AWS Washington DC Summit 2023 – Keynote with Max Peterson

Please welcome to the stage, Max Peterson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector from Amazon Web Services.

How's everybody doing? Welcome. I'm incredibly excited to have everybody here today. The DC Summit is going to be an exciting two day learning and networking and thinking big opportunity for everybody here.

My name is Max Peterson and I'm honored to be able to lead AWS Worldwide Public Sector business where we get to help our customers innovate across education and government and health care and aerospace and satellite and not for profit businesses all to deliver on their missions.

This is our 13th DC Summit and we have an exciting two days lined up for everybody. There are more than 220 sessions with breakouts with builder sessions, with chalk talks and workshops, all designed to help you deepen your skills, gain new knowledge and really think big about the potential for your area and cloud computing.

I really hope you get into these activities, enjoy them, have fun, build some new relationships, make sure you gather up the resources you need to go out and do your jobs. The journey to the cloud is really incumbent upon everybody in the room here and at the conference taking action, I also want to encourage everybody to have your phones ready. Not that you don't already have them ready, but we're going to, we're going to include QR codes on a lot of the slides and the announcements today to make it easier for you to snap a quick picture and then follow those QR codes later so that you make sure you get that specific and useful information uh that, that intrigued you or that excited you to help you build solutions uh or discover more about topics that we've got set up for you to talk to today.

I want to start by thanking our sponsors that made this event possible. A special, thank you to all of our gold sponsors that have played a big role in helping us to produce today's summit. And then we also have a list of emerald platinum and gold sponsors as well. They've all gone above and beyond to be able to support the summit and to bring you really interesting, useful and innovative solutions. And finally, I want to say thank you to our silver and our bronze and exhibitor sponsors for helping us make this summit today a reality.

Make sure that you get the opportunity to go down to the expo hall. I was there earlier this morning. um and make sure you get down to the expo hall, talk to the partners, see how they can help you on your journeys. uh there's a lot of really cool stuff down there too. So do get down to the expo hall.

Well, I think you can probably tell. I'm sort of thrilled to be able to be here today and speak to all of our customers in the public sector about the boundaries that you're pushing each and every day as you digitally transform your businesses over the next 60 minutes. I've got two customer speakers that are going to join us here and share their stories of how they're leveraging the cloud to get the speed, the agility, the security that they need to be able to deliver on their missions and be able to drive innovation to support better those constituents that they serve.

Now, I've been working in the public sector for more than three decades. Sometimes, sometimes I scare myself when I say that I've been doing that for three decades, but I continue to be inspired by the fact that our customers are every day out solving the complex problems presented by global challenges. They're driving a positive change with AWS. And we love that piece of our partnership.

This includes things like storing and analyzing genomic data to find cures for major diseases, driving space advancements for real time tracking, to protect our planet and modernizing critical government services to provide better citizen support. And so much more.

These are the types of efforts that result in long term lasting impact, I believe for generations to come. And throughout history, there have been countless actions and innovations that we've witnessed that transform the world around us and they continue to shape the future. And I wanted to take a moment to reflect on a handful of them.

When you, when you think about medical research, Jonas Salk comes to mind. His team conducted extensive laboratory research and testing that led to the development of the first successful polio vaccine in 1955. And this breakthrough not only paved the way for eradication of the disease in many parts of the world, but it established vaccines as a critical tool. And it demonstrated the power of collaborative research, clinical trials and public health infrastructure in advancing medicine going where no human has gone before astronaut Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon mission as part of Apollo 11 in 1969. That was supported by another pioneer Katherine Johnson, who was the first African American woman to work as a NASA scientist and calculated the trajectories that helped make the mission a success.

This pushed the limits on what everyone thought was possible in space and it inspired a sense of unity and a pride in humanity's ability to achieve great things. We see our customers every day display this same kind of courage, resilience and creativity as they continue to pave new paths and to drive impact with the cloud, to reimagine with confidence and to thrive in uncharted territories, it comes down to leveraging the right tools and capabilities, ensuring the proper security and protection. And then all of us pushing the limits by thinking big.

This is more important now than ever before as we build a better future and as we as we prepare for circumstances that are yet to come, I want to acknowledge the fact that right now there are a lot of real and pressing challenges in the world. This includes economic uncertainty. We deal with supply chain disruptions, natural disasters, food insecurity, war and other global conflicts among many others. And these issues affect us all. And it's in times like these that the work that's being done across the public sector to support every patient, every student, every citizen or individual in need is vital organizations with strong digital foundations have proven to be better positioned to move faster and maintain the continuity for those they serve while ensuring the highest levels of security and keeping costs low, which is important in difficult budget times.

We're proud that tens of thousands of public sector customers count on AWS to support their mission critical systems. And one of the many reasons for this is that AWS is global cloud infrastructure allows them to take advantage of capability anywhere around the world. 31 global cloud computing regions that are made up of clusters of data centers that we call availability zones organized around 99 availability zones that provides the sort of exceptional resilience and availability that public sector customers and enterprise customers demand to deploy their, their mission critical and business critical applications. And we've announced five more AWS regions around the world that will add an additional 15 availability zones. So we continue to invest in that kind of global capability and global services that customers need as we increase our global presence.

