White House launches artificial intelligence task force

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) on Thursday announced the launch of a National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force.

The new task force will lay out a road map for expanding critical resources and educational tools that the Biden Administration says it hopes will spur innovation and economic prosperity across the U.S. Its launch comes amid heightened scrutiny of the U.S.’s competitive position in research and development, and follows a bill that was last week passed by the Senate to limit the technology influence of China.

The new task force will act as an advisory committee and is tasked with ensuring that AI researchers and students across all scientific disciplines receive the computational resources, high quality data, educational tools and other user support. It will submit two reports to Congress that present a comprehensive AI strategy and implementation plan: an interim report in May 2022, and a final report in November 2022.

Lynne Parker, who is director of the National AI Initiative Office at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, will co-chair the committee, along with Erwin Gianchandani from the National Science Foundation.

Other members of the committee include experts from the universities of New York and Standard, as well as a representative from Google.

Frederick Streitz from the Department of Energy and Elham Tabassi from the National Institute of Standards and Technnology are also on the committee.

Commenting on the launch of the committee, Science Advisor to the president and OSTP director Eric Lander, said: “America’s economic prosperity hinges on foundational investments in our technological leadership.”

“The National AI Research Resource will expand access to the resources and tools that fuel AI research and development, opening opportunities for bright minds from across America to pursue the next breakthroughs in science and technology,” he added.

NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said: “NSF is delighted to co-chair the National AI Research Resource Task Force, which has the essential role of envisioning the research infrastructure that will drive future innovations in AI.

“By bringing together the nation’s foremost experts from academia, industry, and government, we will be able to chart an exciting and compelling path forward, ensuring long-term U.S. competitiveness in all fields of science and engineering and all sectors of our economy,” he added.

Return to work guidance says agencies should consider embracing a distributed workforce

Agencies should consider embracing a distributed workforce where possible, according to new guidance issued on Thursday by the Office of Management and Budget, Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration.

In a joint memorandum sent to all major agencies, the three oversight agencies said that such a move should be taken “where possible and appropriate,” and could help to benefit equity, inclusion and the delivery of missions.

“Distributing work nationwide has the potential to advance equity and inclusion in the federal work environment to the benefit of Federal agency missions, allowing agencies to recruit from a larger talent pool reflecting the talents of individuals all across America, and allowing employees to choose to live where it best suits them,” the guidance said.

The intervention comes as agencies including DHS and the Department of Defense look at new ways to attract top technology talent to federal departments, despite an often large pay differential between the public sector and private sector. Federal government jobs have conventionally required staff to be located at the agency’s headquarters or a key operational hub, which compares unfavorably with flexible working policies in industry.

Other key aspects of the memorandum include guidance that some employees who teleworked during the pandemic may prefer to continue working remotely, and that this should be a key factor in how agencies apply their return to work policies.

It states also that federal agencies should increase the use of flexible and alternative work schedules, as compared to before the pandemic. Specifically, the missive advocates the continued use of maxiflex work schedules — work schedules that allow staff to complete their eight-hour work day any time within a 24-hour period — and says that where possible these should continue to be offered.

According to the joint memorandum, the federal government’s official operating status remains at “open with maximum telework flexibilities to all current telework eligible employees, pursuant to direction from agency heads.”

It says also that previously-established pandemic occupancy limits for federal buildings are no longer in effect, although adds that agencies may establish occupancy limits for specific workplaces as a means of ensuring physical distancing between unvaccinated individuals.

Agencies that have taken steps during the pandemic to allow greater workforce autonomy include the Department of Defense. The DOD is just days away from launching its high-security version of Microsoft Office365, dubbed DOD365, which is designed to replace the current telework system.

Space Force has also outlined plans to become the first digital service, and said in a May memo, that it intends its guardians to be “digital nomads”.

Earlier this month, the OMB wrote to agencies across federal government to give them a final deadline of July 19 to finalize plans for bringing staff back to work.

All departments are required to have previously submitted draft return to work policies by June 18, and will then receive feedback on their submissions. 

The return of federal agency staff to the office is being led by the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force, which was established Jan. 20, 2021 in one of President Joe Biden’s first executive orders. 

Hack the Army event yields 102 critical security gaps

The annual Hack The Army event found 238 vulnerabilities, 102 being critical security gaps that needed immediate fixing, event organizers disclosed Thursday.

