AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog

Category: government

Whiteboard with an SA: AWS Code Deployment

How can you easily deploy your code on AWS? AWS has several services which would allow you to do this. Whiteboard with Leo Zhadanovsky, AWS Solutions Architect, as he shows you how to use AWS CodeDeploy and other services to make it easier for you to rapidly release new features, help you avoid downtime during application deployment, and handle the complexity of updating your applications.

With several options available to deploy your code on AWS, Leo shares a proposed architecture and gives step-by-step instructions on how you can store your code in a git repository, or an S3 bucket, and use AWS Elastic Beanstalk to provision EC2 instances, deploy your code to them, set up autoscaling groups, configure your Elastic Load Balancer, and provision your RDS database.

Watch this video to learn how to make deploying your code on AWS as easy as possible!

Continue to whiteboard with our AWS Worldwide Public Sector Solutions Architects for step-by-step instructions and demos on topics important to you in our YouTube Channel. Have a question about cloud computing? Our public sector SAs are here to help! Send us your question at aws-wwps-blog@amazon.com.

The Future of Policing: BJA Smart Suite Summit Recap

If a police officer has three eye witnesses to an incident, it’s also likely that there are three camera phones recording it. The rise of social media, 24/7 media coverage, and mobile phones with video cameras has sparked growing interest in policing activities. But how are police departments responding?

Many recognize the need to not just acknowledge this increased exposure, but also to get ahead of it. Police departments are leading efforts to create greater transparency into their work as a way to build stronger communities. Technology can help get us to this collaborative future state through body-worn cameras, video redaction, crime forecasting, digital evidence management, and more.

Teresa Carlson, VP of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS, recently spoke at the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) Smart Suite Summit. The goal of the summit was to increase collaboration among BJA Smart Suite grantees, researchers, national experts, federal representatives, and thought leaders to discuss and promote data-informed criminal justice projects and programs. At AWS, we understand that being able to record, transmit, store, redact, and share data is no easy task. Body cameras and digital evidence management solutions are the fastest growing technologies in the Justice and Public Safety space. According to a recent survey sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, 94.5 percent of law enforcement agencies had either implemented or were fully committed to implementing body cameras. And empirical research has shown that body cameras significantly reduce use of force incidents and citizen complaints, helping to improve public trust.

“Our focus is on securing your IT infrastructure, so you can focus on what matters most—protecting your citizens. To consistently meet the needs of our customers, we start with what they need and work backwards. Building the foundation with the AWS infrastructure, our customers and APN partners are able to meet any use case, including crime forecasting, secure messaging and mass alerts, e-citation, and more,” said Teresa.

Cloud technology providers and our many partners enable law enforcement to collect, securely store, and analyze body camera and other video data, from dash cameras to surveillance cameras to citizen-generated video. We recognize that when law enforcement agencies place data in the cloud, they put an absolute priority on secure access to information, wherever and whenever it is needed. And we have an isolated AWS region designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud that is managed by US persons only—AWS GovCloud (US).

In the US, we comply with the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJIS) standard. These CJIS standards mean that law enforcement organizations can take advantage of the security, agility, and scalability of the cloud while complying with FBI standards for the cloud-based storage and processing of sensitive criminal justice information (CJI). We’re working to execute agreements with many other law enforcement customers, and are committed to maintaining a comprehensive security program consistent with federal and state laws, regulations, standards, and the requirements of the FBI CJIS Security Policy. We currently have CJIS agreements with many states, see recent announcements with California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Oregon. And while many of the security and compliance standards we meet were developed for the US, we are actually seeing their adoption globally.

With the rapid evolution of technology, the explosion of data sharing through social media and other means, and with the transformative innovation of people like you, this space is changing faster than any of us could have anticipated.  From open data initiatives to machine learning, there is so much possibility in the cloud. Learn more about our work supporting the justice and public safety community here and come see us at IACP in October.

Announcing Terrain Tiles on AWS: A Q&A with Mapzen

We are excited to announce Terrain Tiles on AWS, a new AWS Public Dataset that makes global digital elevation models (DEMs) available for anyone to access from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). DEMs provide a way to examine the elevation of the Earth’s surface and are available as terrain raster tiles. We connected with Mapzen, an open, sustainable, and accessible mapping platform which lets you display, search, and navigate our world. Mapzen gathered the elevation data from various public sources and is making it easy for startups, enterprises, and research institutions to access and use via Amazon S3. Elevation data has been one of the top public dataset requests, so we are excited about the recent launch. Making Earth observation data available in the cloud is accelerating scientific discovery and enabling the creation of new products.

