STACKx Smart City 2024

Bill Vass is Vice President of Engineering at Amazon Web Services. In this role, Bill oversees more than 42 cloud and edge technologies that allow AWS’ customers to store, analyze, manage, and retrieve information quickly and efficiently. Bill’s teams deploy, manage, and monitor the cloud. They provide large scale storage; support gaming, large scale simulations, and studio rendering; provide data transfer and real time streaming services; lead AWS’ product development into the Internet of Things (IoT); create robotics and autonomous systems; support the Snowball Edge processing device systems; and lead AWS’ research and development into quantum computing. In short, his teams develop and operate the largest software defined storage, streaming, IoT, automated management, and monitoring systems in the world, used by web-based companies, consumer companies, enterprises, and governments

Before joining AWS, Mr. Vass was the President and Chief Executive Officer of Liquid Robotics, Inc., a pioneering Data as a Service, cloud-based solutions company that designs and builds autonomous robots that serve a wide range of customers in the energy, shipping, defense, communications, scientific, intelligence, and environmental markets.

Prior to that, Mr. Vass was the President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Microsystems Federal, an independent subsidiary of Sun Microsystems with its own board of directors, where he was responsible for growing over $1.4B of revenue. His responsibilities spanned Product Development, Sales and Business Development, Marketing, Partner Management, and Service Delivery.

Before his role leading Sun Microsystems Federal, Mr. Vass served as Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Sun, where he defined and delivered the technology vision and architecture while he managed global deployments in support of Sun’s 50K business users. During his time as CIO, Mr. Vass significantly improved security, availability, and application delivery while reducing the overall operations cost of IT from $880M to $360M.

Mr. Vass had a lengthy public service career. Working for the Secretary of Defense in the Office of the CIO, he was on a team responsible the for oversight of a $35.5B budget, as well as system and software acquisition, research, development, and integration standards for over 6,800 IT systems. His organization managed networks, servers and applications across the Pentagon’s defense networks.

Prior to joining the Office of the CIO, Mr. Vass was CTO and technical lead for the U.S. Army’s personnel systems worldwide. Before his work at the DoD, Mr. Vass developed large-scale commercial Information Technology engineering and business systems solutions for defense system integrators, as well as the oil and gas and ocean engineering industries.

Mr David Tan is the Assistant Chief Executive Officer (Development Group) of JTC, Singapore’s lead government agency responsible for the planning and development of industrial infrastructure to support and catalyse the growth of new industries and transform existing enterprises. He oversees the land planning and redevelopment, architecture, procurement and contract management, as well as the planning and development of JTC’s next generation estates like one-north, Jurong Innovation District, Punggol Digital District and Woodlands North Coast.

Mr Tan has professional experience in engineering and industry development; having been involved in the planning, design and construction of major infrastructure, building and reclamation projects. He was involved in the development of Jurong Island as the world’s top ten chemical and energy hub, and Jurong Rock Caverns, South East Asia’s first underground liquid hydrocarbon storage and terminalling facility. He was the Deputy Chief Executive of Energy Market Authority from 2007 to 2010 where he was involved in energy policy, planning and development.

Currently, Mr Tan serves on the boards of Jurong Port Pte Ltd and SLI Holdings Pte Ltd. He is also a member of the Development Projects Advisory Panel of the Ministry of Finance and the MOH Holdings Pte Ltd’s Healthcare Infrastructure and Planning Committee and Project Development Committee.

Mr Tan graduated with a BEng in Civil Engineering (First Class Honours) from the University of Adelaide and a MSc in Engineering from the National University of Singapore. In 2005, he was awarded the Public Administration Medal (Bronze) and in 2014, he was awarded the Public Administration Medal (Silver) in recognition of his contribution to the Public Service.

James is the Director for Smart City Technology Division (SCTD) in Govtech, and hold a double portfolio in JTC as the Director for Smart District Division. In Govtech, the Smart City Technology Division supports agencies to develop and deploy Geospatial, IOT and Robotics systems. His team is also working on assisted living technologies that will support our aging population.

In JTC, James leads a team that develops the Open Digital Platform - the Smart District Operating System for System Interoperability and Estate Management. His team has been using digital twin technology to build a command-and-control system for the Punggol Digital District in Singapore. The platform serves as a backbone for smart estate management to deliver sustainability targets and manpower optimisation.