This year’s “Hack The Army 3.0,” organized in January 2021 for six week, involved 40 “top-tier” security researcher from both military and civilian backgrounds, testing a range of assets to find security flaws. It is the 11th Hack the Army event, which is a bug bounty program modeled off a practice common in the private sector of paying security researchers when they find vulnerabilities. The Army paid out more than $150,000 to civilians that participated.

For the third time, the service partnered with HackerOne, a bug bounty platform that won Federal Risk and Access Management Program (FedRAMP) approval in May 2020.

Hack the Army is part of Hack the Pentagon, which is a series of bug bounty challenges for varying assets and branches of the military run by the Defense Digital Service.

“By inviting skilled hackers to test the US military’s digital assets, the DDS and the US Army demonstrate that hacker-powered security has become a mainstream best practice for organizations requiring continuous security testing,” Alex Rice, HackerOne’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said in a statement. “It’s been an exciting journey to chart the successes of the three Hack The Army initiatives and watching the hacking community help strengthen the nation’s cybersecurity defenses.”

The goal is find security gaps by replicating adversary activity against a network or other part of their domain. The federal government has previously struggled to form close bonds with the so-called “white hat” hackers only mimicking adversaries and prove hackers won’t face any legal jeopardy for their work and they can share their work. DDS also recently expanded their policy on what hackers could do their worst on.Thank

HackerOne and similar platforms act as an intermediary where they host the parts of an organization’s network that are acceptable for hackers to target, so that over-ambitious security researches do not compromise live systems. The use of services such as HackerOne helps to mitigate suspicion in the security community of working with the government.

“We are trying to first be a valuable member of the community,” former assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, Will Roper, said in May 2020 about the military’s place in the hacker community. To do that, the department will be putting “meaningful activity on the table.”

HackerOne has been trying to capitalize on requirements in 2020 that agencies develop vulnerability disclosure programs. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) launched its own bug bounty platform Tuesday.

Renewed Palantir contract could expand disease surveillance to other CDC centers

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest contract with Palantir Technologies allows the agency to extend a non-COVID-19 disease surveillance solution to any of its centers.

The one-year, $7.4 million contract renewal covers the modernization of the Data Collation and Integration for Public Health Event Response (DCIPHER) environment, based on the Palantir Foundry platform.

While the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases has used DCIPHER to better manage food-borne outbreaks since 2010, the COVID-19 pandemic showed other CDC centers the benefits of using scalable, interoperable cloud solutions.

“We’ve learned from the pandemic just how important it is to modernize surveillance to have that situational awareness for any public health issue,” Dr. Bill Kassler, chief medical officer at Palantir, told FedScoop.

DCIPHER collects epidemiological, surveillance and laboratory data from various sources so CDC centers and their partners can make informed decisions around outbreaks.

Within NCEZID, both the System for Enteric Disease Response, Investigation, and Coordination (SEDRIC) and the National Wastewater Surveillance System use DCIPHER.

More recently other centers have requested similar cloud infrastructure to assist with surveilling the flu and HIV and the Center for Global Health.

The pandemic made CDC centers recognize the need for earlier situational awareness on social determinants of health, to plan a more equitable response, and supply chain instability, to get personal protective equipment and other resources where they’re needed, Kassler said.

Unfortunately many CDC systems are legacy systems that can’t be scaled for more compute or storage in a crisis to handle hundreds of necessary data sources. Systems like that can take contractors two to four months to recode for collection of new data fields pertaining to novel outbreaks.

DCIPHER’s usefulness extends beyond outbreaks though as new data sources on genomics, social needs, behavior from wearables, and clinical records help monitor conditions like heart disease and stroke.

“We think there are huge opportunities across the federal government to bring disparate, multimodal data together to help to visualize that data and to make it into a form that advanced analytics such as machine learning and predictive modeling [can use],” Kassler said.

The Department of Health and Human Services awarded Palantir several contracts early in the pandemic that were not competed citing the “unusual and compelling urgency” of the crisis. Those contracts supported the development of HHS Protect, which informs the White House on COVID-19’s spread and comprises most of Palantir’s work around the pandemic.

Palantir also supplies the analytics platform behind the National Institutes of Health‘s National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) Data Enclave, used by researchers to better understand the coronavirus.

VHA acting Under Secretary Stone to step down

Acting Under Secretary of the Veterans Health Administration Richard Stone is set to leave the agency in mid-July.

In a press release on Thursday, the agency announced the departure, adding that his replacement as leader of the Veterans Health Administration has yet to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

Stone oversaw the agency’s program to modernize its sprawling legacy electronic health record system, migrating to a cloud-based Cerner EHR platform. Over the last year he also led the VA’s response to the Covid-19 crisis.

