2016 City on a Cloud Challenge Winners

City of Los Angeles, California 

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), 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.

New York Public Library

The New York Public Library's Digital Collections platform makes available 677,496 items spanning a wide range of eras, geography, and media, 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. The NYPL created not only an elegant user facing front-end, but also provided flexible search tools to make finding material easier. Users can search and browse NYPLs collections with ease compared to the various trips they would have had to make years before.

DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority

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 state 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.

Utah.Gov

The Utah.Gov Driver License Practice Exam uses the Amazon Echo and Alexa voice technology to help drivers practice for the Utah driver license exam by reviewing questions while talking directly with the Alexa personal digital assistant. It is the first state government voice activated review test of its kind. Utah.Gov partnered with the Utah Department of Public Safety and Driver License Division to develop the practice exam for the Echo. Hosted on AWS, the voice activated practice exam is a new and convenient way for drivers to review the rules of the road in the comfort of their homes.

Peterborough City Council

PCC is a council charged with governing the City of Peterborough, a leading UK Digital City. Integrating data from weather stations, Smart Energy Meters, IOT devices installed in people’s homes, and automated libraries with council's core applications and data sets, PCC aims to run the city in a revolutionary new way. Arcus Global recommended AWS to be the sole provider of the infrastructure for the project due to its innovation, elasticity, and breadth of services. The AWS deployment acts as a hub for all legacy applications, integration to Smart City IOT Devices, Analytics, and SaaS applications.

Miami-Dade County

Citizen Relationship Management (CiRM) is an open-source Semantic Web system created to support Miami-Dade County’s 311 Contact Center operations. The system was developed as a platform for case management, GIS and problem reporting modules that improve business processes, promote open data and enable integration with agency applications. CiRM is innovative in its willingness to challenge traditional government vendor relationships and in its technological design. CiRM is composed of several modules: a knowledge base search, service request intake, a search utility, and an interactive map. The system also interfaces with several departmental business and work order systems.

City of Boston

The City of Boston is looking to leverage Amazon Web Services to develop a comprehensive data warehouse and analytics stack to empower research into transportation, crashes, and mobility. Through combining a multitude of data sources, the city will be able to derive more insights and dive deeper into these pressing and salient issues. Through these insights, the city will be able to deploy resources more effectively that will have a positive impact on the citizens of Boston.

City of Denver

Denver’s Smart City Program can be summed up in one simple phrase – connect more with less. With data as the core of a Smart City, a key first step in the approach is to create an Enterprise Data Management (EDM) platform. The EDM platform will allow Denver to use data it already has for its existing operations while serving as the foundation for the expansion of future services. Denver currently collects, manages, and shares data quite effectively. However, the challenge is that many of their systems are constrained by the “silo effect,” which means that any data sharing and analytics across systems must happen manually. The EDM platform will help to remove organizational barriers and conflicts by implementing a structured data delivery strategy – from data producer to data consumer. The platform will also be expandable to accommodate other data systems, ensuring scalability for ready adoption by other cities around the country.

Eduserv

Local government organizations are making increasingly large amounts of data available as part of the UK government's move towards greater transparency. This data often includes details about the current occupancy of council and privately-run car-parks in town and city centers. This project takes that data and uses it to build data-rich websites about the historical use of car-parks, coupled with twitter feeds about current and expected occupancy. Because the data is kept historically, it becomes possible to make increasingly accurate estimates of likely occupancy levels in the future, giving citizens greater ability to plan their journeys into city centers.

South Central Planning and Development Commission

The South Central Planning and Development Commission (SCPDC) is interested in creating a solution that would equip jurisdictional building inspectors with drones to better facilitate the inspection process of locations that place the inspector at risk. These high risk areas include high-pitched rooftops, solar panel installations, and mechanical inspections where HVAC units are placed on rooftops. SCPDC is also studying the possibility of pairing the drone with tablets that run inspection software to integrate and seamlessly link photographs and video into the inspection report. Through the AWS Dream Big award SCPDC has an opportunity to improve the safety and efficiency of many jurisdictional inspectors.

Appriss

Prior to the introduction of VINE, an automated, reliable method for victims of crime to be notified of offender incarceration status did not exist. With VINE, Appriss systematized and automated the process of providing victims with information regarding offenders, enabling government agency staff to focus on their core responsibilities while allowing those affected to get timely offender information. VINE provides comfort to victims by providing them with critical information regarding their offenders. They can check the status of an offender 24/7/365 and register for automated notifications to provide extra peace of mind that comes with knowing a particular offender is incarcerated. VINE helps keep victims of crime safe and informed. 

GRIDSMART

GRIDSMART is an intersection actuation product that actually “sees” the center of the intersection. The GRIDSMART system is made up of a bell shaped camera and connected into a process (GS2) in the traffic cabinet. Our system actuates the intersection, provides video feed for situational awareness, and collects and records data on everything happening at the intersection, counts, speed, vehicle classification, and many others. Recently, they launched their new software program Atlas.

OpenDataSoft

OpenDataSoft has built a cloud-based platform for data publishing and API management. OpenDataSoft’s turnkey solution is ideal for cities looking to provide Open Data as a resource for transparency and economic or social innovation. It is designed for non-technical users and makes it easy to publish, visualize, and share any kind of structured data to bring maximum value to them. OpenDataSoft can also serve as the basis for a Smart City project, as incoming sensor data can be processed in real-time and displayed on visualizations that can easily communicate the data to citizens.

SmartProcure

SmartProcure is a powerful tool used by government agencies to share and access critical purchasing intelligence. Hundreds of millions of government purchase orders from local, state and federal agencies are made available and easily searchable via SmartProcure. This information is used by agencies to quickly find products, research pricing, verify vendors, ensure compliance, provide data to their citizens and benchmark their performance internally and externally. This can dramatically reduce costs, increase procurement efficiency and decrease records requests. SmartProcure uses Amazon Web Services to make their SaaS available in the cloud to cities and to government agencies at every level.