We also remain focused on driving economic development and we continue to scale our community efforts and our investments as well. In the past year, we've launched five new regions around the world, investing billions of dollars in each local economy through our infrastructure and supporting thousands of jobs in the dmv area, which has long been an important place for amazon and aws. Virginia is home to our second headquarters and it's been hosting our data centers since 2006. Over the past four years, we've committed more than $88 million to local nonprofits, community groups and schools with a focus on addressing challenges like racial equality, housing, sustainability, and equity and skilling.

We continue to invent and to innovate on behalf of our customers and we're not slowing down to help force multiply our efforts. We've got an enormous global partner network of over 100,000 partners to provide our partners with more tailored guidance and support. I'm pleased to announce that AWS is expanding our partner transformation program with a suite of targeted transformation modules. This includes the cloud enablement engine and the CFO cloud conversations workshops that are designed to help partners meet customer needs and accelerate their cloud journeys while also achieving their business goals.

It's hard to plan in the current environment and that's exactly why more and more customers are leveraging the cloud to get the sort of flexibility that they need. So they can scale up and scale down and only pay for what they use. An example. UK Cancer Research, the world's largest independent funder of cancer research migrated from a custom built infrastructure to AWS and now can easily scale up to handle 800 transactions per second during their peak fundraising periods by leveraging the cloud. They furthermore save the organization 94% in costs so that more of the funds that they do secure go to the resources that are directly applied to research and tools to help us cure this pervasive disease.

Moving it workloads from on premise data centers to AWS also has environmental benefits and it can reduce energy consumption and the associated carbon emissions by nearly 80%. This, this will increase to up to 96% when AWS is fully 100% renewable powered, which Amazon is on the path to achieve by 2025. And we're already 85% of the way there to make it easier for our customers to calculate and track their sustainability efforts. With the cloud. AWS announced the Customer Carbon Footprint tool. This dashboard provides estimates of the carbon emissions that our customers have avoided by using AWS instead of the on premise data centers and it even helps them forecast how those numbers will improve over time. Based on their continued cloud migration with the Met Office in the UK. They have a mission to provide global weather and climate services. They also have a goal to be carbon neutral by 2030 by building a prototype solution on AWS. They've reduced the time that it takes to complete data intensive workloads by 65%. And they've been able to quantify their savings in energy and equivalent carbon emissions using the carbon footprint calculator tool. This is helping them to stay on track with their urgent mission imperative to address climate and sustainability.

This is going to be a journey and it's a journey that requires continuous improvement and it's a journey that requires participation from each and every one of us to drive the collective change that we need. I'm happy to share that AWS is collaborating with Halcyon, a nonprofit supporting impact driven start ups on a new climate change intensive fellowship in Latin America and the Caribbean. We're providing $25,000 in credits to each start up in this program to help them address issues around climate change and change and health equity more quickly through the use of modern cloud technologies. I'm so excited about the work they're doing. I can't wait to see the solutions that they come up with. And I congratulate all those fellows who have been selected for this intensive.

Now, leveraging the right tools and capabilities is essential for continuously pushing the boundaries and charting new paths. Let's focus on leveraging their data data is the cornerstone of almost every organization's digital transformation, but it can be tricky to work with as many of you know, to harness the full potential. It's important that you have a modern end to end data strategy to properly store and access it, to unify it, to be able to analyze and visualize it and to get insights and predictions from it.

AWS has the broadest set of services across databases and analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence for many different types of data and many different use cases that help our customers unlock value and drive better outcomes, the ability to understand what's happening around you, that situational awareness, ability to get the full picture positions you to move fast, move confidently solve complex issues and really go far as a pioneer in your areas.

A coalition of AWS partners recently came together to build an integrated framework known as Project Argus. Project. Argus allows vast amounts of data to be organized to deliver situational awareness in real time. This centralized solution is available today on the AWS Marketplace and it allows users to choose from multiple different data sources, multiple different tools for analytics and multiple different software integration capabilities.

Project Argus collects and analyzes past and current space data and earth data to provide this sort of real time situational awareness of what's happening on land at sea in the air all at any time, which enables better decisions by decision makers so that they can turn the data that they've got into actual actionable intelligence and help them identify opportunities to act in the future.

The cloud is also helping scientists to power advancements in research through global collaboration, catalyzing breakthroughs in areas from climate change to human health. To hear more on this, I'm gonna turn it over to our first speaker.

Please. Welcome to the stage, Ed Lein PhD, Senior Investigator from the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

Good morning, everyone. And thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you today about a fantastic new collaboration between the Allen Institute for Brain Science and AWS to try to create a transformative unifying brain knowledge platform.

Let me begin by introducing the Allen Institute which is a nonprofit research institute located in Seattle, Washington. We're actually made up of a series of institutes focused on neuroscience, cell biology and immunology, as well as the Paul G Allen Frontiers Group that supports cutting edge research across the world. I lead over our human brain research at the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

The institute has a long history of tackling extremely complex problems in biological sciences whose scale and complexity are really not easily tackled by a traditional academic research lab. We have an approach to doing this that really focuses on three big principles, big science tackling these really challenging problems, team science and open science. The latter of which is the most important for what I'll tell you about today.

