VA brings in FedTech for employee innovation trainings
The Department of Veterans Affairs is investing in turning its employees into innovators.
The agency announced on Wednesday that it has contracted accelerator and innovation bootcamp provider FedTech to provide training to Veterans Health Administration employees on how to turn ideas into solutions in use.
Over the course of a year, FedTech’s “network of experienced business professionals” will “train VHA employee innovators and discuss new ways to use innovation and creativity within VA.” Participants will learn how to do things like prototype an idea, create a business model, measure return on investment and more. Trainings will take place both in person, such as during a scheduled “Innovation Boot Camp” Nov. 19-21, and via web-based modules created for VHA.
“Schooling like this is essential to ensuring growth and advancement of VA’s innovation culture and fostering continuous learning while we work to deliver creative solutions that can positively impact Veteran lives,” VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said in a statement.
The VA program is a twist on FedTech’s flagship program, which is all about tech transfer— it matches would-be entrepreneurs to technologies developed in federal labs. The entrepreneurs then spend two months learning about the technology and, through copious interviews, exploring its potential in other markets. The essential question the entrepreneurs ask: What else can this tech do?
Sometimes, there’s an obvious and viable answer to this question. Other times there isn’t. In either case, though, the process is a learning experience both for scientists from federal labs and the entrepreneurs who join the accelerator.
The group has also branched out and started offering workshops teaching “intrapreneurship” to corporate and government clients. This is where FedTech’s work with the VA will fit in. The group’s website provides another example of this kind of programming — FedTech ran a program called “Elevate” with the Department of Defense’s Defense Laboratories Office, a training aiming to “grow the capability of DoD lab personnel to interact with industry, non-traditional partners and the venture community.”
Delays in security clearances hit IT vendors in capital region the hardest, report says
The backlog in federal security clearances has a disproportionate effect on digital technology companies in and around the nation’s capital, according to a new report that gathers data on a process that has faced increased scrutiny from lawmakers, the Trump administration and industry.
The Greater Washington Partnership — a “civic alliance of CEOs” from the corridor that stretches from Baltimore to Richmond, Virginia — says that the backlog isn’t just a headache for companies, as they typically wait more than 200 days for a new hire to get a clearance. The delays are also a drain on the regional economy, the report says.
“Though the Capital Region has a deep and diverse digital tech workforce, the region will not reach its full economic potential if its digital tech and security clearance jobs are left unfilled,” the report says, citing 2018 statistics for job openings and the requirements listed for those positions.
The categories of “systems engineer” and “software development engineer” had the highest numbers of openings that also required a clearance, with about 2,700 each in the Capital Region, the report says.
And the employers in the region with the most openings for cleared workers in 2018 reads like a who’s who of the federal IT community: Booz Allen Hamilton (13,634 postings), ManTech (4,331), General Dynamics (4,028), Leidos (2,046) and Northrop Grumman (1,776). The federal government itself had 2,446 openings.
“Security clearances are by far the most highly requested credential for individuals working in digital tech,” the report says.
It offers succinct explanations for the backlog in background checks: “(1) there is higher demand for cleared workers and consequently more workers need clearances, and (2) there is more for background investigators to investigate because there are more second-generation Americans with family members abroad, more communication activity due to social media, and more global connectivity in general, which leads to longer investigations, as investigators track foreign contacts and any potential illegal online activity.”
The Trump administration has taken direct action on speeding up the process, transferring all background checks that had previously been done by the Office of Personnel Management to the Department of Defense. The Defense Information Systems Agency as well as the renamed agency handling the background checks — the Defense Security Service — already have started issuing contracts for improvements to its systems.
Congress has been trying to work on the issue through legislation such as the House and Senate versions of the fiscal 2020 intelligence authorization bill.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., has pushed his own provisions for overhauling the process, and Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas — a former CIA officer — said earlier this year that he thinks it should take only a few days.
On average a new hire must wait 422 days to get a Top Secret security clearance and 234 days for a Secret clearance, the director of the National Background Investigations Bureau, Charles Phalen, said this July.
The Greater Washington Partnership says it took input from federal talent acquisition officers, executives at top defense and intelligence contractors and other industry officials from the region.