Read our interview below with Mapzen about the newly released dataset and how they run entirely on open-source tools and are powered by open data.

What are terrain tiles? What sort of geospatial data are they providing?

Terrain tiles provide open elevation data for the entire world in a raster tile format. By aggregating, standardizing, and tiling multiple source datasets into common web mapping and desktop GIS formats and dimensions, it’s much easier to process the data and build applications on top of it.

Each square-shaped terrain tile contains a grid of elevation values. For example, the grid cell for Mount Everest would has a value of 8,848 meters above sea level, while the grid cell for Challenger Deep has a value of 10,994 meters below sea level.

If you are familiar with digital elevation models (DEMs) or digital terrain models (DTMs), then you’ll be interested in terrain tiles. Tiles are available for zooms 0 through 15 in several spatial data formats, including PNG and GeoTIFF tiles in web Mercator projection, as well as SRTM-style HGT in raw latlng projection. A derived “normal map” product is also available, which precomputes math on the server so your mobile phone doesn’t overheat and can be combined with renders like Tangram to generate spheremap-based hillshades and real-time 3D scenes.

With terrain tiles, you have the power to customize the content and visual appearance of your map on the fly and perform complicated analysis on the desktop or in the cloud. We’re excited to see what you build!

Where does the data for the terrain tiles come from?

Mapzen aggregates elevation data from several open data providers, including 3 meter and 10 meter 3DEP (formerly NED or National Elevation Dataset) in the United States, 30 meter SRTM globally, and coarser GMTED zoomed out and ETOPO1 to fill in bathymetry – all powered by GDAL VRTs, and some special sauce. We’d love to add additional detail in your area, so send us data source tips!

Why did you decide to make the terrain tiles publicly available?

Mapzen is committed to making all of our data and mapping solutions open and available to the public because we believe doing so will encourage innovation amongst developers and designers looking for greater personalization and control in their mapping capabilities. Through the open community, we’re able to offer a level of flexibility and accessibility not currently present in the industry today, without the costs associated with leveraging existing infrastructures. Even without the big budgets, developers and entrepreneurs of all sizes can incorporate our mapping functionality into whatever they are working on.

Can you provide an estimate of how much data you’re creating? How has working on AWS helped you to handle this amount of data?

The total file size of all the tiles Mapzen has created is around 51.5TB. Working on AWS has allowed us to store over 4.6 billion tiles easily in S3, without having to worry about provisioning redundant storage ourselves. Moreover, S3 serves as a platform for efficiently distributing the tile data to users, greatly simplifying deployment and maintenance of such a service.

How are you using terrain tiles in your own products internally?

Mapzen uses terrain tiles internally for our elevation lookup service and Walkabout map style. We will also be using the tiles for our upcoming terrain tile service and Tron map style.

How do you expect others to use terrain tiles in their own workflows?

Mapzen encourages people to use our data and leverage it in the best or most beneficial way for whatever projects they are working on. We have found that the terrain titles are particularly beneficial for helping design the following mapping elements:

  • Lookup elevation values for a map location
  • Create elevation profiles along a line
  • Select map locations within an elevation range
  • Hillshades
  • Slopes
  • Contours
  • Hyposometric tints
  • Coastal flooding models
  • Model tsunami evacuation zones
  • Other advanced GIS modeling using 3D height maps
  • Flight simulators (combined with satellite data, see related Amazon public data)
  • Estimate crop yield for agriculture (combined with weather information)

Thank you, Mapzen, for your work making this data available to the public!

Learn more about Terrain Tiles on AWS and access the Landsat and NAIP public datasets.

 

Join the TfL Hackathon to Help Manage the Capacity of London’s Transport Network

A guest post by Rikesh Shah, Lead Digital Relationship Manager, Transport for London (TfL) Online

There are 30 million journeys made in London every day. On September 23, Transport for London (TfL) in partnership with Amazon Web Services and Geovation are hosting a hackathon in London to seek ways to make these journeys more efficient by maximising capacity on the public transport network, maximising capacity on the roads network, and improving air quality. These open data sets are fueling entrepreneurship, accelerating scientific discovery, and enabling Londoners and visitors to travel more easily across the capital.

