JAIC looking for ‘data readiness’ services for military

The Department of Defenses’ Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is looking for companies to help curate and enhance the military’s ability to use its data.

JAIC released a solicitation for Data Readiness for AI Development (DRAID) services, carrying a $240 million ceiling. Under the five-year contract, JAIC wants to enable “decentralized ordering” on the contract for parts of the military looking to use their data for AI development.

“The Government intends to issue multiple BOAs resulting from this solicitation to the responsible Offeror(s) whose submission(s) conforms to the solicitation and will be the most advantageous to the Government,” the solicitation states.

The JAIC recently shifted its focus to be an enabling force for AI across the military, not just an AI development office. This solicitation appears to fit neatly into that new vision the JAIC has of itself, searching for services that can be used across the military.

Some of the specific types of data readiness services the JAIC is looking for include Extract Transform Load (ETL) and data engineering, database design and development, data analysis, and project and outreach management, according to the statement of work.

Data community asks OMB to remember data funding in fiscal 2022

Members of the data community urged the Office of Management and Budget to include data infrastructure funding in its fiscal 2022 budget proposal in a letter sent by the Data Coalition.

In the letter, the coalition called for the reissue of a national data strategy similar to the Federal Data Strategy (FDS) and routine coordination on information management between the different parts of OMB and other agencies.

An FDS Year 2 Action Plan is overdue, leaving the group wondering how committed the Biden administration is to data-driven decisions — irrespective of its recent memo on restoring evidence-based policymaking.

“The Data Coalition appreciates the efforts from the Biden-Harris administration to date in elevating and encouraging the central role of data and evidence in decision-making,” reads the letter sent to OMB Deputy Director Shalanda Young on Tuesday. “Following through on promises and bold statements will require sustained engagement and leadership from all levels of the administration.”

OMB should further have the federal chief statistician chair the Advisory Committee on Data for Evidence Building like Congress intended and task the body with determining how data sharing can improve economic mobility, social inequalities, climate change, and COVID-19 pandemic response.

OMB did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act requires agencies to develop evaluation plans, but only a few agencies, like the National Science Foundation, have made theirs public. A web portal should be developed as soon as possible for that purpose, according to the letter.

OMB can quickly comply with recent data laws by publishing the presumption of accessibility authority as an interim final rule, issuing open data guidance with the Chief Data Officers Council, developing data standards for grantees with the Department of Health and Human Services, and accelerating use of artificial intelligence.

The Evidence Commission recommended the creation of a national secure data service within NSF, which needs funding in the fiscal 2022 budget to launch and begin improving analysis of things like racial, ethnic and gender disparities across government programs, according to the letter.

OMB should use its budget proposal to expand access to the National Directory of New Hires and certain tax data useful for analyzing benefit program eligibility and the impacts of employment and training programs, the letter adds.

Privacy-preserving technology pilots should be funded over the next year, especially for high-value data assets agencies are reluctant to share, according to the Data Coalition.

OMB also has the opportunity to streamline Paperwork Reduction Act implementation; update data standards for public health and financial reporting during the pandemic, as well as race and ethnicity; and promote government spending data transparency in its budget work.

Lastly the letter recommends OMB use Office of Personnel Management data to identify data workforce gaps, provide CDOs with $50 million for their accountability and transparency efforts, and set aside Evidence Incentive Funds for agencies that require additional money.

“Our country needs good data to support useful evidence for decision makers,” reads the letter. “OMB has a central role in fostering a cohesive data and evidence ecosystem.”

Anduril buys small drone company, expanding its innovative tech portfolio

Startup defense tech company Anduril Industries announced Thursday its purchase of a small tube-launched drone manufacturer to expand its suite of emerging tech offerings into the unmanned systems market.

Anduril acquired Area-I to marry its automation and data-sensing technology from Anduril with the hardware capabilities of the Atlanta-based drone developer, the companies’ CEOs said in an interview with FedScoop.

Area-I sells a range of unmanned aircraft systems but specializes in tube-launched drones, which are fired mid-air from other larger aircraft and then fly on their own, maneuvering independently. The company will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Anduril, allowing it to continue its operations with a new influx of cash. Neither company would disclose the transaction amount.

“We believe that to really enable these technologies to go, you have to solve the autonomy side,” Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf said.

Anduril has positioned itself as a “next-generation” defense tech company, aiming to corner the military’s burgeoning artificial intelligence, automation and sensing market. Small drones have become increasingly popular in the government, with military agencies strategizing around their use for everything from surveillance to creating on-the-fly mesh radio networks.