Oracle continues JEDI protest after Microsoft award
Oracle will continue its efforts to derail the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud acquisition after the contract was awarded to Microsoft late last month.
The company’s attorneys filed an opening brief in federal appeals court last week after losing a lawsuit in the Court of Federal Claims earlier this year. Oracle also lost a pre-award bid protest with the Government Accountability Office last November.
With the appeal, Oracle is renewing its yearslong campaign against JEDI‘s single-award approach and allegations of conflicts of interest between former Department of Defense officials and Amazon Web Services, a company that competed for the contract.
Oracle’s attorneys claim that the federal claims court “erred” in letting the acquisition move forward despite finding that DOD’s justification for using a single-award contract was “flawed.” The court ultimately denied Oracle’s lawsuit because the company wasn’t able to initially meet the contract’s stringent gate criteria, stopping it from submitting a full-on bid proposal for JEDI. Oracle said the gate criteria were prejudicial.
“COFC agreed that DoD’s single-award approach violated the law and that DOD might reissue the solicitation for multiple awards,” the brief says. “DOD, accordingly, wrongfully deprived Oracle of the opportunity to compete under a multiple-award solicitation — a prejudicial injury.”
In its determination, the court made “fatal legal and factual errors,” and used too strong of a standard for prejudice, the brief states. Really, all Oracle needed to show, it believes, is “non-trivial competitive injury which can be redressed by judicial relief.” Instead, Oracle feels the court held it to the standard for post-award protests, which requires a company to show “a substantial chance for award.”
The company continues its stance that a multi-award contract is the right path for JEDI, adding that the gate requirements that ended its bid could be different in such a scenario and that Oracle could meet those now, which it argues changes things.
“It matters not whether Oracle met [the gate criteria] as of proposal submission in October 2018,” Oracle’s brief says. “The relevant inquiry is whether the protester has a substantial chance of securing the award in the corrected competition, i.e., whether Oracle would meet the same standard under a revised multiple-award solicitation in 2019.”
There’s also the claims Oracle has made alleging conflicts of interest between DOD and AWS. But that argument gets much murkier now that AWS lost its bid for JEDI to Microsoft.
The federal claims court previously denied Oracle’s claim saying that even if those officials stepped out of line in their dealings with AWS, they were just “bit players” in the overall landscape of the acquisition and had “no impact on the integrity of the procurement.”
There’s still a chance AWS could protest JEDI post-award based on the evaluations of bids, but some say that might not be in the company’s best interest.
GSA awards 75 spots on $5.5B Second Generation IT vehicle
The General Services Administration awarded spots on its $5.5 billion Second Generation IT contract to 75 vendors to provide IT hardware and software products and services to all levels of government.
Called 2GIT for short, the five-year blanket purchase agreement is the product of a two-year collaboration with the Air Force to replace the expiring NETCENTS-2 contract. It is anticipated that this new contract will be used more widely by federal agencies and state, local and tribal governments through Cooperative Purchasing.
2GIT is split among five line-item categories: data center, end user, network, radio equipment, and order level material.
The new contract “demonstrates GSA’s commitment to working in true partnership with our customer agencies to help them navigate complex acquisition and IT modernization challenges with solutions that will evolve to deliver on government’s current and future needs,” Bill Zielinski, an assistant commissioner at GSA, said in an announcement.
The BPA ensures vendors are pre-vetted for supply chain risk management plans to report and address cybersecurity vulnerabilities. It also facilitates the collection of prices-paid data and tracking of savings and reduction in costs and administrative burden.
Vendors are able to quickly add emerging tech to their list of offerings through the GSA FASt Lane modification process and are expected to provide on-site and virtual customer support and training.
Among the 75 vendors selected to deliver products and services, 56 are small businesses.
Google’s departure from Project Maven was a ‘little bit of a canary in a coal mine’
There’s nothing controversial about the Department of Defense’s Project Maven, if you ask Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan.
Shanahan, who has led the military’s program to use artificial intelligence for full-motion video analysis since its inception, said Tuesday that Google‘s decision to back away from involvement with Maven came from a lack of transparency around the project. As a result, the DOD lost the narrative around its work, he said.
