AWS lauds Iowa City, Virginia Beach, other cities for cloud innovations
Amazon Web Services on Wednesday recognized 14 cities and government entities, as well as five businesses, as the winners of its seventh annual City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge.
The contest celebrates local and regional governments, as well as their private partners, for innovations in three categories: Best Practices, Partners in Innovation and Dream Big. The winners will receive AWS promotional credits to start or continue their projects.
This year's contest showcased ways cities and government entities are using AWS for eal-time data analytics, IoT services and open data projects, among other things.
For instance, in the Best Practices category, AWS recognized the city of Virginia Beach for its StormSense project, which uses sensors to provide near real-time information on water levels and enables the city and surrounding communities to forecast flooding.
In the Dream Big category, AWS recognized Louisville for using machine learning, real-time traffic data and IoT to build an adaptive traffic flow management system. AWS also recognized Iowa City in the Dream Big category for its use of inter-departmental data to predict and identify populations that would benefit from a pre-jail diversion program.
The Partners in Innovation category recognizes companies working with governments to improve services. For instance, AWS recognized Blue Spurs in Canada, which has partnered with the Government of New Brunswick to create the Blue Kit, a creative, low-cost IoT educational starter kit for middle and high school students.