The institute produces large scale data resources and it's well known for doing this. It's been a pioneer in open science and these resources have a really profound impact across the scientific field. Our work generates uh data knowledge and tools all of which we share openly and publicly to give you an idea of the scale. As of spring 2022 we collected about 22 petabytes of data at the institute and it's only increasing from here today.

I'm gonna be focusing on the brain, this amazing organ. It is responsible for everything that we feel and do and everything we are as individuals. It's also the organ affected in many of our most devastating diseases. A major motivation behind the brain knowledge platform is to try to fill a gap. We have an enormous unsolved problem around these diseases and unmet medical need. Collectively, these diseases affect more than a billion people worldwide. The list is very long of these disorders and we have very few cures and not even effective treatments for many of these.

Why is this the case? On the one hand, we have a complexity problem. We really don't understand the brain very well or its structure and function. On the other hand, we have a data problem. There's an enormous amount of data out there in the field. It's not lack of investment, but it's incredibly distributed and disorganized anyone who's been to the Society for Neuroscience meeting. This is about a 25,000 member strong meeting that happens often in this very convention center knows exactly what I'm talking about. Football field size rooms of posters, data everywhere, completely disconnected. You can't make sense of it across the whole the whole um convention.

So what neuroscience needs is a unifying framework? If you think about chemistry has a periodic table, genomics has a human genome reference. We need the same thing for neuroscience. What would that look like? It's a, it's a reference of its component cells, the cells, the makeup circuits and the functional architecture of the brain with 100 billion or so neurons in our brains across hundreds of brain regions. This seems like a rather tall order. But I'm going to be briefly describing is that we have the tools now to begin reverse engineering, the brain much like taking apart an electronic device to define the cell types and the organization.

What's made this possible is a transformative set of technologies that came from an unexpected source. At least for neuroscience. The field of genomics. These single-cell genomic methods allow one to measure all the genes being actively used in individual cells. This gives a genetic fingerprint of a cell and you can group cells that have similar fingerprints into cell types. If you now apply this to complex brain tissues, you can get for the first time, a complete definition of the set of cells that make up these structures.

This approach has been dramatically accelerated with support from the National Institutes of Health through their Brain Initiative, Cell Census Network and Cell Atlas Network that aim to create a complete census of cell types across the brain. uh there was a whole issue of Nature devoted to this topic on the first stage of this to look in one region of the brain that really established that this could work. And that defining cells on the basis of their genes was meaningful for understanding cells from the basis of other properties of the cell, like their shape or their connectivity.

For example, this approach has become so radically useful across biology that there are now efforts to try to map the cells in every organ in the body and to aggregate that for a whole human body map based on these molecular signatures. So due to the incredible scalability of these methods, with the support of the National Intuitive Health, we've been able to move to begin to create the first whole brain maps of the cells that make up the brain, both in human and also in model organisms for biomedical research. And most notably the laboratory mouse in just a few years from the description of a single brain region. We've now created the first essentially complete maps of the entire mouse brain and a draft of the human brain that's now being expanded in greater detail.

The results from this are truly remarkable. The brain has about 200 billion cells in it and they come in a bit incredibly diverse range of types. They can be classified into about 5000 types of cells. This is in the mouse, presumably in the human. It will be at least that complex and we can define them. And now we can map their distributions across the brain as well to create really a reference of both the spatial organization and the types.

This really is like the periodic table for the brain has revealed a dramatically higher complexity than we ever had access to to before uh for the tech crowd. It's also worth noting how different this is from a computational neural network for deep learning, for example, that uses essentially one type of unit. This is not how nature does it as many types of units.

So why is this map useful? One reason it's so useful is because it can give us a brand new perspective on disease. For example, in a project that we run funded by the National Nusa on Aging called the Seattle Alzheimer's Disease Brain Cell Atlas or C AD. We're looking now using these methods to see what kinds of cells are vulnerable in disease and to try to identify these earliest events in disease

When treatment may be possible, I want to give an example of what this looks like in just one part of the neocortex. We can now look for changes that happened over the course of disease severity. We can look at this across this incredibly diverse set of cell populations. Now, in this one region, about 100 and 40 kinds of cells where past studies might have been half a dozen.

And what you can immediately see is that certain kinds of neurons are lost in disease and certain kinds of nonneuronal cells increase or have states that are only seen in the disease. This is a very different way to think of disease and particular Alzheimer's disease, which has been conventionally focused on the deposition of rather non-specific amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary tangles that have not led to effective treatments for the disease.

Now, if we zoom in just a little bit more at one of these types of vulnerable cell populations, those that make connections from one part of the cortex to another, we're beginning to aggregate information about their properties. We're starting to understand what they look like how they function, what the consequence of their loss may be in disease. And you can imagine that these cells now become targets for therapies to prevent their degeneration. And it also highlights how an increasingly rich understanding of these cells will guide new treatments. This same approach will work for any brain disease or for that matter, any other disease.

So with this emerging high resolution map, we suddenly have an amazing opportunity to try to dramatically advance the field by aggregating information around these foundational elements in their organization. Enter the Brain Knowledge Platform, which is an ambitious effort to try to create one of the most, one of the largest and most complete knowledge stores and sources of truth in neuroscience in principle.