“This idea of transparency and a willingness to talk about what each side is trying to achieve may be the biggest lessons of all that I took from it,” Shanahan, who now heads DOD’s Joint AI Center, said of Project Maven at an event in conjunction with the National Security Commission on AI’s release of its interim report.
Because Google and DOD weren’t minding the public perception what Project Maven was meant to do, “we started hearing these wild stories and assumptions about what Project Maven was and was not to the point where if you Googled it today … the adjective ‘controversial’ has now been permanently inserted in front of Project Maven, Shanahan said. “It was not controversial to me. It was not controversial to the team. I say it’s not controversial to anybody right now beyond some people who just don’t like what we’re doing.”
The project was, quite simply, created to provide computer vision on drones to detect objects from above, Shanahan said. It certainly wasn’t “a weapons project” — although the project’s official name, the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, does sound very weapon-y.
Those impressions were enough to set off protests by Google employees. Google eventually announced it would not renew its contract. It also stepped out of the running for DOD’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract around the same time, reportedly because of ethical concerns centering on the department’s use of artificial intelligence.
Lesson learned, Shanahan said. On Tuesday he seemed to almost take a tone of acceptance about the situation, saying that “it happened,” and if it didn’t happen to his team, “it would have happened to somebody else at some point.”
“I view what happened with Google and Maven as a little bit of a canary in a coal mine,” Shanahan said. “The fact that it happened when it did as opposed to on the verge of a conflict or a crisis where we’re asking for help, we’ve gotten some of that out of the way,” and can now move on.
Shanahan said reports that Google seemingly didn’t want to work with the Pentagon in the aftermath were unfortunate, because “some of the software engineers on the project, they got to the point where they almost felt a little bit ostracized because others criticized them for working with the Department of Defense” on Project Maven. “But day-to-day, from the senior-most leaders down to the people working on the Project Maven team, we had tremendous support in Maven from Google” and “got products we were very pleased with.”
Google’s take on Project Maven
It just so happened that Shanahan was joined on stage at the event by Kent Walker, senior vice president of global affairs for Google, who also wanted to take the moment to clear the air and “set the record straight.”
“It’s been frustrating to hear concerns around our commitment to national security and defense,” he said. Not only has Google been criticized as soft in its support of U.S. defense and national security since its withdrawal from Project Maven, but it’s also been condemned for its work providing AI in China.
Walker explained Google stepping away from Maven as “an area where it’s right that we decided to press the reset button until we had the opportunity to develop our own set of AI principles, our own work with regard to internal standards and review processes. But that was a decision focused on a discrete contract — not a broader statement about our willingness or our history of working with the Department of Defense.”
He said Google continues to work with the U.S. military on countless other efforts and pointed such partnerships as part of “a long tradition of work throughout [Silicon Valley] on national security generally.”
“It’s important to remember the history of the Valley in large measure builds on government technologies from radar to the internet to GPS to some of the work on autonomous vehicles and personal assistants that you’re seeing now,” Walker said. “This is a shared responsibility to get this right.”
Shanahan agreed, alluding to a necessary equilateral triangle of partnership among the government, industry and academia for the U.S. to succeed in developing and using AI competitively.
Even for those who are “suspicious” of the federal government or have trouble with the fact that the U.S. is in strategic competition with China, Shanahan said, “I would hope they would still agree with us that AI is a critical component of our nation’s prosperity, vitality and self-sufficiency. In other words, no matter where you stand with respect to the government’s future use of AI-enabling technologies, I submit that we can never attain [ the nation’s vision for it] without industry and academia with us together in an equal partnership. There’s too much at stake to do otherwise.”
Sen. Schumer teases artificial intelligence investment proposal
The National Science Foundation and DARPA would coordinate on investing federal dollars in artificial intelligence research under a new proposal by the top Democrat in the Senate.
Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., says he hasn’t “firmed up” the legislation yet, but enacting the concept is one of his goals as minority leader. He teased the proposal during the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence’s (NSCAI) conference on Tuesday.
“What we’re thinking about is maybe having the NSF have a subsidiary, NSTF — National Science Tech Foundation — working in concert with DARPA, which would be sort of the analogue defense agency, and it would be responsible for funding fundamental research related to AI and some other cutting edge areas,” he said.
The new group would be tasked to invest $100 billion over five years in research as well as scholarships and fellowships for students in “targeted research areas,” he said.