This hackathon provides the opportunity to win prizes, including six months’ worth of support (office space, business mentoring, and access to technical and subject matter experts). So, whether you’re a start-up or a developer, if you are in a position to develop a product that addresses the challenges outlined below, you should join us at the launch event. All entries will be judged by a panel in a closed environment to protect your idea.

There are over 500 apps powered by TfL data used by millions of people every day – we would like to see more. We want your solutions to help manage the capacity of London’s transport network.

Through this transport-focused hackathon, TfL, Geovation, and AWS want to work with the start-up community, app developers, UX and design specialists, and anyone with a passion for data in order to build new applications and unlock new insights from the data.

  • Maximising capacity on the public transport network: TfL is committed to improving customer journeys and increasing the capacity of services to cope with increasing passenger numbers. Customers have told TfL they would like more information to help them avoid the busiest times and places. This might be by taking a different route, making a small change to travel time, or even travelling in a different way. You could help offer a quicker and more comfortable journey.
  • Maximising capacity on the roads network: London’s rapid population growth, increasing economic activity, and rising traffic volumes is posing a set of challenges for the road network. By 2018, we expect to see around 1.25 million more trips each day on the roads. Therefore, to maintain road network performance, we need to increase the effective capacity of the roads, and move from not just dynamically managing London’s streets in real time, but to making the jump towards predictively managing them. Help us to optimise the use of road space capacity and ensure we can recover capacity quickly when incidents occur. Topics we would like the hackathon to focus on are: understanding the capacity of the road network in real time; detecting incidents and their impact on network capacity in real time; and visualising the state of the road network and predicting how it will look into the near future.
  • Air quality: For TfL, our role is more than simply getting people from A to B quickly. We also want to make London cleaner and greener and contribute to a better quality of life for Londoners, now and in the future. Air quality is the biggest environmental challenge to face London. We want to know when and how to best provide customers with information that can influence behavioural change around being ‘greener.’

Join us at the hackathon and get access to AWS solutions architects, TfL staff, and Geovation technical experts to help you take your idea forward.

Mark your calendar with the details below:

  • Venue: Amazon’s offices – 60 Holborn Viaduct, EC1A 2FD, London and remote access
  • When: Hack for a week: September 23 – September 30, 2016. There will be two launch sessions: 23rd September, 12pm and 5:30pm, so join whichever one works for you.
  • What you’ll need: You will need to bring a laptop and you will need an AWS account. AWS credits and an API will be provided to access the data.

How it works

  • The hackathon will launch on 23 September to share the challenges
  • Surgeries with subject matter experts will be hosted from September 26-29 at the AWS and Geovation offices.
  • Your entry will be judged on September 30 at the AWS office or you can attend remotely.

Already have some ideas? Click here to register and add the event to your calendar. We look forward to seeing you there!

Learn more about the available Transport for London open datasets here.

 

Q&A with Planet OS: Learn about the OpenNEX Climate Data Access Tool

Planet OS announced their OpenNEX Climate Data Access Tool, which allows users to generate custom datasets from the NASA Earth Exchange GDDP and DCP-30 data. With this launch, Planet OS is helping the NASA Earth Exchange team make these valuable climate datasets accessible to the masses, and taking a big step closer to their long-term vision of changing the way data-driven decisions are made.

We had a few questions for the Planet OS team about the project, how they use AWS, and how they plan to continue their innovation. Check out the Q&A below:

What is the OpenNEX project?

Open NASA Earth Exchange (OpenNEX) is a public-private partnership launched in 2014 to promote the discovery, access, and analysis of NASA Earth Exchange data in support of climate assessment. The OpenNEX project builds upon the work done by NASA Earth Exchange by providing open access to a variety of large-scale data products produced by NEX, as well as complementary tools and resources to encourage engagement with the data.

Why is the OpenNEX Climate Data Access Tool needed?

As a part of the OpenNEX project, two downscaled climate projection datasets produced by NEX, Downscaled Climate Projections (NEX-DCP30) and Global Daily Downscaled Projections (NEX-GDDP), were openly published on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and remain freely accessible there. These downscaled and bias-corrected datasets provide a better representation of regional climate patterns and are useful for determining climate impacts to crop productivity, flood risk, energy demand, and human health. With such a wide range of real-world applications, this climate data is important not only to scientists and researchers, but also to non-technical stakeholders who are responsible for developing response plans, public policy, and climate-related legislation. The OpenNEX Climate Data Access Tool was designed to enable quick, easy access to non-technical users, while also providing more efficient access to tech-savvy domain experts.