Now that we understand the elements, we can integrate information across neuroscience, genomics medicine from basic research to neuroimaging data to clinical data. If we could do this, imagine the impact on the field, we could unify disparate parts of the field that can't talk to one another at the moment, we could accelerate our understanding of brain function as well as new approaches for treating diseases.

However, this creates significant technology challenges to transform this vision into reality and this is where we move out of the realm of science and into the realm of technology and the need for us to partner with AWS as leaders in this space. On the one hand, we have a challenge of data management already, I mentioned we have petabytes of data. This is going to grow to exabytes in the future of many different types that need to be integrated.

The second challenge is moving beyond data to extraction of knowledge that's meaningful to researchers and clinicians. And then finally, we have challenges in making these data and knowledge accessible to the community. Our goal is to democratize data access and allow anyone to openly and freely explore the data. So partnering with AWS allows the Brain Knowledge Platform to harness the power of their cutting edge technologies. It leverages scalable cloud storage, advanced computing capabilities, data basing, machine learning, graph analysis and generative AI.

This integrated framework presents the opportunity to revolutionize the way we explore and we discover scientific and medical knowledge. So while this is really in its early phases, now, the goal of the Brain Knowledge Platform is to transform this fragmented landscape of neuroscience information into a unified ecosystem by consolidating this vast amounts of information from diverse sources. We can create a centralized hub of knowledge that's accessible to researchers, scientists, healthcare professionals.

The platform will offer a unified portal to search for advanced search and discovery. Machine learning algorithms will let users easily navigate through this and begin to connect the dots across these disparate types of data. And finally, intelligent search capabilities will allow users to pinpoint relevant information and accelerate the pace of their own data with future goals to incorporate generative AI into this process.

So in closing, we hope the Allen Institute and AWS will change the way we understand the brain. We're extremely enthusiastic about this collaboration and thankful for AWS for bringing the technology solutions to this grand challenge. And with that, thank you very much for your attention.

I mean, I can't think of anything more inspiring to be able to work on than working with the Allen Brain Institute to solve exactly those types of problems. It has a profound impact for everybody. And personally, my mother is dealing with Alzheimer's and it has a huge personal interest and value to me too. So thank you all for your partnership and the work that you're doing.

Thank you so much to make it easier to conduct research with the cloud. We launched Amazon Lightsail for Research in 13 regions around the world at the just earlier this year. And this provides researchers with access to preconfigured tools that can help them to analyze data at scale.

We heard why that's important to run complex simulations and to also better manage costs with intelligent pricing estimators. We're also seeing our customers do a lot with the cloud to study and examine biological data that helps improve health and drug effectiveness.

We launched Amazon Omics last year which makes it easier to store query, analyze genomic and transcriptomic and other types of omics data to drive deeper insights. Amazon Omics lets organizations use custom workflow definitions and tools and run scientific analysis in just a few clicks to get patient level insights.

In support of Israel's vision of personalized medicine, the Israeli government developed its national genomic project called CephAs and AWS is honored to be able to help them drive this mission forward as their sole cloud provider. The project includes building a trusted genomic clinical database that will generate sequencing data from more than 500,000 individuals that importantly is pulled over a 30 year period of electronic health records or EHR.

This is going to be incredible in terms of helping increase research collaboration and then ultimately contribute to medical breakthroughs. AWS offers customers more than 130 HIPAA eligible services to help customers improve both clinical and operational efficiency to develop personalized treatments and to even predict healthcare events, data can be centrally aggregated with the Amazon HealthLake.

And then our analytics offerings integrated with HealthLake help customers to quickly query and derive insights from multimodal health data at scale both at the individual or population levels. Today, I'm excited to announce the recent edition of three new Amazon HealthLake capabilities that will help customers to meet access rights and rules from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Launching in preview, Amazon HealthLake now supports SMART on FHIR, bulk data access APIs, the FHIR bulk data access APIs, all of these things provide combined capabilities that simply make it easier for customers to authorize users and researchers and applications and exchange health data easily and securely modernizing electronic health records with the cloud is also helping to improve health outcomes.

Epic is a global leader in EHR software and a critical application used by health care organizations. Those that are using Epic on AWS are also able to integrate all of their medical records and data into a central secure environment that helps to improve efficiency while also keeping patient data private and secure to better support the needs of mission critical healthcare systems.

We recently increased the scalability of Epic on AWS by 61% now able to handle workloads of up to 42 million global references per second or GREFs as Epic measures performance and capability. Tufts Medicine is the first health system to launch its entire EHR environment in the cloud including more than 80 integrated applications and it was able to do this in just nine months because of the speed and the flexibility of the cloud.

Tufts was able to successfully transfer 4 million health accounts into their Epic on AWS system in 71 hours, a task that would have taken 200 days were they to build the system with on premise servers and they can now spin up new environments as quickly as six minutes. Over the past year, Tufts has also continued to optimize its services, important when you're running on the cloud, optimize its services resulting in increased efficiency that has provided a 60% reduction in costs.

And that's important because it allows them to take that money and put it toward their efforts to address health disparity instead of legacy IT. Part of the AWS for Health initiative includes our AWS Health Equity Initiative program. We launched it in 2021 here at the DC Summit. And the goal is to advance health equity with a commitment from AWS of over $40 million over three years in AWS cloud services and technical expertise.

