>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. it's the Cube covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in our nation's capital, I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Aileen Gemma Smith, the CEO and co-founder of Vizalytics Technology. Thank you so much for coming on the cube. >> Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. >> Let's start by telling our viewers a little bit about Vizalytics, there's a story there about how you founded it. >> Thank you, the mission of Vizalytics is enabling change with data and we saw tremendous opportunity in open and public available data to say, let's make a difference for communities and the whole reason why we started was in 2012 Hurricane Sandy hit my home town of Staten Island and I saw firsthand digital divide, people need access to information, it's not put together in a format that they can use, but it actually is there, so I said, we've got to do something to make a difference. Our first product was a mobile app for shopkeepers. We had thousands of users throughout New York City and then that led on to out first enterprise client being the City of New York. >> The mobile app for shopkeepers could do what? What did it do? >> It let you know everything that was going on outside and around your business that could make a difference to your bottom line, so imagine all you had to do is business name, business address, I'm going to tell you here's your risk for fines, here's when there's going to be public works, here's when someone's filed for a different permit, et cetera, and shopkeepers loved it because we didn't have to do anything to get that information, you told me exactly what I needed to know and you made it really easy to share. >> And now you are a woman founder, a female founder with a she builds t-shirt on and an AWS Hero medallion. Tell me more about this. >> Absolutely, it is a distinct privilege to be an AWS Community Hero. Community Heroes are evangelists for the community where we're talking about how can we build and create more diverse and inclusive communities. I'm privileged and honored to be the only female hero in the Australia and New Zealand region, so I'm determined to say, how can we support more women, how can we support more underestimated founders and tech developers? We have this whole series called She Builds on AWS. We've got events in Sydney, Melbourne, soon to be in Perth, et cetera and that's how we're doing more for our community and as a Community Hero how can I find more voices who aren't me, give them a platform to say, we need to hear what you're building and what you're doing and how can we all support one another as we want to build on on AWS. >> What is it to be like at event like this, where as you said you're the only female Community Hero here, how often are you getting together, collaborating, learning, and how are best practices emerging and what are those best practices? >> First off I want to mention that we have the first ever developer's lounge here in the main hall which is great because we need to see that here in public sector and having those opportunities to meet and greet and talk with folks, hey, you're working on this as well? Tell me more about what you're doing, let me surface out what kind of solutions you're doing, that's where all of the energy and the excitement happens because then you start to discover, oh, I didn't know. Folks are working on this and this, hey we've got the same problem and especially in public sector where folks so often have the challenge of different siloes. I didn't know what I didn't know, how can we bring them all together, so seeing that here in public sector where we can champion, you've got all of these different folks who are working together, it's just a wonderful opportunity. >> And what are you hearing? The big theme here is about IT modernization in the public sector, the public sector, for better or for worse has a reputation of being a little slow or a little more antiquated, there's certain divisions of the government in particular and educational institutions that are incredibly innovative. >> Absolutely. >> Rebecca: Where do you think things stand right now? >> There's absolutely positive change and I like to celebrate here are the leaders and here are the folks that are doing more, yes, public sector does, for good reasons in some cases take a long time to say, how do we want to change, do we feel safe for this change, et cetera, but then you see pockets of excellence. I'm currently based in Sydney, Australia. Transport for New South Wales is one of our clients and I am honored and excited by all that they're doing where at the executive level you have buy-in and you have support. You have support for saying we need organizational change. You have support for saying, let's do proof of concept, let's do these explorations, let's actually have a startup accelerator hub so we as public sector can interact with startups and early-stage founders or university students to make that kind of a difference. When you see that, that's part of why, okay great, we're in Australia now because there's this energy and action and a willingness to move so that's where I think look to those centers of excellence and say, how can we do that within our organization and what can we do better. >> But not saying that we're not seeing quite that energy in the US or how did you think about the differences? >> Again, it depends district by district. Different municipalities have different challenges, different size, et cetera. When you look at this, for example, in San Francisco where you have the Startup in Residence program, started off small, cohort, five or six companies, great, now how can we scale that program and make it national where they had something like 700 applications for maybe a cohort of 50 or 60 companies that are working. That's where you start to see there's an energy that's flowing through, so I think the opportunity for change comes in that kind of cross collaboration and if you have an event like this where you've got public sector folks from all over the world saying, really interesting, you feel my pain, how can we work together on this, what's your team doing, how can I learn from that, how can I take that back to my teams or where can we think about some of the harder problems of organizational change and what do we do if we don't have that