How has OpenNEX data being available on Amazon S3 made development easier?

Having the data available in Amazon S3 enabled us to develop a self-serve tool that lets users do their own data transformation wherever they want to do it. If they run their transformations in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), it’s blindingly fast, but they can also run transformations on their own servers or on a laptop using Docker. To enhance performance and enable efficient spatial subsetting, we have taken the data stored in Amazon S3 and cut it into tiles, which allows our tool to download the requested data much more quickly.

This is just a preliminary release of the tool, what do you expect to add in the future?

In this release of the tool, the key features include:

  • Create Custom Datasets – Create a custom dataset by selecting the time, region, parameter, climate model and scenario that matches your needs. Spatial and temporal slicing enables you to download data only within your area and time of interest.
  • Deploy via Docker – Run the provided bash script to deploy a Docker container that will acquire and serve the data you selected. This container can be run on a local machine or deployed to a remote EC2 instance.
    CSV or NetCDF Format – Download your data in NetCDF or CSV format. The availability of a CSV option means data can be loaded directly into applications without NetCDF support, such as Excel.
  • Reproducible – Deploy your container to an EC2 instance and expose the access endpoint to allow others direct access to your custom dataset. You can also share the unique dataset permalink with colleagues, who can launch their own containers to replicate your dataset.

In the future, we hope to integrate these climate datasets with our public Datahub to provide fully programmatic access to the data via our APIs. We’d also like to expand the scope of available data products by partnering with other government agencies and data publishers who are interested in improving their data accessibility.

These climate datasets are very large, how did you approach making them easier to understand and access?

We built a web front end that presents the data as a single dataset and lets users interactively select the subset they want. The system generates a simple URL that’s a link to a data structure describing that selection. The user pulls from this URL to launch a container that does the transformation on a node of their own.

One of the key elements of this model is that users never see the divisions between files or any data that’s out of the specified bounds. As a result, the user of the data just pulls the transformed data and performs the analysis they want on it directly, without needing to merge or filter. The data can be delivered in CSV format so that even tools like Excel can access it directly, or in the richer NetCDF format which allows for high-speed loading and analytics.

How do you expect others to build on top of the OpenNEX Climate Data Access Tool?

We’d love to see people explore the potential impacts of climate change in their local communities and begin to share their own custom datasets with one another. We’ve published a number of examples in our documentation to help people get started and highlight what’s possible.

We also encourage users to reach out with their own examples and use cases, or suggestions for improvements and future features at feedback@planetos.com. For those wanting to learn more, we recommend reviewing the online documentation and joining our free webinar on September 21 where Tom Faulhaber and Dr. Sangram Ganguly will demonstrate how to use the OpenNEX data tool.

Thank you to the Planet OS team for answering our questions and we look forward to future iterations of the tool!

Whiteboard with an SA: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

How should you design your first VPC? Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC for short) lets you provision an isolated section of the cloud to run your AWS resources in a network you control. When planning your VPC network design, there are several design considerations to explore.

In this video, Warren Santner, AWS Solutions Architect (SA), shows you how to plan and deploy your VPC to have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. He will walk you through several design patterns taking into account these three criteria:

  1. Who are your users?
  2. What systems are accessing your resources?
  3. Where are they accessing these resources?

Watch this whiteboarding video to learn how to design your first VPC.

Continue to whiteboard with our AWS Worldwide Public Sector Solutions Architects for step-by-step instructions and demos on topics important to you in our YouTube Channel. Have a question about cloud computing? Our public sector Solutions Architects are here to help! Send us your question at aws-wwps-blog@amazon.com.

 

Improve Operations and Increase Efficiencies with the AWS Cloud

State and local government customers are leveraging the AWS Cloud for a variety of government operations every day. From elections and city planning to digital libraries and payment systems, government customers are recognizing efficiencies, flexibility, and cost savings made possible through cloud technology.

Cloud technology is helping governments innovate for and with citizens. Check out some of the ways governments are using the cloud to help deliver improved citizen services.