And we distributed $14 million to support these efforts in the first year alone. And we're continuing to see incredible developments led by participants across the spectrum. I want to share just a couple of examples. One is EdLogics who created a game based online platform that's powered by AWS to improve health literacy and to drive better behaviors.

Leo's use of artificial intelligence, personalized outreach and removed the barriers that specific underserved groups experience while trying to access care. It's great to see these kind of innovations come from that Health Equity Initiative. Now, as we've talked about by leveraging the right tools, our customers are able to unlock the value of their data quickly and uncover critical insights, helping drive informed decision and resulting in meaningful action.

However, we can't talk about data without talking about the importance of keeping it protected. Security is our top priority at AWS. And it's been that since the very beginning as the first cloud service provider accredited to support government workloads across the full spectrum of data classifications including unclassified secret and top secret customers benefit from our decade of experience helping public sector organizations manage highly sensitive workloads including the US government.

To hear more about how this technology and collaboration are contributing to national security and resiliency. Let's bring up our next speaker. Please welcome to the stage, Nand Mulchandani, Chief Technology Officer from the Central Intelligence Agency.

Hello everyone. My name is Nand Mulchandani and I'm the Chief Technology Officer at Central Intelligence Agency. We have a unique global 24/7 mission to protect the national security of the United States. We're both a human intelligence organization as well as one focused on foreign threats.

The first and obviously most important part of our organization are our people. We employ domain experts in every field including technology, of course. And as the nation's first line of defense, we're prepared to take deal with problems anywhere and anytime across the world.

So the first question that you may ask is, what is the CTO of CIA doing at an immensely popular technology conference? Well, as we know now, national security and economic security are intimately tied together. And at the heart of economic security is the health of our technology innovation, ecosystem.

Technology and technology innovation are so important to the nation and to global. It is actually now the battlefield for global power competition and leading in this domain is a national priority. And of course, the CIA is fully engaged in supporting these national efforts. The theme for today is making the world a better place, a better place is a place where open markets and a level playing field actually matter. And that the people with the best ideas and the best work ideas win.

As a former technology entrepreneur myself, I actually benefit from an environment where I can focus on building incredible products and focusing on happy customers. But unfortunately, in this new era of competition, global competition, open markets and level playing fields aren't there anymore to some extent. And of course, the United States government is really focused on keeping these free and open the best way possible today.

More than ever, we're seeing a revolution in emerging tech change, the very way we live and work. And of course, it's actually revolution in our society and the world around us, there's a revolution going on in every kind of emerging tech vertical. And of course, there are obvious ones like artificial intelligence that we're all tracking, but it's actually very, very widespread. And I think this is the incredible part about this.

So things like semiconductors and high performance computing, biotechnology, space communications, fintech, next generation energy power and of course quantum computing and technologies and on and on and on. The advances in excitement and all these emerging tech areas is fantastic and forms a new platform to build new products and deliver new capabilities to to people out there throughout its history, CIA has actually been a pioneer in breakthrough technologies.

As a matter of fact, the lithium ion battery in your cell phone right now was actually invented at CIA. And then of course, the core mapping technology is something that we actually delivered to the market. However, while emerging tech is also exciting and happening, it also actually is changing the entire global threat landscape. And again, this is something this evolving situation and evolving tech is something that we CIA take very seriously and is a top priority for us as well.

Working closely together with industry allows us to make our mission possible and do the work that we do. Now, we recognize that we cannot do our work without a secure and resilient framework and base architecture. And CIA was one of the earliest government organizations and national security organizations to recognize the significance and importance of the cloud and become an early adopter.

This was not an easy transition for us and we actually took on a lot of shared risks with industry. However, we're really proud that the investments that we've made in this infrastructure and this change have actually been incredible for us. And the work that we actually put into securing and helping these systems actually be secured and providing that baseline of security has actually been a shared resource for everyone who actually shares this infrastructure with us.

We know that we're one of the, unfortunately the toughest and hardest customers to work with, but we don't make any apologies for that because our work and mission demand the best. So how can you connect and work with CIA? Well, first we actually have a lot of information on our website, which is cia.gov/tech. And as I know, it's a surprise to everyone, we actually do have a website and actually there's a QR code here that will take you to an interesting location on the website. You should try it out.

As far as industry working with us. We have multiple pathways in we have In-Q-Tel obviously very well known. We have CIA Labs, we have Digital Futures and these are all pathways that allow you to connect and engage in the technology, your products and technology with the agency.

For those of you who are interested in public service, there's something called the CIA Technology Fellows program that can actually allow you and as great option to consider. And of course, we love hiring technologists to want to come work for us and we're hiring, as a matter of fact, I'm a great example of somebody who came in after a full career in technology to join the CIA and work here. It's been great and oh by the way, you won't have to wear a suit to work. I can't guarantee it, but I think that will be good for you.

So with that and hope this was a good overview of kind of why CIA's engagement in tech and everything. Let's go together and make a better world. Thank you all so much.

That was really inspirational. I think you're spot on. I mean, we've truly enjoyed the partnership and the technology and the things that we worked on, but the thing that powers it and makes it different is teamwork and so being able to work every day to advance the mission is what it's all about.