executive champion, how can we start to get there? I think that's the kind of energy and opportunity of all the things we're seeing here at Public Sector Summit. >> But as you said, it's also looking for the rest of us, looking at these centers of excellence, see what they're doing, see how they're experimenting, getting those proofs of concept and then saying, hey, we've got something there, let's see if we can replicate this. >> Absolutely, and within public sector, when you have that opportunity to say, and look at how we're doing this in London, look at how we're doing this in Toronto, look at how we're doing this in Sydney and how we're doing this in Melbourne then you can suddenly go back to New York and say, okay great, we do have these other examples, it is being done so we can use that as a guide for what we wanted to do as we continue to innovate. >> What are some of the most exciting things that you're seeing here, some new public sector initiatives, technology, services that you think are really going to be game changers. >> How much time do we have? (laughing) First off, the energy to we want to collaborate, we want to be more agile, we want to make a difference. The sense that this event has grown from just a small cohort to 1,000, couple of thousand, now I believe there's something like 15,000 attendees. >> 18,000 according to Theresa Carlson. >> Think about the fact that we're all willing to be here together, that's a line in the sand that we need to be able to do more, so it's not about a particular technology per se, but willingness to say, we need to be here, we need to face these problems. We've got this challenge of should we bring these legacy systems over, should we think about how we want to work together in public product partnerships that we can all come together and start to work at this and also think about, we've got Public Sector Summits throughout the world, please join us at Canberra Summit that's going to be going on in late August. We've got Tokyo Summit going on right now, so it's not just all here in D.C., you're starting to see these clusters move out and that's really wonderful and exciting for us. >> It's wonderful and exciting on the one hand and yet this summit is taking place against a backdrop where we're seeing a real backlash against technology. The public sentiment has really soured, regulators and lawmakers are sharpening their blades and saying, hey, maybe we should pay attention more to what these technology companies are doing and just how powerful they've become in all of our daily lives. What's the sentiment that you're hearing on the ground, particularly as the founder yourself. >> I think that's where knowledge can be powerful. Can we empathize with some of the challenges? I hope that all companies choose to act with integrity, not necessarily that they do, but there are a lot of folks saying, we need to be able to do more. From a policy perspective, how can tech companies partner with policymakers who may not understand how all of these technologies work and what they're capable of or not capable of, we need more clarity on that because I think that's where it becomes a black box of conflict and if you can change it to say, this is challenges that you have with facial recognition or sentiment analysis or what have you, let's really think about do the systems today do, what are the guard rails that we need to put in and how can we work as partners with policymakers so it's not just driven by lobbyists but there's actually an understanding of, this is the implication of these systems. >> Here are the unintended consequences. >> Absolutely and if I can come back to New York for a second, New York City has one of the strongest open data logs in the nation. Part of that is because Gale Brewer, the Borough President of Manhattan said we need to formalize this. How do we put this together? She didn't come from a tech background, but she saw a problem that needed to be solved and she said, how do we put this together and how do we get the right folks to the table to think about doing this in a really scalable, meaningful way, so the more that we see those opportunities in that backdrop of tensions and concerns, that's how we move forward, facing those hard questions. It's not Rome was built in a day, it's not. It's going to take us a lot of time and there's a lot of unanswered ethical questions as well that we have to start really thinking deeply about. >> But it starts, as you said, with making the data visible and then getting more voices who-- >> Making it visible and also understanding what's not included in the data. Coming back to when I started my company, there was a lot of, but this isn't being counted and what happens when you're saying, I'm making a bias based on this particular dataset that leaves out this whole community over here. Can we think about what's not included in that data or how the data collection itself or the organization itself is changing things, so that's why, coming back to, you need more female founders, you need more underrepresented populations to have those voices of have you considered this, have you given representation to this particular group, to this population. Without doing that, then you're just reinforcing the same siloes and the same biases and we have an obligation to our community and to one another to change that. >> I know you have a keen interest in diversity issues and, as you're talking about, bringing in more women and more underrepresented minorities to lend their perspective to these very important issues that are shaping our lives. How do we solve this problem? Technology has such a bro culture and we're seeing the problems with that. >> First off, from a founder's point of view, you have to know when not to listen, you have to know when not to let someone shut you down because they'll say-- >> The noise. >> Oh my goodness, the noise of, we've got ageism, we've got sexism, we've got racism, we've got elitism. I went to Brooklyn College, I'm very proud of that fact. I had venture capitalists say, I don't want to invest in you, you're too old and you didn't go to a pedigree school, well guess what, my company's still here, some of the folks you've invested in, they folded a long time ago, so part of it is a willingness to drive forward but it's also building networks of support. Coming back to being the community hero, how can I