Over 2,300 government agencies have turned to AWS to provide secure, cost effective, and scalable IT infrastructure. The expectations of an increasingly digital citizenry are high, yet all levels of government are facing budgetary and human resource constraints. Adoption of cloud computing provides access to new deployment models with significant cost and agility benefits. Although each organization has its unique set of challenges in cloud adoption, read the case studies below to learn from other governments about how they use cloud computing, how the cloud has changed the way government does business, and how it has helped create essential tools for service delivery.

A few examples include:

  • New York Public Library – The New York Public Library’s Digital Collections platform makes available 677,496 items spanning a wide range of eras, geographies, and media, and includes drawings, manuscripts, maps, photographs, rare books, videos, audio, and more. Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of NYPL, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences. While that’s a small fraction of the Library’s holdings, the aim of Digital Collections is to provide context for the digitized materials and to inspire people to use and reuse the media and data to advance knowledge and create new works. Cloud technology has simplified access to a part of the Library’s collection that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to access. The NYPL created not only an elegant user interface, but also provided flexible search tools to make finding material easier. Users can search and browse NYPL’s collections with ease compared to the various trips they would have had to make in the past.
  • City of Los Angeles, CA – While the City of Los Angeles is known for sunshine and celebrities, it is also the largest cyber target on the West Coast. With the world’s sixth busiest airport (LAX), the largest port in the Western hemisphere, a high profile police department, and infrastructure supporting 4 million residents, the city must deploy innovative, world-class cybersecurity to protect digital assets, requiring it to collect, correlate, and analyze mountains of data on cyber threats. Against the backdrop of limited resources, the city implemented a unique, cloud-based enterprise security solution, known as the Integrated Security Operations Center (ISOC). The City of LA needed to proactively tackle the rapidly growing cyber threats attempting to infiltrate digital assets. Given the limited resources, the City of LA implemented a unique, cloud-based security information and event management (SIEM) solution for the Integrated Security Operations Center (ISOC), to help consolidate, maintain, and analyze security data across the city’s departments.
  • DC Health Benefit Exchange – DC Health Link is the District of Columbia’s health insurance marketplace created to support the federal health laws known as the Affordable Care Act. The website helps District residents, small businesses, members of Congress, and their staff obtain quality, affordable medical, dental, or vision coverage. To reach goals of sustainability, and become the first US state or territory where every resident has quality, affordable health coverage, DC Health Link moved mission critical IT into the AWS Cloud, adopted an agile delivery model, and re-architected the website using open source technology. This approach achieved significant increases in enrollment, website performance, and cost savings.

Check out more perspectives on how governments are breaking down innovation barriers, tackling mission-critical operations, and delivering more value with the cloud in this AWS Public Sector Summit session, “Modernizing Government in the Cloud,” featuring Jay Haque, Director of Development Operations and Enterprise Computing at the New York Public Library.

Are you interested in learning more about how state and local governments are cutting costs, digitizing old systems, solving data challenges and improving access and customer experience by leveraging the AWS Cloud? If so, then visit: https://aws.amazon.com/stateandlocal/government-operations-and-efficiencies/

 

AWS Public Sector Month in Review – August

Here is the first edition of the AWS Public Sector Month in Review. Each month we will be curating all of the content published for the education, government, and nonprofit communities including blogs, white papers, webinars, and more.

Let’s take a look at what happened in August:

All – Government, Education, & Nonprofits

Education

Government

Nonprofits

New Customer Success Stories

Latest YouTube Videos

Whiteboard with our AWS Worldwide Public Sector Solutions Architects for step-by-step instructions and demos on topics important to you. Have a question about cloud computing? Our public sector SAs are here to help! Send us your question at aws-wwps-blog@amazon.com.

Recent Webinars

Upcoming Events

Attend one of our upcoming events and meet with AWS experts to get all of your questions answered. Register for one of the events below:

Keep checking back with us. But in the meantime, are you following us on social media? Follow along to stay up to the date with all of the real-time AWS news for government and education.

AWS Signs CJIS Agreement with the State of Oregon

 

 

 

 

 

AWS recently signed a Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) agreement with the State of Oregon. Oregon joins California, Minnesota, and Colorado in allowing both state and local police to leverage the AWS Cloud for sensitive data, such as fingerprints and criminal history. These CJIS security addenda give our law enforcement customers the confidence that their data will pass CJIS compliance audits and that their data is secure in the AWS Cloud.

We are committed to doing our part as a cloud service provider by giving our customers the means, through our services, to comply with CJIS requirements within their IT environments. Customers can deploy applications, data, and services, all of which securely comply with CJIS Security Policy requirements.

