FedWire: Astroids, cloud security and Presidents Day

FedWire is FedScoop’s afternoon roundup of news and notes from the federal IT community. Send your links and videos to tips@fedscoop.com.

NASA looks into redirecting astroids.

Code for America gets a makeover.

Three key factors for tech leaders to remember.

Five cloud security lessons.

An update on the National Library of Medicine’s move to digital.

One man’s path to the stars.

Presidents Day trivia: 18 presidents served in the House before becoming president and one served after. Can you name them all? Find the answer here.

Data takes center stage in movement for equality

Two of the world’s most prominent women put data in the spotlight this week, arguing the numerous benefits data will have in understanding and advancing women’s equality around the world.

The Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation announced their new partnership to collect and analyze data about the status of women worldwide. The report will collect data from 1995 to present day, and is expected to be released in 2015.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Melinda Gates made the announcement in a panel moderated by Chelsea Clinton, at New York University on Thursday.

The initiative, No Ceilings: “The Full Participation Project,” launched this past November by Clinton, is meant to evaluate the progress women are making worldwide, generate awareness about issues, and mobilize the private sector, governments and people worldwide.

“We’ve seen progress, but we’ve also seen that there is not an adequate base of information and evidence that we can draw conclusions from about how much progress has been made and what the gaps for the action and decision making still are,” Clinton said during the panel.

Gates and Clinton stressed the importance of gathering data evidence in the fight for women’s equality, agreeing that without data it’s impossible to know what’s left to be done.The partnership intends for the data to be easily accessible, usable and searchable, but also that it is understandable to people around the world.

The data once made available, will be accessible on web platforms and also possibly available via SMS technology, so regions of the world with limited smartphone and Internet capabilities can access the information.

The data will be collected through traditional sources, including the World Bank, the United Nations system and World Economic Forum but also through less traditional methods such as Google, according to Chelsea Clinton.

Linda Rosa, digital strategist and director of government solutions at IdeaScale, told FedScoop the way the data is presented and organized will be crucial.

“People collect data all the time, but the problem lies in not knowing what to do with it,” Rosa said. “A focus on releasing the data in different formats can really make all the difference.”

Stephanie Grosser,  senior adviser for data technology and communications at the U.S. Agency for International Development, Development Credit Authority, deals exclusively with data in her role at USAID and in projects she and her team work on. She said the Clinton Foundation’s latest announcement does a great service for everyone working in the data space.

“The more data that is released publicly translates into more analysis anyone can do,” Grosser told FedScoop. “This enables people with new perspectives to mash up different data to draw new conclusions with the same information.”

Hagel reviews nominations for ethics adviser post

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is close to selecting a senior officer to serve in a new departmentwide coordination post focused on leadership development and ethics.

Pentagon Press Secretary Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby said Friday Hagel is currently reviewing “several nominations” for the post, which he characterized as the “first of its kind” in the Defense Department.

The U.S. military in recent weeks has been rocked by a series of cheating scandals involving Air Force and Navy nuclear forces, drug probes involving some of those same units, major contracting crimes, sexual assault cases, complaints about the way senior officers conduct performance reviews, and a rash of misconduct cases involving senior officers dating back several years.

The incidents have raised concerns at the highest levels that the stress of more than a decade of war, combined with other societal issues, may have created a “systemic” ethics and leadership problem trickling down from the senior officer corps throughout the ranks. To counteract the spread of so-called “toxic leaders,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has instituted changes to the way senior officers are reviewed, including new peer evaluations that will include character assessments.

But while Dempsey “will be intimately involved” in whatever actions the department takes based on internal and independent reviews that are about to kick-off, the new post will report directly to Hagel, according to Kirby.

“The secretary believes it is important to have somebody on his personal staff… to help coordinate the effort across the department,” Kirby said. “He wants somebody who is reporting directly to him to help this coordinating function.”

Richard R. Osial, a spokesman for Dempsey, told FedScoop recently the new “360-degree review” process will enter initial beta testing in March and is scheduled for full implementation this summer. Osial said the Joint Staff is working with the Army’s Center for Army Leadership to develop the specifics of the new review process.

In addition, although all general officers and flag officers occupying joint service billets — commands made up of forces from multiple services — will be subject to the new Joint Staff 360-degree review process, each branch of the service is developing its own program and schedule.

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DHS-sponsored research targets social media, gang graffiti

Dozens of federal, state and local law enforcement and first-responder agencies are working with the Department of Homeland Security and researchers from Purdue University to produce new visual analysis technologies for analyzing social media posts, blogs and even gang graffiti. The technologies are now on the verge of adoption nationwide.

Researchers from the Visual Analytics for Command, Control and Interoperability Environments project, known as VACCINE, have developed a tool called ScatterBlogs that allows law enforcement map social media posts in real-time to crime analysis tools, and also enables first responders to better understand what is happening in communities during a disaster.

“We have the ability to take Flickr, YouTube and Twitter feeds and from that create the ability to interactively explore and navigate the topics and anomalies that are occurring,” said Dr. David S. Ebert, director of the VACCINE program at Purdue. But Ebert, who spoke Feb. 11 at the First Responder Technology Demonstration, sponsored by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, said it’s not about tracking the most popular social media posts.