Stone was appointed Principal Deputy Undersecretary for Health at the VHA for the second time, after previously serving in the role between 2016 and 2017. Between 2018 and 2021 he was executive in charge at the Veterans Health Administration, and before that had a short spell in the private sector as a Vice President for military health at Booz Allen Hamilton in Washington D.C.

Stone is a medical doctor, and during his period of Army service was Deputy Surgeon General and Deputy Commanding General of Support for the US Army Medical Command.

Commenting on Stone’s departure, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough, said “We owe Dr. Stone an immense debt of gratitude for his leadership, especially during the pandemic.

“When COVID-19 first began to spread, Dr. Stone was among the first people Veterans and their families heard from, delivering a simple and urgent message: ‘We are going to be here [for you] just like we have been for the last 100 years.’

“As much as I hate to see Dr. Stone go, I am grateful to him for staying through mid-July, during which time I will continue to lean on him and learn from him.

“I’m proud to call Dr. Stone a friend and I thank him for his decades of service. Our nation is safer, and our Veterans are healthier because of his work,” he added.

OPM rules federal agencies can rehire staff at higher pay grades

The Office of Personnel Management has issued a new regulation that will allow federal agencies to rehire staff at a higher pay grade.

The measure is intended to broaden the choice of talent available to agencies and to provide a route for former federal employees to re-enter government in a position with an analogous skill level, after a spell working in the private sector.

It comes as government departments continue to look for new ways to hire technology talent into senior positions.

OPM says that the guidance will also increase knowledge-sharing between private enterprise and government agencies. The new regulation was published on Tuesday in the Federal Register as a final rule document.

However, some agencies and unions have raised concerns, saying it may be abused and potentially erode the bargaining power of staff.

In its Federal Register entry, OPM said seven individuals, two federal agencies, and the Federal Employees’ Union had submitted evidence to say that the hiring authority may be abused, and questioned the fairness of allowing former federal employees to re-enter the workforce in this way.

Two individuals and three federal agencies also questioned OPM’s assertion that former employees would actually acquire skills or experience in the private sector that would qualify them for such an appointment.

According to OPM, seven individuals, four federal agencies, one professional organization, and the Federal Employees’ Union also in evidence said that the proposal is contrary to merit system principles and would deprive certain employees to their collectively bargained right to first consideration.

In 2019, the Trump Administration gave a final ruling on direct-hire authority for key IT positions, which gave agency leaders the authority to sidestep typically long federal hiring processes, if there is a shortage of applicants or critical need.

That direct-hire rule gave agencies permission to hire IT professionals for limited terms of up to four years, with an option to extend those measures for another four.

Air Force launches new digital transformation office

Air Force Materiel Command, the force’s major command in charge of buying and sustaining airplanes and weapons, has opened a new office to work on digital transformation across the Air and Space Force acquisition enterprises.

The small office of 12 has big ambitions to work on broad digital transformations in both what the Air Force buys and how it buys it. It is being set up to be an “enabler” for the many new digitally-focused procurement and sustainment offices in the department with the aim to “[create] a digital governance structure” that will reach across specific mission areas, according to a press release announcing the office Tuesday. The goal appears similar to work being done in the Air Force’s chief information officer’s office, but with a focus on acquisition practices.

“This office is the first organization that will stand-up from an enterprise-wide perspective to address digital needs with a long-term perspective in mind,” James Kyle Hurst, DTO Branch Chief, said in a statement. “Though the office sits at AFMC, it will have a perspective for the entire Department of the Air Force acquisition community and encompass activities from research and development to fielding, sustainment and beyond…the entire cradle-to-grave of life cycle management.”

The Air Force Materiel Command oversees the acquisition of everything from new fighter jets to weapon systems and electronic warfare systems. It is an area of the Air Force’s mission that has increasingly relied on digital technology as weapons and planes become more reliant on tech. For example, the F-35, known as the “flying super computer,” has long lines of code and tech that needs refreshing to keep its capabilities sharp.

The Air and Space Force have many offices and groups focused on digital activities in acquisition, like Kessel Run which works to improve the department’s software creation and purchasing or AFWERX that was set up to quickly purchase emerging tech. But the Air Force says the DTO is the only one focused on being an “enabler” across disciplines and work along side many of these other digital offices.

“This office will look across all of those teams and activities to facilitate the sharing of best practices and lessons learned across the entire department. We will focus on the enablers that will help the program,” Hurst said.