Well, thank you so much. I hope you have lots of people go to your website. Yes, I can see the phones out. It's great. Thank you. Yeah, give him one more round of applause. Thanks, Nand.

Our defense and national security customers entrust AWS with the type of critical operations as we all continue to pave new paths to the cloud and AWS is honored to have been selected by the US Department of Defense for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability or JWCC contract. This provides the DoD with the opportunity to acquire cloud services and capabilities from cloud service providers and be able to do that across all security domains, all classification levels for the enterprise, all the way out to the tactical edge. All this is important because it helps to deliver on the critical mission that our armed services do.

This is also key to enabling on the ground critical war fighter capabilities using techniques like the Joint All Domain Command and Control or JADC2 or the DoD Artificial Intelligence and Data Acceleration initiative. And so today, I'm excited to announce AWS Snowcone is now available for customers on the US DoD JWCC contract. This new offering from the AWS Snow Family provides compute storage and other hybrid services in remote and even denied, disrupted, intermittent or limited environments.

AWS Snowcone meets US military rugged organization standards that enables our defense customers to run their operations and manage demanding workloads in edge locations all around the world that are subject to extreme operating environments to broad support for the US Department of Defense and for our national security customers.

We're also excited to highlight a new effort that's being led by Class and Booz Allen to develop and extend tactical edge solutions. This is going to enable mission owners to modernize their edge applications with AWS and deploy them on Voyager VM, ruggedized compute packages from Class which is going to help improve deployment flexibility, help upgrade existing CAPE, accelerate that decision making and improve collaboration through these or in these remote environments.

We're so excited about this update because it demonstrates the kind of edge innovation that our partners are helping to bring to our customers. Earlier this year, we also announced the availability of the AWS Modular Data Center. This is available to DoD customers under the JWCC contract and the self contained cloud solution allows our customers to deploy compute and storage capabilities fast in support of large scale workloads wherever they need them. And having instead of having to build data centers from the ground up in an infrastructure limited environment.

And this is one of the things that I got a chance to stop by and see this morning. So I encourage you if you get a chance to stop by the exhibit hall and see the hybrid cloud, the edge computing and the mobile data center solutions. You'll be able to get a tour hopefully or at least a 3D demo. if you stop by now, it's important to know for our customers that they can achieve and maintain continuous insight and control over the cloud.

Our Landing Zone accelerator on AWS is an open source solution that helps customers automate and orchestrate foundational AWS services so they can accelerate customer compliance in highly regulated environments to keep providing guidance to our customers. We've added Trusted Secure Enclave Sensitive Edition to help our global national security defense and law enforcement customers establish and maintain and operate secure cloud configurations to get the outcomes that they need on the cloud.

Governments have also innovated quickly during critical times of need to maintain continuity for those they serve. And it's been incredible to see all of the ways that they keep adapting to be able to scale up their services, to be able to meet new expectations and to deliver on the needs that we have from citizens to students, to health care, to science and research.

Over the past five years, AWS has worked with local governments, national governments, state governments across Latin America and Canada to help power more than 20 election processes to ensure that they remain fair, transparent and secure. This has had the benefit of delivering democracy for over 300 million citizens. It's included the first and the second round of voting in Brazil's most recent presidential election where a record 124 million Brazilians voted. The first round hit a peak of 1.5 million requests per second with zero security incidents.

We've also been honored to work alongside the Ukrainian government to keep critical services operating and applications secure. Since Russia's invasion, the Ukrainian government has established a strong foundation with their cloud applications as they rebuild for the future and they aim to have 100% of their services available on the digitally enabled de platform known as Ukraine's State in a Smartphone. Today. more than half of adult Ukrainians currently are accessing over 100 public services on the the portal and the app.

As you can see from a lot of the examples I've shared today. our customers have proven to be relentless, innovative, imaginative. They're thinking big to reimagine what's possible and to drive this type of long lasting impact, you need to be willing to push the limits and cloud allows you to innovate faster by being able to launch new solutions, test them iterate quickly all while removing the risks and constraints that you have in your legacy environment. This gives you the freedom to try bolder and better things.

Now, AWS and Amazon have more than 20 years of experience in artificial intelligence and machine learning. In fact, many of the capabilities that customers use today demonstrate that if you've gone on Amazon and experienced a personalized ecommerce experience, if you've walked into an Amazon Go store and seen the computer vision technology that lets you walk in and just walk out, or if you've maybe interacted with Alexa, all of these things are driven by machine learning. And we've been able through these efforts to help democratize machine learning so that it's more accessible to anyone who wants to use it today. In fact, over 100,000 customers of all sizes and industries are using AWS machine learning to transform their organizations and their missions.

I'm excited to be able to talk about the Technology Innovation Institute or TII. It's the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council and they have a focus on innovating. And then taking that from the lab to the market. They recently launched the FALCON 40B ML large language model with 40 billion parameters trained on a trillion tokens on Amazon SageMaker. This achieved record breaking training speeds at 173 trillion mathematical operations per second on each Graphics Processing Unit or GPU that it uses.

This is important because it helps improve the overall productivity by combining multiple capabilities into one command and then allowing complex tasks to be accomplished more quickly. I want to congratulate TII for their recent recognition as the top ranked open source model on the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard. And importantly for customers that think you need to develop your own foundation models that SageMaker is available right now in AWS GovCloud to work with all of your sensitive information.