“If I just show you the top 10, it’s not going to be very useful,” Ebert said. “But if there are 10 tweets that involve a knife, that’s probably going to be unusual, and that’s what a law enforcement officer wants to do.”

The tool, which is currently part of a pilot project with the Ohio State Highway Patrol, is capable of conducting interactive topic classification and interactive anomaly detection of real-time social media messages. It also allows users to filter specific topics of interest, plots the social media postings on a map and allows officials to view profiles and previous posts to help determine a person’s credibility.

Purdue researchers have been refining the tool with direct input from 40 federal, state and local agencies, focusing on everything from crime analysis to monitoring disaster response efforts.

“For example, after Hurricane Sandy, lower Manhattan wasn’t well evacuated after the order went in, but the majority of tweets were coming from grocery stores,” Ebert said. “So people were actually hunkering down to ride it out instead of evacuating. If you were able to pull up that information in real-time, you could decide that maybe you need to get a different message out, or your planning and response might change.”

Researchers are now studying how to integrate other social media outlets into the tool, depending on the feedback they receive from law enforcement agencies.

Fighting gang violence

Another project that researchers from the VACCINE program have developed includes automatic image recognition and interpretation currently being used by more than 15 state and local police departments to document, map and analyze gang graffiti.

Known as GARI, or Gang Graffiti Automatic Recognition and Interpretation, the system allows police officers “to take a picture, categorize and compare the graffiti images that you have to a database, see where there are similar images and do simple shape interpretation from that,” Ebert said.

The GARI system has been pilot tested with the Indiana Division of Homeland Security, the Indiana Metropolitan Police Department, the State of Indiana Gang Intelligence Network and 15 other police departments. More than 8,000 images of gang graffiti have been uploaded into the system since 2012.

Purdue and DHS are currently looking at ways to deploy the technology on a broader basis to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, intelligence analysts and the nationwide network of fusion centers.

The next steps for the program include developing a community policing version for public access, development of a tattoo image version for use by prison officials, explore use by school districts and find a corporate or government partner to transition the technology to the nationwide market.

Video: How the GARI gang graffiti tool started out as a HAZMAT identification tool

TechTake: OMB posts agency progress on performance.gov

TechTake explores the bigger issues and trends in the federal IT community, and twice-monthly features a “Women in Technology” segment.

The Office of Management and Budget announced Thursday agencies had made significant progress with their 2012-2013 Agency Priority Goals. The results of the fourth quarter of 2013 were posted on performance.gov by the administration, highlighting goals met by the departments of Commerce and Treasury and the Small Business Administration.

Today’s release did not include projects that failed to meet their goals, but we can expect a new set of milestones in the 2015 budget request scheduled to come out March 4.

Data Vault

Threat Matrix

TechTake

Leadership, retention still struggles for women in high-tech fields

More than one-third of women in the science, engineering and technology field won’t stay at their job for more than one year, and U.S. women are 45 percent more likely than men to leave that industry within a year, according to recent research.

Released Wednesday by the Center for Talent Innovation, the “Athena 2.0 Factor: Accelerating Female Talent in Science, Engineering & Technology” report found that in addition to the struggles of recruiting women to the SET field, retaining them is an even bigger problem.

A hostile macho atmosphere, a dearth of female role models, exclusion from “buddy networks,” ineffective sponsorships and a lack of a perceived leadership ability contributed to these women’s departures. Among U.S. women, 80 percent said they loved their job but felt compelled to leave because of these factors.

“Across the globe, there is high demand for top SET talent, but short supply,” Sylvia Hewlett, founder and president of CTI, said in a statement. “Women are central to the solution as they comprise nearly half of the SET talent pipeline worldwide. The success of our global economy depends on our ability to develop and leverage our high-performing women.”

Despite women’s hopes of holding a senior position at their company, a considerable proportion of SET senior leaders (31 percent in the U.S.) reported a woman would never get to the top regardless of how high performing or able. Nearly half of women believe senior management more readily sees men as “leadership material.”

These latest numbers are an update to a similar report from 2008 on women in high-tech positions. According to the recent report, the situation has evolved since 2008 in ways the authors found to be both promising and frustrating.

“Many of the barriers we documented in our first report continue to daunt and demoralize women as they seek to fill these gaps,” the report said.

The report surveyed 5,685 women aged 25-60 from the U.S., Brazil, India and China.

FedWire: Working without Internet, biological threats and snow emergency

FedWire is FedScoop’s afternoon roundup of news and notes from the federal IT community. Send your links and videos to tips@fedscoop.com.

Understanding the psychology behind technology.

An apt article for today: working when the power goes out.

Technologies to decontaminate biological threats.

Updates from The Great Montgomery Hackathon.

Improving cybersecurity through acquisition.

Designing for a behavior change.

Be careful in D.C. — a snow emergency has been declared.

If you’re really bored, check out the snow day specials D.C. bars are hosting.