Area-I had already found success riding the wave of small drone interest within the DOD. The company’s Agile-Launched, Tactically-Integrated, Unmanned System (ALTIUS) drone was one of the technologies included in the Army’s Project Convergence test events that experimented with linking sensor data to increase targeting and shooting speed.

Similarly, selling technologies to power Project Convergence and the encompassing Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept is a core part of Anduril’s business, company leaders have said.

Area-I has been on the hunt to partner with another company to increase its ability to sell to the military. But many of the traditional options emerging technology companies take, like being acquired by a traditional, old-guard defense contractor, would come at the cost to its innovative culture, Area-I CEO Nick Alley said.

“For years I have looked [at] joining forces and being acquired by a large aerospace prime; historically that just ruins the type of company that we are and the technology development gets slowed,” Alley said.

The spark for joining forces came after hours of “nerding out” on phone calls between the two CEOs. Both said they appreciated the priority each places on innovation, and Alley said that Schimpf’s “strategic vision” was what helped seal the deal.

Anduril was mainly looking to acquire a company that could provide a capability it knew the government wanted, Schimpf said. “Let’s just pick the thing that you obviously have to have to win.”

Microsoft wins $21B contract to produce 120,000 AR headsets for the Army

The Army has moved a prototype deal with Microsoft to develop an augmented reality headset into full production — calling for 120,000 headsets over the next decade under a $21.9 billion contract.

The contract comes 28 months after prototyping of the Microsoft HoloLens 2-based Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) began. IVAS is designed to help soldiers train with augmented reality headsets displaying combat situations.

The Army says the pace of the program’s development is far faster than most of its other major technology purchases, which usually take several years or even decades to field.

“The Army’s partnership with Microsoft redefined the timeline for rapid development and production of a major defense program by taking advantage of the Middle Tier of Acquisition and Other Transaction authorities, and partnering with a non-traditional defense contractor that is an industry leader in developing innovative technology,” the Army’s Program Executive Office Soldier, the office overseeing the procurement, said in a statement.

Microsoft president Brad Smith had previously said the company expected that it would likely win the production contract to build the system, telling Congress in February that the company had started constructing manufacturing capabilities for the system before the award.

The Army’s version of the HoloLens 2 headset adds more punch using Microsoft Azure cloud to pipe in training scenarios and other visuals to help soldiers better prepare for conflict. The Department of Veterans Affairs also uses Microsoft’s HoloLens.

“The same technology enables warfighters to execute the operation with real-time visual data that integrates everything from the building’s digital layout to local thermal images to facial recognition of the hostages and the identification of friendly forces,” Smith said about the technology in testimony to Congress.

Microsoft says that “soldiers have been deeply involved in the design process” over the past two years. The company praised the openness from DOD and its willingness to allow changes to the system during the prototyping phase as a key enabler of the program’s relative acquisition speed.

GSA expects Multiple Award Schedule consolidation finished this year

The General Services Administration expects to complete the third and final phase of its project consolidating 24 schedules for products, services and solutions into one Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) by the end of 2021.

Contractors had until end of day Wednesday to update their price lists so the special item numbers (SINs) and schedule numbers match what’s in the GSA eBuy! and eLibrary systems, which will help customer agencies find contracts more easily.

Now GSA wants MAS holders with multiple contracts to submit their plans by year’s end for consolidating them down to one per unique entity identifier (UEI).

“The rest of this year we’ll be focused on moving companies that have multiple contracts to one [contracting officer], so that you guys can establish your plans for any of these small businesses that do have multiple contracts,” Stephanie Shutt, director of the MAS Program Management Office, said during an ACT-IAC event Wednesday.

Contractors will have potentially the next five years to wrap up existing task orders without moving them over, in a “more natural” shift to one contract that lets the rest simply die off, Shutt said.

MAS consolidation is a “foundational” project for GSA — one of the four pillars of its Federal Marketplace Strategy for streamlining acquisition — that will pave the way for additional projects coming soon thanks to simplified terms and conditions, she added.

Contractors will be able to do e-modifications to their contracts any time to add additional SINs, and small businesses will be able to more easily partner in prime-subcontractor relationships that expand their offerings.

The MAS PMO recognizes it needs to update its systems and simplify contract language moving forward.

“A lot of our systems are old,” Shutt said. “So we are looking to see where we can update those across the board and get everything on a happier level for everyone.”

