processing.
• In the Atmosphere: When NASA faced the challenge of reprocessing petabyte-scale data from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2), they anticipated a 100-day wait and a $200,000 bill using their on-premises data center. With AWS, NASA was able to do the same thing in less than six days for just $7,000.  The project helped NASA engineers obtain new insights from their data through the use of new algorithms that adjusted instruments on the satellite, helping them receive richer data on the Earth’s carbon uptake.
• On Earth: NASA continues to leverage the AWS Cloud to study the effects of climate change. Teaming up with Cycle Computing and AWS, NASA is measuring vegetation change in the Sahara at lightning speed. In only six hours, NASA scientists were able to process one third of the data – in a carbon neutral region– for only $80.

Go ahead and explore Mars in the virtual reality experience created by The Washington Post here, and don’t miss out on the “How NASA’s Mars Rover and Earth Analytics Use the Cloud” webinar on April 11th. Register today.

Increasingly, customers across the public sector are going “all-in” on the AWS Cloud. Instead of asking whether to go all-in, these pioneers asked how quickly they could do it.  Balancing the need to improve efficiency, stay agile, and meet mandates, government and education customers are committing to going all-in on AWS, meaning they have declared that AWS is their strategic cloud platform.

At last year’s re:Invent, we were lucky enough to hear from Mike Chapple, Notre Dame; VJ Rao, National Democratic Institute; Eric Geiger, Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago; and Roland Oberdorfer, Singapore Post eCommerce on a panel sharing insights into their decision-making about moving all-in or cloud-first, the value they’ve seen, and the impact to the mission.

Success can be contagious

All of these organizations are at various stages on their journey to the cloud. For example, Notre Dame is a year in with a third of their services migrated, whereas, Federal Home Loan Bank is three years in and recently unplugged their last piece of on premises infrastructure. No matter the stage, they all have similar experiences, lessons learned, and a shared goal—the cloud.

After initial successes with pilot projects, such as websites or testing environments, IT teams within these organizations saw the possibilities and savings with AWS and decided to migrate more of their infrastructure to AWS. Whether it was cost savings or scalability, these quick wins showed business value and a compelling case to bring other services to the cloud.

“Look for things that are as straightforward as possible to guarantee success,” advised Mike Chapple, Sr. Director for IT Service Delivery, Notre Dame.

The feeling of success can be contagious, and because of the initial success, each of these organizations wanted to do more and more. They took the time to carefully and thoughtfully design their infrastructure or “data center in the cloud” with an AWS Solutions Architect. Getting serious from the start paid off in the long run.

They may have begun the journey by wanting to lower costs, but they continued on the journey leveraging the cloud because of the possibilities available. No longer are they constricted by budgets, scale, and compute.

Tidbits of advice on the journey

Since adopting the all-in strategy, these organizations are now realizing what is possible with the power of the cloud. But gaining buy-in was not always easy. The panel mentioned they could prove security, they can encrypt data in flight and they can encrypt at rest, but surprisingly, the biggest push back came from their own staff.

With some universities and business, tradition runs deep, and that was the case with Notre Dame, a 175-year-old institution. So going all-in on AWS required more than just initial success with a few little projects. It required storytelling, training, and education. “One of the things we’ve learned along the way is the culture change that is needed to bring people along on that cloud journey and really transforming the organization, not only convincing that the technology is the right way to go, but winning over the hearts and minds of the team to completely change direction,” Mike Chapple said.

Change happens and the cloud is the natural evolution of IT. These teams did a lot of storytelling and mapping out that this is the next logical step to move from a virtualized on premises environment to a virtualized environment in the cloud. They planned early, trusted their instincts, and told the cloud story.

Watch this panel discussion and don’t miss out on the chance to hear from some other customers who have gone all-in with AWS at one of our upcoming Summits in Chicago, New York, Washington DC, and Santa Clara. Learn more about these events here and register for the AWS Public Sector Summit on June 20-21 here.

No one denies that military operations are very high risk.  And in high risk operations, it is essential to assess risks and plan for mitigation.  Enter the business of military organizational assessments, in which squadrons, battalions, companies, and detachments routinely turn to their own members to assess the safety climate of their organizations.

In August 2005, Dr. Robert Figlock and Michael Schimpf formed Advanced Survey Design, LLC (ASD) to deliver reliable, relevant, and responsive data to a growing number of Department of Defense (DoD) organizations that embrace data-driven decision-making. To obtain real-time, anonymous feedback about the safety challenges a military organization faces, ASD conducts surveys on behalf of various military agencies. Survey topics range from flight operations, aircraft maintenance safety, ground safety procedures, hazing, sexual harassment, drinking and driving, and other areas of concern to military units. The goal is to help clients better understand their organizational climate so as to maximize the benefit of actions taken to mitigate hazards.

As a small business focused on supporting organizational assessments for thousands of squadrons and battalions each year within the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force, ASD requires both scalability and the strongest information security.  For this, ASD turned to AWS GovCloud (US).

