Amazon Web Services Opening AWS Innovation Studio At HQ2

Amazon Web Services will open a new AWS Innovation Studio at its Arlington, Va., headquarters to collaborate on global solutions that leverage its cloud computing technologies to solve societal issues.

Amazon Web Services will open a new AWS Innovation Studio to collaborate on global solutions that leverage its cloud computing technologies to address issues such as housing insecurity, social justice, climate change, sustainability and health and education inequality.

A first for AWS, the studio will launch at Amazon’s new HQ2 headquarters under construction in Arlington, Va. AWS will invite public sector organizations, policy makers, citizens, industry leaders and academia to work with AWS experts and use its technologies including artificial intelligence and machine learning along with data science to launch solutions.

The AWS Innovation Center will have a permanent home in one of the new HQ2 towers slated to open in 2023, but for now is operating virtually and at one of the HQ2 offices.

Collaborations already are underway, according to Max Peterson, vice president of AWS’ worldwide public sector business.

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“We’ve already got two projects in the early stages,” Peterson said during his keynote at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C., today. “The studio is working with Resilient Cities Network, which supports 100 cities around the world, and together we help make communities put systems in place that can survive, adapt and thrive, especially given the increasing impacts of climate change.”

The nonprofit Resilient Cities Network is a global, city-led organization focused on driving urban resilience action to protect vulnerable communities and critical infrastructure.

“With Georgetown University, we’re working at the studio to bring to life a big data project to help researchers analyze and access U.S. civil court data to help them be more transparent and more equitable in court systems,” Peterson said.

AWS is working with the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy and the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at Georgetown’s Law Center on the Civil Justice Data Commons (CJDC) project. The project will be powered by AWS’ cloud computing platform and serve as a clearinghouse for data and analysis across numerous U.S. courts.

The AWS Innovation Studio will approach collaborations with organizations in two ways, according to Peterson. It will help them identify their core challenges in simplifying their processes to create solutions that can be more quickly scaled globally. AWS also will identify common problems across an industry, develop solutions to address the issue with one customer and then share or open source the results to allow multiple organizations to benefit.