Now, there continues to be a lot of exciting developments in large language models and generative AI. You may have heard about generative AI. Yeah, a couple folks. Ok, good. Well, AWS has taken the same approach to democratizing generative AI that we've taken to machine learning and AI in general. And that's why we're thrilled to be able to recently announce several new innovations that will make it easier and more practical for customers to use generative AI.

One of those innovations is Amazon Bedrock. It's a new service that allows customers to quickly build and scale generative AI applications easily and securely. It enables our customers to find the right model based on what they're looking to get done to privately make customizations using their own data, which they retain full control of and to deploy those applications fast without having to manage the underlying infrastructure.

Another example is Amazon CodeWhisperer, which automatically determines the cloud services and code libraries best suited for a task and then recommends a code snippet that helps detect and remediate hard to find vulnerabilities. And it does this all in real time. This enables customers to be able to develop code faster and more efficiently improving productivity by up to 30%. Unlike traditional autocomplete types of tools, CodeWhisperer can generate multiple lines of code or even entire functions and it supports over 15 different programming languages. And best of all for anybody here who's developing code, the individual tier is free. So you should get out and try it today. The enterprise tier is something that every customer should look at as well.

Um so try CodeWhisperer today in one of our jam sessions that are taking place over in the Training and Certification booth. Um if you're interested, excited and you want to move faster and be more productive, that's a great couple of minutes to spend over there to help our public sector organizations advance their generative AI capabilities. We're also providing an AIML Experienced based Accelerator offering. This provides the opportunity for customers to work closely with our AWS team over a sprint period of 8 to 12 weeks. And during this time, we focus on implementing the best practices and solving problems together.

You heard Nan talk about teamwork um in this interactive setting, we help you to build models for things like creating more engaging conversational citizen experiences or for assisting students to find resources for their coursework more easily. This allows our customers to really get the full support needed to deliver results faster and more efficiently and to meet our AIML team. Please join us and stop by the exhibit area to the Mission Solutions booth.

Another exciting area that's driving rapid advancements and helping to solve complex global problems includes large scale simulation. We recently launched AWS SimSpace Weaver. That's a fully managed service that customers and partners can use to build, operate and scale up very large spatial simulations that have hundreds thousands or millions of entities interacting in real time in complex two D and 3D environments. And today, I'm excited to announce that SimSpace Weaver is available in the AWS GovCloud region, US East and US West that enables our customers that have sensitive workloads or regulated workloads to now do digital simulation in the cloud and meet all of the US Federal State and local security and compliance requirements.

This means that government customers can now run simulations, do immersive training, analyze environmental hazard preparedness, conduct simulated logistics planning among many many different scenarios all in the security and with the compliance requirements wrapped around us GovCloud. Now, simulations have been commonly used to model urban cities and to help with things that would be too expensive or too time consuming or too dangerous or sometimes just impossible to build and test live. This has great applications for everybody in the public sector, for anybody who is driving down to DC today. This can help you improve and optimize traffic flows for anybody who's had a challenge in a period of natural disaster. This can help urban planners prepare for and analyze and create better emergency response plans. That's why this is important.

The island of Naxos, Greece is driving a smart island initiative that's that's instrumenting their infrastructure such as the energy grid and the local marina with an Internet of Things smart management system that runs on AWS. This information gets created and then is made accessible through visualizations that range from dashboards to fully functioning digital twins and this allows that real time monitoring and scenario analysis. These projects are being built on the global industry standard open source FIWARE framework using cloud computing that enables interoperability with one click. And we heard about data strategy and how you need that to prevent these silos.

So it's been inspiring to be able to talk with you today to see all the ways that customers are reinventing what can be achieved and navigated confidently with the cloud to support this kind of innovation. We also need to prepare the workforce of the future and increasing cloud talent and transforming organizational cultures is more important than ever. In 2020 Amazon committed to training 29 million people around the world with access to free cloud computing skills. By 2025 we've already helped train 13 million individuals and we're continuing to invest and scale these programs up so that we can increase our reach and our impact.

Our training programs include robust offerings that are available in many different formats from digital and self paced to full time intensive upskilling programs. For example, AWS Educate offers hundreds of hours of training that's available for new cloud learners as young as 13 and AWS Skill Builder has over 600 free courses covering many, many different AWS solutions all at various skill levels. And today, I'm happy to announce that we're bringing together a coalition of government and education and Fortune 500 leaders and other employers as part of our AWS Skills to Job Tech Alliance to help modernize higher education curricula and create more pathways to cloud careers. Globally. Efforts are going to focus on developing capstone projects on creating hiring events for participating organizations.

The Tech Alliance is going to be available to 78 educational institutions collectively serving more than 380,000 learners across five regions including Illinois, New York, Washington, and here in the US as well as internationally in Spain and Egypt. And we've got plans to scale these up with additional regions around the world. soon.