“What we got when we switched to Amazon was an improvement across the board in every metric. The cost dropped by more than 50%, security improved dramatically, we are now able to scale to over 2,500 respondents per hour, and the site runs better than it ever did before,” offered Michael Schimpf, VP Operations at ASD.

When you think of surveys (especially surveys containing DoD information), data integrity and security are of utmost importance. Prior to operating in AWS GovCloud (US), ASD had a dedicated server and the web hosting provider had access to the box. This raised concerns about the possibility of rogue employees at the web hosting company being able to view ASD’s customer data. That concern was eliminated with AWS because only ASD personnel have logical access to ASD’s GovCloud data. Additionally, the AWS GovCloud (US) region is managed by and accessible to U.S. Persons and adheres to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), as well as Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and DoD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (SRG) Impact Levels 2-4 requirements.

“A big driver of our decision to move to AWS GovCloud (US) was that the people who had access to the equipment were screened and were U.S. persons. This was important to us, and even more important to our customers,” Michael said, “Our Air Force customer was actually the one who suggested we look at Amazon Web Services back in 2013.”

With contracts with Naval Aviation, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Air Force, NASA, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the British Royal Airforce (RAF), ASD will not compromise with compliance and security in the cloud.

Learn more about ASD and whether AWS GovCloud (US) is right for your business.

Last weekend, we sponsored the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM) Track hosted by the City of Austin, presented in conjunction with the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference.

The City of Austin invited mayors from across the US to attend for an opportunity to learn from their peers are doing, share best practices, and experience the latest technology positively impacting citizens. Throughout the sessions, the mayors in attendance focused on top-of-mind themes, including economic development, supporting startups and entrepreneurs, affordable housing, procurement challenges, and the new role of cities as hubs of innovation.

Cloud technology helps cities become these hubs of innovation by serving as the platform to help create new citizen services within cities. From mobility to the Internet of Things (IoT), we heard from local governments about what matters most to them to continue to innovate for the benefit of their citizens:

• Mobility— Mayors can take advantage of mobility to make smart changes in their cities including traffic, parking, energy, utilities, public safety, citizen connection, predictive maintenance, emergency management, budget, air quality, and waste management. Mayors can also serve as an agent of change in the rapid push toward smart cities.
• Internet of Things (IoT)— IoT can help cities leverage resources more effectively. For example, IoT can save water and money for cities by leveraging devices and sensors to collect data, including weather forecast, traffic, air quality, and water information.
• Partnerships— Agile legislation at the city level and engagement with startups to transform into a smart city is important in the quest for innovation. Cities can bring startups as change agents to lead innovation in partnership with their city leaders.

In addition to the great conversations and our launch of our third annual City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge (read the announcement post here), the US Department of Transportation (DOT) announced seven finalists for their Smart Cities Challenge. AWS will be providing $1M in credits to the winning city in June to help build their solutions on AWS. In addition, we will work with the finalist cities on their applications and identify how AWS can help make their vision a reality. The competition will award a total of $40M to one winner in June to implement smart transportation solutions within their city. The finalists are: Austin, Columbus, Denver, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Portland and San Francisco. Congratulations!

Thank you to all of the mayors who attended the conference and participated in this track. Smart minds can do amazing things for our cities and we look forward to continuing to innovate with the cloud to help transform our cities.

Last week, we announced a signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Busan City, the second largest city in Korea, to establish the Amazon-Busan Cloud Innovation and Technology Centre.

A few months ago, you heard about our region launch in Korea. This is another step forward in our cloud computing efforts between a Korean government and AWS.

AWS will work with Busan City and the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning (MSIP) to establish the Amazon-Busan Cloud Innovation and Technology Centre. This will be one of the Korean National Creative Economy and Innovation Centers (integrated facilities nationwide to enhance the creative economy), an initiative of President Park Geun-hye.

Amazon-Busan Cloud Innovation and Technology Centre will promote and showcase Busan-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. In particular, we will help Busan use SaaS solutions and cloud technology to capitalize on Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives. This will support Busan’s commitment to continually improving the lives of their citizens. Together with Busan city and MSIP, we will collaborate on cloud technology programs that will help Busan realize the city’s long-term vision of becoming the nation’s most intelligent city through the use of cloud computing technology.

Additionally, AWS Cloud Training and Global Certification programs, as well as the AWS Activate program, which provides support to startup businesses, will be implemented to help grow and scale the city’s cloud-enabled economy, fostering a globally competitive workforce in Busan.

We look forward to working with Busan City and MSIP to help raise the bar on innovation, and realize its vision of developing a cloud-based ‘Intelligent City,’ boosting the city’s economy and job growth.

“Busan is a global logistics centre with prominent film, tourism, and ICT industries. The ICT industry, in particular, is a strategic priority for Busan. As a large port in South Korea with established infrastructure, Busan is considered one of the most attractive cities for technology investments. In collaborating with AWS, Busan strives to become a cloud-based high-technology ‘smart city,’ with job growth and economic vitalization,” Byung-Soo Suh, Mayor of Busan City, said.

Check out the photos below from the day of the announcement with Teresa Carlson, Vice President of Amazon Web Services, Worldwide Public Sector.