“The Oregon State Police (OSP) is pleased to announce to the Oregon CJIS community that OSP and Amazon have agreed to a security control agreement that meets every requirement of the FBI’s CJIS Security Policy. This agreement gives Oregon agencies additional hosting options that enhance security, while meeting their business requirements pertaining to Criminal Justice Information (CJI),” said Major Tom M. Worthy, CSO, Oregon State Police.

Members of the AWS Partner Network (APN) are enabling the delivery of electronic warrant services that create, route for approval, and issue field warrants electronically across multiple state, county, and city law enforcement agencies. Additionally, APN partners support law enforcement agencies worldwide in managing police videos related to demonstrations, public meetings, and general police interactions as a way to create transparency through public portals, and to help build trust and transparency in law enforcement. View our “Future of Policing” webinar here.

AWS is dedicated to enabling and educating the law enforcement market. Come talk to us at any of these upcoming events to get your questions answered.

To learn more about the APN and the broad set of public safety solutions available today, click here. Please reach out if you would like to get started.

MalariaSpot: Diagnose Diseases with Video Games

More than one billion people in the world entertain themselves with apps and video games. Only a hobby? For Miguel Luengo Oroz, the answer is no. Miguel and his team from the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) have resolved to use the collective intelligence of players from around the world to help diagnose diseases that kill thousands of people every day.

Parasites rather than spaceships

The idea originated in 2012. “While I was working for the United Nations in global health challenges, it caught my attention how tough and manual the process of diagnosing malaria was,” explains Miguel. “It can take up to 30 minutes to identify and count the parasites in a blood sample that cause the disease. There are not enough specialists in the world to diagnose all the cases!”

Miguel, a great fan of videogames had an idea: “Why not create a video game in which rather than shooting spaceships we search for parasites?” And MalariaSpot was born, a game available for computer and mobiles in which the “malaria hunter” has one minute to detect the parasites in a real, digitalized blood sample.

Since its launch, more than 100,000 people in 100 countries have “hunted” one and a half million parasites, and the results are promising. The number of clicks made by many players in the same image sample combined by artificial intelligence shows a count as precise as the one of an expert, but quicker.

“We published a study that probed that the collective diagnosis by the use of a videogame is not a crazy thing, but now it needs to be assessed from a medical point of view,” explains Miguel. His team cooperates with a clinic in Mozambique and has done some tests in real time and has achieved the first collaborative remote diagnosis of malaria from Africa.

The technology platform to host the game was the key. “We needed a flexible infrastructure that worked from anywhere in the world. We usually have traffic spikes when we appear in media or when we do campaigns in social networks, and we saw that Amazon Web Services (AWS) offered a good solution for auto scaling based on demand,” Miguel said.

Miguel and his team use the AWS Research Grants program that allows students, teachers, and researchers to transfer their activities to the cloud and innovate rapidly at a low cost. “We can now test different services without having to worry about the bill,” explains Miguel.

From the White House to neighborhood schools

The MalariaSpot project has attracted the recognition of entities such as the Singularity University of NASA, the Office of Science and Technology of the White House, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which has named Miguel one of the ten Spaniards under 35 with potential to change the world through technology.

But one of the greatest rewards for Miguel and his team comes from much closer to home. They enjoy visiting schools all over Spain and helping awaken unsuspected scientific vocations. “Today’s kids are digital natives. They are used to seeing and analyzing complex images on a screen,” says Miguel. This shows the educational value and awareness of videogames. During the last World Malaria Day on April 25th, thousands of Spanish students participated in “Olympic malaria video games,” playing the new game MalariaSpot Bubbles. School teams competed to become the best virtual hunters of malaria parasites.

“With MalariaSpot, we have even be able to reach kids who were not very good at biology. In a workshop that we ran in a school last year, the kid who won was the worst troublemaker out of his whole class,” explains Miguel (with a smile).

The future of medical diagnosis is not only defined in laboratories. “We are at a turning point where technology allows ubiquitous connectivity. We, and the rest of our generation, are responsible to direct all the possibilities that technology offers us to initiatives that make a real impact on the lives of people. And what better than health.”

With MalariaSpot and her “younger sister,” TuberSpot, Miguel and his young team of researchers are contributing so that in five years, 5% of video games are used to analyze medical images. Their objective? “Achieve a low cost diagnosis of global diseases, accessible to any person anywhere around the planet.”