King's students work with Amazon Web Services to create community change

As part of the Impact Accelerator initiative, students from King’s Department of Informatics worked with the global cloud provider to apply skills learnt in the classroom to address challenges faced by public sector bodies across London, from managing care services to finding school places.

Teaming up with representatives from councils including Barnet, Croydon, Hackney, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Kingston, Wandsworth, and Waltham Forest, the groups of undergraduates from the Integrated Computer Science programme used AWS cloud technologies to build working prototypes that would enhance resident services offered by local government, following workshops and seminars given by AWS industry experts.

Teams spent seven months with their ‘challenge sponsors’ to understand business objectives and structure, iterating on their ideas to ensure that they could deliver real change for their partner organisation in a process reflective of post-graduation software development. The teams had access to support from AWS who helped them work out a vision for their product using Amazon’s ‘working backwards’ process. AWS solution architects then helped the students select the right cloud services to build their solution.

‘Team Lovelace’, the winning team of the showcase, worked with children’s services provider, Achieving for Children, to design ‘SchoolSeeker’, a digital map that displayed all publicly available information for schools in Kingston, Richmond, and Windsor & Maidenhead to help parents make informed decisions about which schools to send their children to.

Aligning with parents’ specific needs around factors such as faith and postcode, SchoolSeeker seeks to remove the need to wade through competing sources of information and help parents decide on a school with confidence. The programme uses Amazon SageMaker to run machine learning models trained on proprietary, anonymised data from Achieving for Children and secured under their privacy protection. It then utilises AWS Lambda and Python to leverage this data to accurately predict the likelihood of an individual’s acceptance to a specific school, displaying this alongside school vacancy numbers.

Commenting on the potential impact of SchoolSeeker and how it could be commercialised, Matthew Wallbridge, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Hillingdon Council said: “As someone who is currently looking at school places for their children, it feels like homework on top of a day job. A system that gets you 80% of the way there could be massive, if I didn’t have my current job, I might even buy it! The next step is commercialisation, and collaborating with an organisation like AWS in that innovation pipeline will be invaluable to supporting this. I could absolutely see something like this integrated into some of the popular real estate applications.”

Lucia Woods, Intelligence Analyst at Achieving for Children, and challenge sponsor for ‘Team Lovelace’ said of the project: “Our goal is to empower families within the local community, as well as assisting our local admissions team to serve these families well. This prototype has great potential to be of assistance to both families and be used as a tool for our admissions officers to sign-post families to.”

In addition to developing a tool to help parents choose schools, teams from King’s also developed a system to create templates for workers at Hounslow Council to respond Freedom of Information requests based on historical data, cutting response times while keeping a human-in-the-loop to review potentially sensitive content.

Much of this work utilised work currently ongoing at the university, with research around data management and responsible artificial intelligence systems finding direct application in students’ solutions.

Professor Elena Simperl, academic lead of the programme at King’s said, “Our students bring a first-class education and first-class mindset to the problems they solve, as engaged members of the community. By working with AWS and local government, this programme empowers them to act as ambassadors for the impactful work that happens at academic institutions like King’s, turning the research done in the classroom into real innovation for real people.”

Mike Bainbridge, Senior Manager, Customer Innovation Programmes at AWS said: “Digital and cloud technologies can help local governments innovate and transform resident services. The Impact Accelerator initiative provides an important showcase for innovation and new ideas. Helping students learn how to solve real world challenges in their local communities with different digital and cloud technologies benefits everyone. We were impressed with the product ideas developed by the students, and look forward to seeing how the challenge sponsors will build on this work.”

AWS and King’s College London will support student teams who are interested in developing their solution into a start-up.