Streamlining government services with intelligent document processing

As federal agency leaders look to modernize operations and streamline manual workflow processes with automation, one of the areas that creates significant bottlenecks is document and data processing.

Public sector organizations must efficiently and effectively process millions of forms, applications and images — some digital, some handwritten — to meet the needs of mission-critical workflows. And document formats are continuously changing and vary in quality and complexity, making it difficult to reliably and efficiently process and extract data at scale.

“Intelligent document processing (IDP) is a powerful example of intelligent automation in action, providing tangible value for organizations that are looking to increase efficiency and accuracy when dealing with huge volumes of data,” according to a recent report from Hyperscience.

By leveraging advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques, Hyperscience’s proprietary extraction engine is able to classify and extract data across all types of documents — including handwritten forms, PDFs and low-quality images — with higher accuracy and automation than existing solutions.

“Hyperscience delivers up to 95% of data entry with over 99% accuracy, far surpassing the average industry accuracy rate, which hovers around 55%,” shares the report. “Out-of-the-box, clients can expect around 80% automation,” which continues to get better as the ML solution learns and trains on the data it’s exposed to, which increases throughput without sacrificing accuracy.

Learn more about how Hyperscience’s automation platform is helping government agencies deliver increased efficiencies and better agency outcomes.

This article was produced by FedScoop for, and sponsored by, Hyperscience.

OMB and agencies to enforce executive order undoing TikTok ban

The Office of Management and Budget and federal agencies will be responsible for enforcing an executive order issued Wednesday that will revoke Trump-era bans on TikTok and WeChat.

According to the order, agencies must rescind the requirements and abolish the positions, committees and task forces created by three Trump administration executive orders pertaining to software developed by Chinese companies.

The executive order represents the Biden administration’s move to develop its own framework for assessing threats posed by software connected to foreign adversaries like China, which can be used to collect “vast swaths of information” from the personal electronic devices of users.

“The ongoing emergency … arises from a variety of factors, including the continuing effort of foreign adversaries to steal or otherwise obtain United States persons’ data,” reads the order.  “That continuing effort by foreign adversaries constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

In order to develop its own threat-assessment framework, the order gives national security agencies and others the Department of Commerce deems relevant 120 days to provide the White House with recommendations on protecting against the access, sale and transfer of citizens’ personally identifiable, health and genetic information.

As agencies evaluate the risks of software applications, the executive order requires that they consider factors about the owners and operators including connections to foreign militaries, and the potential use of the technology for spying.

Federal departments must also take into account the scope and sensitivity of the data they collect, and also the use of reliable third-party auditing.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security have 60 days to supply the Commerce Department with threat and vulnerability assessments relating to these factors.

The Department of Commerce has 180 days to provide the White House with a report on executive and legislative actions it can take to address the risks identified by agencies. It is also expected to continually evaluate transactions via apps for risks of sabotage and to critical infrastructure, the digital economy and national security.

CMMC accreditation body clears first third-party assessor

The Department of Defense (DOD) has approved cybersecurity company Redspin as the first certified third party assessor for its Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC).

Redspin will now be able to undertake security inspections on behalf of DOD contractors that are required under the recently-introduced protocol.

CMMC is the DOD’s new set of cybersecurity standards for contractors, which requires them to prove compliance through third-party inspections. Based largely on previous security practices, the most significant change in the new policy is that contractors must pay an assessor to test their compliance, whereas before they simply needed to self-verify.

All 300,000 contractors serving the department will eventually need to be assessed, which has led to concerns over potential bottlenecks.

Redspin became the first certified third party assessor after months of training, assessments and oversight from both the DOD and the CMMC Accreditation Body (AB), the third-party organization that is implementing the DOD’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC).

In a statement, CMMC-AB chief executive Matthew Travis said: “Reaching this step in getting the CMMC ecosystem up and running is a significant milestone and we look forward to authorizing additional C3PAOs in the coming days and weeks.”

As recent events emphasize how aggressively cyber threat actors are targeting our nation, the role of CMMC is more vital than ever as we take a united approach to protecting critical assets and information within the defense industrial base,” he added.

Contractors that handle the most sensitive controlled unclassified data will need a level five assessment — the highest level of CMMC clearance — to ensure they meet strict security controls. Many companies that handle benign data will only need a level one assessment to ensure they meet basic best practices.

Speaking to FedScoop, Redspin CEO Caleb Barlow said being first into the marketplace was the result of more than a year of intense work and focus within the company.

The company has had to pass a CMMC assessment of its own before it can assess others, a task some prospective C3PAOs have found difficult.