“What we need to do is have the federal government have a dramatically increased investment in AI, in the basic research, in the pure research that companies won’t do,” Schumer said. “We’re great here in America, and our companies are great, at taking that kind of basic and pure research and turning it into practical things.”
The proposed agency also would fund the development of “testbed type of facilities, which would be before you get to the pure research,” Schumer said.
Schumer made it clear that his proposal is, as yet, “just a discussion draft.” But, he said, it’s gotten “a lot of support” from people “very close” to President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
“Anyone here who has any relationships with those people or anyone near them should be pushing this,” he said, in an appeal to the gathered audience.
“This should not be a political issue,” Schumer said. “This should be … like putting a man on the moon.”
On Monday, NSCAI released its interim report to Congress. The 15-person commission advocates for increased AI research and development spending by the federal government, among other things.
Postal Service will use AI to process package data faster
The U.S. Postal Service expects to process package data 10 times faster after adopting an artificial intelligence system for reading address labels more accurately.
On Tuesday, NVIDIA announced that technology featuring its V100 Tensor Core graphics processing units (GPUs) will be used at 192 mail processing and sorting centers nationwide by spring 2020. USPS processes and delivers 485 million pieces of mail daily, producing a vast amount of visual data that is difficult for the central processing units it currently uses to handle on their own.
NVIDIA’s GPUs will work with deep-learning software to train multiple AI algorithms that will then be deployed to the company’s EGX edge computing systems at most USPS facilities, the tech company said.
Postal Service leaders have touted the potential of AI, and the Trump administration in general has been pushing for greater adoption of the technology wherever it makes sense.
“The president signed the executive order for artificial intelligence back in February of this year,” Anthony Robbins, a vice president at NVIDIA, told reporters on a press call. “What we see now across the entire federal government is a movement to try and accelerate the development and deployment of artificial intelligence in support of citizen services.”
The infrastructure is being purchased under USPS’s contract with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Dell will do the same with its part of the contract, Robbins said.
While the software and development isn’t finished, USPS and NVIDIA’s engineering teams have been collaborating for months to develop the AI models before entering the test phase, Robbins said.
“What they’re doing is improving the ability of the sensors — the cameras — to read the address label on packages, so that they can read it more accurately and more quickly,” said Ken Brown, a spokesman for NVIDIA. “And by doing that, they’re going to improve the efficiency of the overall system.”
Pentagon partners with GSA on procurement pilot to replace military recruitment system
The Pentagon has partnered with the General Services Administration to use a pilot procurement program to replace its outdated system for determining recruits’ qualifications for military service.
The Department of Defense wants to refresh the current, legacy version of the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command’s Integrated Resource System (USMIRS) to meet Defense Digital Service security standards. The original system is set to be retired in March 2021.
DOD has enlisted GSA to use a commercial solutions opening (CSO) to procure the modernization. The CSO is a streamlined solicitation designed to attract nontraditional, innovative companies to do work with the federal government by allowing agencies to acquire technologies and services in production or adapted from existing products. Section 880 of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2017 directed the General Services Administration’s Procurement Innovation Resource Center to create the CSO pilot outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation.
Other benefits of the CSO are that it uses simplified contract terms and allows vendors to retain core intellectual property. During the pilot period, CSO awards can’t exceed $10 million. The process involves submitting a written solution brief for evaluation and a request for proposal.
GSA’s FEDSIM innovation team posted this solicitation, the first under the new pilot program. The DOD itself has been granted the authority use CSOs. The Defense Innovation Unit often uses them for high-impact national security applications.
In this particular offering to modernize the USMIRS, “The successful offeror will produce additional software upgrades to the existing code base, provide data migration and management, and perform software, test, integration, and product deployment,” reads the solicitation.
This is particularly important because USMIRS contains recruits’ initial medical records, which are transferred to the Defense Enrollment Eligibility and Reporting System before basic training begins. All 66 military entrance processing stations will use the new system, which will eliminate reliance on all paper records.
Department of Energy closely watching DOD’s JEDI implementation
The Department of Defense’s adoption of commercial cloud through the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure program won’t just affect the military services and defense support agencies.