elevate these voices and say, we need to give them an opportunity to be here, we need to change this, so part of it is we want more seats at the table, but if that table's not going to welcome me, I'm creating a whole 'nother table over here where we can start to have that cluster effect and that's where the dedication, the tenacity and you see things like we power tech, where we're really looking to elevate those voices. That change can't happen unless we keep doing that and unless the folks who are like, but this is how we've always done it, are willing to say, actually, shortcoming here, let's think about changing this and broadening the conversation. >> Is that changing though? >> We were talking a lot about how there's a new generation of workers coming up who do think differently and they do grow up with this stuff and they say, we don't need this red tape, why is this taking so long? They're impatient and maybe a more willingness to listen to other voices, are you seeing a difference? >> Absolutely, I'm seeing a difference for sure. That doesn't mean sexism, ageism, elitism has gone away. It has not, but you're starting to see, again, clusters of excellence and I think if you really want to make change you focus on where that traction is, use that as your foothold to build and scale and then start to be able to do more because that's the only way. We've got some barriers that for other founders I empathize with how insurmountable it can be, but if you've got that dedication, if you refuse to be defined by what someone else says you are or what your company is capable of being and then you find those great partners to say, let's do this together, the whole conversation changes. >> Aileen Gemma Smith those are great words to end on. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. >> Absolute pleasure, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have much more of the Cube's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington D.C. coming up in just a bit. (techno music)

(electronic music) >> Live, from Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back. We're here live in Washington, D.C. It's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit. It's like re:Invent but also for public sector. But it's a global public sector. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Vincent Quah, who's the head of education, nonprofits, and healthcare in Asia, Pacific, and Japan for AWS. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, John, Stu. Great to be able to be here. >> You know, we constantly talk about cloud in the United States here, and people use the word GovCloud, and Teresa and I always kind of jokingly say, "No, it's bigger than GovCloud. It's global public sector." You bring an international perspective covering APAC for AWS? >> Yes, absolutely. >> Public sector, okay. Outside of China, which is a different division with Amazon, you got the whole world. So Teresa and the team are looking not just at the US, it's the entire world. What's different? How's that working? Give us an update. >> I think one of the key differences that we see is that the US has really led the way in terms of the adoption of cloud technologies. We had great examples of universities that have really gone all in. What we are seeing now is that universities and education institutions in Asia, they're beginning to pick up their pace. And it's exciting to see some of the universities really coming very strongly using AWS. And we're seeing this across not just in mature countries and developed countries, but also in developing countries. And so it is a very widespread adoption of the cloud. And we're very excited by that. Tell us about the AWS Educate. Teresa Carlson on stage yesterday very highlighted much in her keynote about education, as well as some of the that they're doing with retraining and educating young people and whatnot, but really education has been a real growth area, from interest with cloud. Because old IT (laughs) okay, you look at that, okay, there's never had a lot of IT guys. (Vincent laughs) But it's really changed both technology procurement and delivery, but also the impact. >> Right. >> Talk about the AWS Educate program. >> So the AWS Educate program is a free program that all institutions can join. It comes with content from AWS, it comes with content from some of the top computer science universities in the world, as well as Cloud Credits, where individual student members, or the educator's members, they can actually get access to using the real platform that AWS provide. Now, this is really game-changing for students and for the institution. And it's game-changing because they have exactly the same access to all the 125-plus technologies that AWS provide to enterprises and now they are in the hands of students. So can you imagine, if they have the experience using some of these services, building capabilities, building solutions and services, and bringing out to the market. So now, innovation is in the hands of every single individual. And Educate is such an important program to re-skill and skill graduates to be ready for the working world. >> I love that, Vincent. I think back, most of my career, when you talked about education, you talked about research and universities. So it was a certain top-tier and a very limited amount. You're really democratizing what's happening. Wonder if you have any examples, or what sort of innovations are coming out of some of these global initiatives? One of the great example is NOVA, right. So we've announced that NOVA is now building this cloud associate degree as part of their information systems technology. >> What's NOVA again? >> The Northern Virginia Community College. >> In the keynote yesterday, not to be confused with Villanova, the basketball champs. >> Northern Virginia, got it, sorry. >> So, there's a need there that the institutions see because there's so much that the industry would need in terms of skills and graduates graduating with the right skill set. If you look at the World Economic Forum that was published in 2016, more about Internet and cloud computing are the two key technological drivers that's creating all these change in the industry. And many, many organizations are now investing into skilling and re-skilling. Educate sits so nicely to this particular part of the agenda. Apart from what NOVA has done here in the US, there are