Army cloud agency expanding its team

The Army’s newly dubbed Enterprise Cloud Management Agency (EMCA) is growing its cloud operations team and extending new partnerships as the service tries to implement cloud-based tech.

The growth of the cloud team comes a year into ECMA’s operation and as it just recently gained new authorities as a field agency. It’s unclear exactly how many more cloud operators the agency hopes to add, but doing so will play a key role in supporting the deployment of a new tactical cloud network and other modernization initiatives, Director Paul Puckett said during an AFCEA webinar Wednesday.

“We are leaning in to expand our cloud operations team and really try to turn that into the new normal,” Puckett said, adding that the team will expand work on things like security and tactical deployments.

The ECMA has also expanded its partnerships across the Army, working closely with regional cyber centers, program executive offices and support commands, like the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command. Puckett said he meets weekly with other tech leaders across the service to work cohesively under the Army’s cloud modernization strategy.

“There is nothing that one does that the other is not involved in,” he said of the partnerships ECMA has formed.

Having a larger team for cloud operations means that the Army can take a more central approach to its cloud modernization. Before ECMA was stood up as the Enterprise Cloud Management Office in 2019, Army offices faced the daunting process of migrating their data to the cloud on their own, Puckett said. The shift is from the “thousand flowers blooming” approach to a more centralized push that can orchestrate a more common cloud architecture for the Army to work within.

Other impacts of ECMA’s growth will be seen in expanded environments for tech-related initiatives. The Army’s new software factory has soldiers code within a cloud-based environment supported by the ECMA, for example.

Other projects that straddle the worlds between technology and tactical use are also moving to the cloud. Along with partners like the Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical (PEO C3T), the ECMA helped launch the recent “Tactical Cloud Infrastructure.” It’s the cloud version of the former “Tactical Server Infrastructure” that used on-premise and physical stacks to get compute at the edge.

But not everything has moved to the cloud as bandwidth in austere environments is limited. Puckett said the Army is working to “figure out what data needs to be local” and what can be stored in the cloud.

IT Insights: Interview with AWS federal director Brett McMillen

Brett McMillen has devoted most of his career helping government harness information technology and tackle innovative initiatives. Since joining Amazon Web Services 10 years ago, he’s also played a contributing role to the rise of cloud computing in government.

Among other projects, he’s helped make the 1,000 Genome Project available as public datasets. He helped the Department of Veterans Affairs integrate more than 200 previously distinct websites and services to implement the Vets.gov portal. He was part of the team that helped develop a facial recognition program that Customs and Border Protection uses to improve airport security. And he worked with federal officials to obtain FedRAMP certification for AWS’s government cloud services.

Today, as Director of U.S. Federal at Amazon Web Services, McMillen sees AWS’s experience in helping federal agencies take advantage of the cloud as important as the technology itself.

In this exclusive FedScoop interview, McMillen talks about how the U.S. Census Bureau offers an example of ways that government is taking advantage of recent advances in the capabilities of the cloud:

FedScoop:  Where are you seeing noteworthy progress or success in the way government is taking advantage of technology advances, like those offered by your company?

 

 

FedScoop: What critical steps did that the Census Bureau take to address those issues?

 

 

FedScoop: What were the major outcomes and lessons gleaned from the Census Bureau’s efforts that other agencies could learn from?

 

 

Learn how AWS can help your agency capitalize on today’s cloud or contact AWS.

Read more insights from AWS leaders on how agencies are using the power of the cloud to innovate.

This video interview was produced by FedScoop and underwritten by AWS.

‘Significant deficiency’ risks security of sensitive federal debt data

The agency responsible for managing the $26.9 trillion federal debt needs to improve its information system controls or risk the security of sensitive financial data, according to the Government Accountability Office.

While the Bureau of the Fiscal Service addressed five previous recommendations, 16 related to security management, access controls and configuration management deficiencies remain unresolved — on top of eight new ones in areas like segregation of duties, GAO found in its annual audit.

Details on the deficiencies were deemed “sensitive information” by BFS and not publicly disclosed, but the agency said it’s drafting a comprehensive audit remediation plan.

“These new and continuing information system control deficiencies, which collectively represent a significant deficiency, increase the risk of unauthorized access to, modification of, or disclosure of sensitive data and programs and disruption of critical operations,” reads GAO’s public report.

BFS managed to maintain “effective internal control” of federal debt reporting by strengthening access and monitoring controls around data sets that can only be altered with its mainframe change-management tool, reads the report. The agency also improved its monitoring of compliance with baseline security requirements.