AWS Cloud Innovation Centers or CICs as we call them are also helping to drive improved learning outcomes. Our CICs are focused on helping public sector organizations to collaborate and test new ideas to get access to AWS technology expertise fundamentally to help solve real world problems. And so we're excited today to talk about efforts being driven right here locally. And I'm happy to announce that the Smart Factory Believers program, which is a collaborative initiative between AWS and Deloitte. And part of our CIC program is going to be expanding to DC Public Schools coming this fall, this program is going to provide robotics kits, curriculum and educator support to five DC middle schools helping to broaden learning experiences.

Hey, come on, we've got to get more kids into tech. You know, we've got to get them excited and interested in science and technology and engineering and math STEM to drive understanding and drive the sort of careers that are needed for the future. And for this brief update, I'm going to ask Chancellor Ferebee to describe what it means to the DC community. I'm going to ask him to join me here on stage and welcome Chancellor of DC Public Schools, Lewis Ferebee and Deloitte, Chief Commercial Officer for Amazon Nishita Henry up on stage. Come on up.

I love it. I brought the kit with me. That looks fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Max for having us here, Lewis and I are super proud to be talking about our Smart Believers program with the Smart Rovers kit. I love the Smart River kit. Awesome. So as a backdrop before we talk about that, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics says that currently there is a talent shortage for over 300,000 manufacturing jobs and by the year 2028 that could expand to over 2 million. And so we at Deloitte are really focused on empowering the workforce of tomorrow by upskilling young innovators furthest from opportunity. But as you said, we can't do that alone. It really is a partnership and it's a partnership that we've created between Amazon school systems, um, the National Math and Science Institute to actually create programs that support both students and teachers in the creation of new STEM education, creating equitable access to underserved communities. And so I'm really proud to say that since 2022 just last year, we've impacted over 3700 students and teachers. And in fact, in the Wayne Westland school district outside of Detroit, they formed a new robotics team using these smart kits that actually made it to the national robotics championship as rookie of the year. All right, of the year. You got like that. All right. There we go. We've got a tall challenge here in DC. Now. Excited to partner with DC. Next.

Thank you. Thank you. So I heard the applause when we were talking about schools and I love to hear that it's great to be with you today to discuss how we are collectively aspiring in building future leaders in STEM as the Chancellor for DC Public Schools. I know firsthand to achieve excellence in our 116 schools. It requires a village, a collective effort and that's why it's so important to have trusted partners such as Amazon and Deloitte to be in this journey with us, to ensure our schools and our students experience success as educators, we're constantly striving to ensure that we stay abreast of what's happening around the world, technological advances to ensure that not only we have the skills in our classrooms, but we know how we can impact and inform what needs to happen as relates to teaching and learning in our schools. And so that's why we're so excited to have initiatives such as our Smart Factory Believers program, which allows our educators to gain critical skills and to aspire them and empower them, but also to provide critical resources for our students. And for me, I think about our schools have the ability to visit Amazon warehouses and fulfillment centers where they get to see firsthand what's happening around them, but also it complements what students are learning in the classroom to ensure that our students are experiencing what we call cornerstones or experiential learning.

These initiatives provide our students opportunity to not only gain real world experiences but also to inspire their career decisions and what's possible and gain new perspectives. And so as I think about our future in our community, I know everyone can be a part of our solutions as we think about the direction we're headed we know that our journey in our village is so important to the fabric of our city and also our society as a whole. So everyone, whether you're in government nonprofit, public sector, whatever you're doing, we want you to know that you can be a part of this village in ensuring that we achieve equity in education and that we continue to build future leaders that will flourish. And so thank you for the opportunity to be an integral part of this village. Uh and thank you for being a part of this journey with DC Public Schools. Thank you very much.

Thank you. This is an amazing program. I love this. This is, these are so fun. This is how you make it fun, exciting and engaging. So, thanks again for joining us here on stage and to all of you that are working to support our learners and our educators. And I also wanted to recognize the principal Courtney Stafford. Courtney. Are you here? Hey, Courtney, there we go. Courtney, Stafford and the director of partnerships, Darren Gregory, Darren. Are you here? Yeah. Thank you very much. Appreciate that Darren. Um it's been great to be able to have this collaboration. I look forward to doing so much more. So, let's give a round of applause for this initiative and please do participate in some way. Thank you. Thank you. Can't wait to play with one of those. Thank you.

Well, in closing, I wanted to whip out a pair of sunglasses because the future is really so bright in so many different ways to see all of the things that our public sector customers are doing to imagine and invent together. Unfortunately, he told me I couldn't do that. But nonetheless, we're committed to continuing to help you power, invention, innovation and deliver on the needs of your organizations as we all work through these uncharted territories ahead and we want you to be able to do it with the sort of confidence and inspiration that's necessary to thrive in any situation.

So I look forward to all the ways that we'll keep on transforming your organizations and keep on making the world a better place as we work together. And we solve those grand challenges that we've got and create the type of future that we all want to have. And so on behalf of all of the folks from Amazon and all of our partners and all of our great customers. I want to be able to send you on your way and enjoy the rest of the summit.

Be sure to attend several of the learning sessions, get down and see the exhibits on the exhibit hall play and take advantage of the interactive opera to get your hands on these learning opportunities that have been lined up here today. Really take advantage of everything that's there for you no matter where you are on your cloud journey. We've got the content, we've got the experience and we've got the people to help you along on that journey.

So thank you very much and enjoy the rest of your day.