2017 City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge Winners

City of Virginia Beach, Virginia

StormSense enhances the capability of Virginia Beach and the neighboring communities of Hampton Roads, VA to predict coastal flooding resulting from storm surge, rain, and tides in ways that are replicable, scalable, measurable, and make a difference worldwide. The scope of the project includes the interests of coastal local governments wishing to enhance their emergency preparedness via a network of IoT-enabled water level sensors, collaborating with the hydrodynamic flood modeling and forecasting capabilities of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) and their VIMS TideWatch Network.

Solodev and Seminole Public Schools

As a top ranking school district in Florida with a mission of connecting with its community, Solodev needed to streamline its digital presence to reflect its commitment to providing quality education in the community. In order to compete with well-funded private schools and provide a better web experience to students, families, and faculty, it became clear that a better online presence was a cost-effective way to begin. By utilizing the power of Solodev platform built on AWS, they were able to set a new standard for modern K-12 websites while saving money and streamlining operations.

Transport for London

From pothole repairs to Crossrail, there are approximately 500,000 roadworks in London each year and each has the potential to cause disruption to the city’s road users. Transport for London and London’s boroughs coordinate to minimize their disruption, but managing a program of this scale and velocity requires significant collaboration and data sharing
across many different stakeholder groups. Built on the AWS Cloud, LondonWorks 2 provides a modern cloud-based solution that provides a complete picture of all roadworks. This allows London’s service providers to plan on a city-wide basis and alleviates the potential for significant disruption and delay.

Caltrans (with Connected Corridors and UC Berkeley)

The Caltrans project has one main goal: to reinvent traffic incident response for California. This requires coordinated development of tools, methodologies, and policy. The project includes a Data Hub to consolidate real-time IoT sensor datasets, scalable, real-time traffic modeling and forecasting, an incident response Decision Support System informed by data and models, and coordinated, real-time control of signals, ramp meters, and detour signs. The project relies on an all-in move to the AWS Cloud to support data storage, analytics, and scaling for testing.

Intermediate School District 287

With a mission to provide high-quality learning opportunities to Minnesota public school students, regardless of their geographic location, race, or socioeconomic status, Intermediate School District 287 turned to digital means of supporting its students via the Minnesota Partnership for Collaborative Curriculum and the Northern Star Online School. The AWS Cloud allows for affordable storage and management of digital resources. By using open digital curriculum, every teacher and student in Minnesota now has access to rich learning experiences and educational outreach programs.

Lawrence Police Department

Aiming to improve public safety, reduce crime, and build public trust between police and the citizens they serve, the Lawrence Police Department partnered with BodyWorn by Utility to provide Body Worn Camera technology. The project uses AWS for big data storage and analytics. Video and audio recording collected by police officers is instantly, effortlessly uploaded in a safe, encrypted storage environment.

Louisville Metro Government

By utilizing machine learning, real-time traffic data, IoT infrastructure, and interconnected systems, Louisville is building a next generation adaptive traffic flow management system that can sense detrimental systemic changes to the circulatory nature of traffic and automatically adjust city infrastructure to mitigate the impact.

City of Las Vegas, Nevada

Las Vegas would like to use AWS and Amazon Alexa to support the “ReInvent Schools Las Vegas” program run by the City of Las Vegas Youth Development and Social Innovation Department. The program will help local students at risk of falling behind in school due to challenges with attendance, and keep them up to speed on knowledge and literacy. They envision using Americorps Success Mentors to help the children develop skills using Amazon Alexa.

City of Ottawa

Seeing the value of the cloud and it’s openness for innovation, Ottawa would like to pilot the use of third party cloud such as AWS Cloud for rapid prototyping of solutions. This would allow Ottawa to begin pilot projects in a variety of areas e.g. IoT sensors (for water distribution, Traffic applications, disaster recovery, etc), and further leverage the existing infrastructure of ottawa.ca to handle surges in web traffic. As the nation's capital, Ottawa would like to set the standard for best practices to create a repeatable process in other Canadian cities and abroad.

WSIPC

WSIPC provides a lineup of technology solutions, data management tools, expert service, training, and approximately 750,000 students, 2,000,000 parents and guardians, and 100,000 teachers and administrators. For their training service, WSIPC plans to build a user interface. Trainers will be able to select a database backup to be used for professional development and troubleshooting. Training has been rolled out to 5 states, over 20,000 users, and has expanded internationally.

City of Iowa City, Iowa

Johnson County, Iowa is implementing elements of the Data Driven Justice Initiative to expand the work they have done with their post-booking jail diversion program. They will use inter-departmental data to predict and identify populations that would benefit from a pre-jail diversion program, better understand infrastructure costs, where to increase efficiencies, and use the data to show improved outcomes. They will also use the data to identify high utilizers of law enforcement, emergency medical services, emergency room, and jail services. This population will be provided with proactive mental health and substance abuse treatment to reduce recidivism and minimize their interaction with these services.

Marmion Academy

Marmion CPARC Engineering Center is a prototype for business and education STEM collaboration. They require high performance computing, remote learning, and virtual desktop solution assets to advance this to other schools. They will begin expanding to the first outside school this fall.

Anthemis Technologies has developed a beacon called “Help-me”, allowing firefighters to save precious time during their interventions. This beacon can be activated by remote control or by a dedicated application on a smartphone. “Help me” emits powerful flashes via its Fresnel lens, and will immediately call and send data to the fire brigade. The application provides information about the location and the people injured, details about the dwelling access code, as well as medical history data that could help save lives. 

Blue Spurs

In partnership with the Government of New Brunswick, Canada, Blue Spurs created the Blue Kit. A creative, low-code IoT educational starter kit that allows middle and high school students to understand the fundamentals of IoT. Using technology that complex IoT systems are built on today, including arduino boards, sensors, AWS IoT and Noodl, students build IoT projects to learn the fundamentals in an interactive, fun environment. Each project builds on the previous providing increasing challenges that are aligned with school curriculum objectives.

LearnZillion

LearnZillion is the first K-12 Curriculum-as-a-Service company. They are changing the paradigm of curriculum from a static product to an adaptable, cloud-based service. They do this with three solutions that work hand-in-hand: digital curriculum that promotes productive struggle in traditional and blended classrooms, an Enterprise Platform that allows for localization of the curriculum to better meet the needs of teachers and students, and Professional Services that empower teachers to better orchestrate meaningful learning experiences for their students.

Tolemi

Tolemi is building a platform that integrates seamlessly with all government systems and databases to collect, aggregate, and cleanse data, creating a data standard for the BuildingBlocks software to derive insights. Cities use Tolemi and BuildingBlocks every day to make data-driven decisions and better manage their real-estate assets. Tolemi currently operates in over 50 cities in the US including Philadelphia, Boston, Louisville, Richmond, and more.

Xaqt

Xaqt's urban analytics platform bridges people and data with policy and best practices to help policymakers and citizens better understand how cities function. The core platform handles: data integration, deep analytics, and making insights accessible to drive collaboration and data sharing across the city. Xaqt makes Smart City analytics modular and repeatable by deriving predictive insights from both legacy data-sources, such as open data portals coupled with emerging sources, such as: sensors, mobile devices and smart infrastructure.