The Department of Energy is closely watching the Pentagon’s JEDI implementation to see how it may change the way the two interact when sharing information, said Karen Evans, assistant secretary for the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER).
DOD and DOE work closely together on cybersecurity of the nation’s critical energy infrastructure, Evans explained Monday at a DOD CIO awards ceremony. Particularly, Evans and her office meet and work regularly with Cyber Command and NSA around “the whole what does it mean to defend forward, and how is DOD going to work with the private sector to make sure power stays up?”
Other federal agencies, like the intelligence and law enforcement communities, are also likely watching DOD’s implementation of JEDI, both for partnership and information sharing purposes but also to learn lessons in what’s positioned to be a massive migration — worth up to $10 billion over 10 years with contract extensions.
“We always look forward to seeing how DOD accomplishes migration to the cloud,” Evans said. “You guys have your big cloud award out there, so of course DOE is looking to see how that implementation is going to go forward. We will be right there with you, just a little bit behind, lessons learned from how you guys are doing stuff.”
Evans said this means “we need to have that same solution in place because we have to interact” with DOD. This doesn’t mean DOE is going to go off an award it’s own billion-dollar cloud contract just to communicate with the Pentagon — but it could build an enclave and adopt similar standards with the same cloud provider for maximum interoperability.
“That’s critical to us so that we understand what the technical platforms that you’re having in place because we have to be able to exchange and have you access our data so that we can then be able to have shared situational awareness in the energy sector,” she said.
Two weeks ago, the Pentagon awarded the JEDI contract to Microsoft, which edged out Amazon Web Services for the win. It remains to be seen if AWS will protest that decision.
China’s lead on some aspects of AI doesn’t mean it’s ahead ‘overall,’ NSCAI says
While China represents a worthy adversary, the United States retains strategic advantages when it comes to the global competition for superior artificial intelligence, Eric Schmidt, chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, said Monday.
On the metric of research, for example, the “best and most original papers” on artificial intelligence are still coming out of the West, he said.
NSCAI introduced its interim report to Congress on Monday, and it expressed confidence that the U.S. is “up to the challenge” of continued AI innovation leadership.
That said, the answer to the binary question of whether China or the U.S. is currently “winning” depends a bit on what metrics one pays attention to. It is “fairly apparent,” Schmidt said, that China is ahead in two areas — facial recognition surveillance and financial technology. But, he went on, “this does not mean that they’re ahead … overall.”
“There are two aspects of AI,” Schmidt said. “One is the actual invention of it, and there is no question in my mind, and I suspect the final report will say this, that that continues to be in the West and in particular the United States. But then there’s sort of the scale adoption question, and there there are credible scenarios where certain technologies in AI will be adopted faster in China than elsewhere for various reasons.”
The report does caution against taking America’s relative AI leadership for granted. For example, China has drastically increased its research and development funding within the past years, while funding at home — at least by the U.S. government — has increased only marginally. President Trump’s 2020 budget proposal, for example, called for for about $850 million in AI research and development funding to support the American AI Initiative. This 2% increase over fiscal 2019 levels is too little, the NSCAI report argues.
The U.S. also has to compete harder for STEM talent now that China is encouraging its nationals to bring their skillsets back, the report says.
“We don’t answer the question how far behind China is in the report,” Schmidt said.
“We tried not to have a scorecard, that’s not the intent,” Vice Chairman Robert Work added. “The intent is to say this is a competition that is very, very important for America, both for its economic future and its national security future. And we’re intent on trying to lay out the things that will allow America to win the competition, regardless of who the competitor is.”
NSCAI, which is independent but sits in the executive branch, was created under the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2019. It is comprised of 15 members from industry, government and academia, plus staff.
Since convening in March the commission has been working on an “assessment phase,” the end product of which is this interim report. The report is a broad overview of what AI is, what it could mean for national security, the state of the technology in government and more. It also identifies five “lines of effort” for the government — areas that, the commission believes “need more attention or may be ripe for action.”
These are:
- Invest in AI research and development
- Apply AI to national security missions
- Train and recruit AI talent
- Protect and build upon U.S. technology advantages
- Marshall global AI cooperation
The commission’s final report, which Work expects will be released “about a year from now,” will make specific recommendations and implementation suggestions on these topics.