two other examples I want to quickly highlight to you. The first is, in the first week of June, we actually did an event in the Philippines. It was a large-scale student event. We had more than hundreds of students in a single location, with probably close to 100 educators. We took them through a four-day event. Two days of skills and content learning with hands-on experience. A third day on a gamified challenge that we put the students through so that they can compete with one another in groups, and thereby achieving top-notch scores in the leaderboard. And at the end of the day, they actually get to also develop a curriculum vitae, a CV, that they can actually submit to companies. And on the fourth day, we brought more than 20 companies as part of this whole event, and we got the students to actually connect with the companies, and the companies to the students, so that where the companies are looking for jobs, these are the students that are ready with skills that they have learned over the past three days, that they can apply to jobs that these company are looking for. So that's a really strong case of what we see working. Connecting skills to companies that are looking for students with the right set of skills. >> Talk about the international global landscape for a minute. You have a unique perspective in your job. What are the key things going on out there? What's the progress look like? What are some of the successes? Can you share a little bit about what's going on in Asia, Pacific, and Japan? >> Sure. There'll be two examples that I'll be sharing. The first is, we know that AWS Educate started off at the tertiary level. But then, last re:Invent is now being extended to 14 years and above. So now children at that age can learn about the cloud and be made aware of what's the potential of the cloud and what they can learn and use the cloud for. We've also begun to extend that work into the adult working workforce. One very specific example that I can share with you. There is an organization in Singapore called the National Trade Unions Congress LearningHub. They're an education service provider and they provide education services to citizens of Singapore. We have worked with them. They're using the AWS Educate content, and they develop two courses. Fundamentals in Cloud Computing and Fundamentals in IoT. They bring this pilot courses for the Fundamentals in IoT to a group of individuals age 45 to 74 years old. And they came away, the course just simply blew their mind away. They were so excited about what they have learned. How to program, actually, I have with me, an Internet of Things button. Now they can actually come up with an idea, program an activity on this button, so that it trigger off a particular reaction. And that's the excitement that these individuals 45 to 74 years old. They have the domain expertise, now they need is just an idea and a platform. >> It's also entrepreneurial too. >> Absolutely. >> They can tinker with the software, learn about the cloud at a very young age, and they can grow into it and maybe start something compelling, have a unique idea, fresh perspective. >> Correct. >> Or, someone who's retraining, to get a new job. >> Correct. And innovation is, we keep thinking of innovation as something that's really big. But actually, innovation doesn't have to be that way. It can start very small and then scale up from there. And all you need is just an idea to apply. >> All right. So Vincent, one of the themes we've been talking a lot about at the show is cybersecurity. Can you speak how that discussion plays specifically in the education markets? >> What we want to do is really raise the awareness of every individual's understanding of cloud computing. And by that I mean from 14 years to 74 years old. We want to let them know, actually, they are already interacting with cloud technologies. For example, if you have a Samsung Smart TV at home, if you have made a hotel booking through Expedia or through Airbnb, or if you have called for home delivery from McDonald's, you've already interacted with the cloud. And so what we want to do is make sure that everybody actually understand that. And then through some of these courses that are being provided by our partners, then they can go and learn about the security part of it. And help them have a much better sense of idea of, look, the cloud is actually a lot more secure. And we've heard many examples of that today and yesterday. And we want to give them that assurance that what they are doing and consuming, they can be part of that entrepreneur process to create something new and very exciting. >> Vincent, I'll give you the last word on this interview by sharing the update from Asia Pacific AWS. How many people are out there's a growing, you're hiring. What are some of the priorities you guys have. They have a big event in Singapore, I know that. We've been watching it, thinking about bringing theCUBE there. Give us some idea of the growth around the AWS people. What's the head count look like, give us some estimations. John, you know I can't really talk too much about head count, but I can say that we are definitely growing our AWS head count very, very rapidly. The needs and requirements out there in the market is so tremendous, and we want to be able to serve the customer as best as we can. We are a customer-obsessed company, and so we want to be there with the customer, work with them to really meet the objective and the goals that they have. And help them achieve that vision. And so we are just the enabler. We empower the customer to make. >> You have events out there too, right? You have the re:Invent, Summit? >> We have the AWS Summit, and this coming October we have the Public Sector Summit here in Singapore, as well as in Canberra in September. >> Right. >> And there's an education event coming domestically, too. >> And there's an education, a global education event that is happening in Seattle in August. So we're very excited about that. >> Lot of action on the AWS ecosystem. Congratulations, you guys do a great job. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, Vincent. Really appreciate it. We're here live in Washington, DC. It's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We've got Dave Vellante here as well, coming and joining us for some interviews. We'll be right back, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)