But GAO found mainframe security controls weren’t used in accordance with the concept of least privilege and mainframe security architecture documents needed improvement.

Security and configuration management controls remain inadequate and responsibilities unclear, with one person sometimes in charge of activities better split between two or more people or units to catch errors and suspicious activity, according to the report.

The head of BFS has 180 days to formally respond to the report with actions taken or planned.

CMMC is under an internal DOD review

One of the most consequential programs in defense contracting is getting a second look by the Biden administration.

The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) — the new cyber standards all defense contractors will need to adhere to to bid on contracts — is under an ongoing “internal assessment,” according to a Department of Defense spokeswoman.

The DOD did not provide details on the review but said it was routine for a high-impact program like CMMC.

“As is done in the early stages of many programs, the DoD is reviewing the current approach to CMMC to ensure that it is achieving stated goals as effectively as possible while not creating barriers to participation in the DoD acquisition process,” spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell said in a statement to FedScoop.

While the program is over a year into development, new brass within the Pentagon could choose to make some big changes to what has been program loaded with controversy since inception. Many companies have expressed concern over the cost to adhere to the new CMMC standards, which require them to pay for third-party assessors to inspect their networks against a five-tiered set of controls. If a contractor doesn’t meet the CMMC level required in a contract, it won’t be eligible to bid on it.

“It is now timely to consider what we might want to do differently in the implementation of CMMC,” said Robert Metzger, the head of the Washington, D.C. offices of the Rogers Joseph O’Donnell law firm and co-author of several reports on supply chain cyber threats.

While there is uniform agreement on the need to increase the overall cybersecurity of the defense industrial base, the program has been criticized in its rollout. The initial decision to push much of the implementation responsibility of CMMC to a third-party volunteer organization — the CMMC Accreditation Body — caused some backlash. Eventually, two leaders on the board resigned over a perceived “pay-to-play” marketing scheme.

Metzger suggested the new administration could make changes to the relationship the government has with the CMMC Accreditation Body and what responsibilities it gives to the third-party group. He also anticipates the review could take a look at other issues like staffing of the program management office for CMMC, the interim final rule Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation for CMMC and funding for the program’s implementation.

“It would not surprise me at all if the new administration would want to consider very carefully how best to get this objective achieved,” Metzger said.

FDA undertaking ‘unprecedented’ data infrastructure modernization during the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has given the Food and Drug Administration an “unprecedented” opportunity to modernize IT systems and data infrastructure that was just “chugging along,” according to one senior agency official.

FDA went from having an “antiquated” system that could only process low volumes of low-complexity COVID-19 reporting to developing a core diagnostic data set with clinical, graphics, testing and results data, said Dr. Sara Brenner, the associate director for medical affairs in the Center for Devices and Radiological Health.

New technologies like rapid antigen tests are being untethered from laboratories so people can self-administer them, but that requires new wireless infrastructure to harmonize data at the source and get it to the FDA and other health agencies tracking COVID-19’s spread, Brenner said.

“This rapid expansion of volume has really just completely blown the wheels off of the conventional data collection and reporting system, which was never really designed for pandemic-scale data transmission,” she said during AFCEA Bethesda‘s Health IT Summit on Tuesday.

COVID-19 tests were the first diagnostic used to track the virus’ spread so FDA could intervene and stop transmission, but now it’s working with other agencies, states, laboratories, clinicians, and device makers to expand the data coming in. The Data Standards and Execution Work Group within the Department of Health and Human Services has begun working with IT infrastructure offices at other agencies to improve data quality and flow.

“We believe that if we’d had a better data infrastructure, we would’ve been able to answer many obvious questions that people needed to know — in terms of supply chain, why do we run out of certain products and goods — better,” said Vid Desai, chief technology officer at FDA. “And that’s certainly going to be a focus for what we’re going to be looking at going forward.”

FDA published a technology modernization action plan last September and quickly followed that with an accelerated data plan. The agency also hired a chief data officer during the pandemic and is forming a data team to address infrastructure issues, Desai said.

One issue the FDA was able to get ahead of is cybersecurity, raising threat levels in mid-March of 2020 when it became clear the agency would play a critical role in COVID-19 therapeutics, diagnostics and vaccinations.

“We also knew that would attract a lot of nefarious, rogue characters who would try and stop our work, and I think our predictions were true,” Desai said. “If you think about all these supply chain attacks that have occurred in the therapeutic and vaccine distribution mechanism, literally every week we see something new there.”