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Kathleen Hicks to prioritize data as Pentagon No. 2

Kathleen Hicks, the nominee to be deputy secretary of Defense, told senators during a confirmation hearing Tuesday she wants to continue pushing the Department of Defense to be a data-driven organization.

Likely to be confirmed as the Pentagon’s No. 2 in the coming days, Hicks said she would take the job of the de-facto chief operating officer and lead by using data to inform business decisions. She also committed to continuing the push to modernize warfighting systems to be more data-centric in new operating concepts.

“As we move into an era of data, the department needs to move there too,” she told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

As deputy secretary, Hicks will likely oversee most Pentagon technology modernization and reform initiatives in place of her boss, Secretary Lloyd Austin, whose expertise lies more in uniformed military operations as a retired four-star general.

Many saw Hicks’ nomination as a counterbalance to Austin with her mastery of the “bureaucratic black arts,” as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said introducing her during the hearing. Gates also praised her strategic analysis that included work on the recent National Defense Strategy, which pivoted the military to focus on great power competition with China.

“At a time of significant challenges internationally and great uncertainty surrounding defense budgets and programs, Dr. Kath Hicks is well qualified to assist Secretary Austin in realistically ensuring that budgetary decisions and military strategy are integrated,” Gates said.

Hicks expressed support for using data not only in business and budgetary decisions but also in military operations. She endorsed the military needing to move towards new “operational concepts,” a likely reference to the data-centric Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept where battlefield networks are to be linked across domains.

Hicks previously ran the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies where she authored and oversaw reports that called for a data-centric, internet-like system of warfare and bringing more technology talent in the DOD.

While she did not mention artificial intelligence during her hearing, in advanced written answers to policy questions she expressed support for the main AI hub she would oversee if confirmed — the Joint AI Center. The latest defense policy bill made the office a direct report to the deputy secretary.

“If confirmed, the JAIC will be my primary tool for guiding and accelerating the integration of artificial intelligence into the Department’s missions and activities,” she wrote, committing to regular meetings with JAIC leadership.

Hicks also voiced support for the current cyber posture of “defend forward,” where cyber operators covertly breach foreign adversary networks to understand their position and get early warnings on potential attacks on U.S. networks. The concept has come under some scrutiny recently given the failure of the U.S. government to see a widespread supply chain breach in the SolarWinds Orion hack.

“I am supportive of the approach,” Hicks said, but added that she needs to examine “exactly how the authorities are being executed,” giving her some wiggle room to adjust her broad support in specific areas.

USPTO modernizing its trademarking process with $80M IT contract

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office plans to modernize the IT for its trademarking process under an $80 million contract requiring developers to update applications across 20 systems.

REI Systems received the seven-year contract to improve the agency’s technology for reviewing and approving trademark applications. The agreement is part of USPTO‘s larger effort to consolidate IT projects from more than 150 to just 30 and allow staff to pick their teams, before filling gaps with contractors.

“This opens the door to what is possible through app modernization and emerging technologies” at USPTO, said Samidha Manu, senior director of REI, in a statement.

USPTO refers to its trademark and patent registration processes as separate “products,” given that the general public interacts with them in the same way it might use commercial services. Each product consists of systems and applications supporting every step in the trademark or patent process: application submission, attorney review, registration and continued use.

REI says its developers will use principles from behavioral psychology as well as change management techniques as they modernize USPTO systems.

USPTO used the General Services Administration‘s Alliant 2 governmentwide acquisition contract (GWAC), a best-in-class vehicle, to work with REI Systems.

 

Under new deal, NORAD gets new capabilities for defensive JADC2

Data company Kinetica inked a five-year deal with a $100 million ceiling to provide analytics and machine learning capabilities to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the U.S. military’s protector of North American airspace.

Kinetica will provide its capabilities to NORAD and U.S. Northern Command to monitor and defend U.S. airspace from unknown threats.

As such, the deal adds a defensive flare to one of the Department of Defense’s top emerging technology priorities: creating a military Internet of Things-like capability of connected sensors called Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2). Major JADC2 test events have so far focused on offensive capabilities with the new network-of-networks. NORAD has been one of the first to actually deploy new capabilities under the still-developing operational construct.

“The current work that we are doing under this pathfinder project is more defensive,” Jeff Kennedy, Kinetica’s federal sales director, said in an interview.

The Arlington-based company boasts the ability to analyze “massive” data sets with “trillions of rows” to project near-real-time risk assessments — the type of capability military leaders have been on the hunt for.

Kinetica first partnered with the military on this project through a year-long collaboration with the Defense Innovation Unit, the military’s Silicon Valley outpost. The company said it competed on weekly sprints, identifying new data-crunching techniques to solve defense challenges like targeting stolen aircraft in U.S. airspace.

“Most technologies today are not equipped to handle the volume of data along with the highspeed velocity flowing in from non-stop data feeds,” Amit Vij, president and co-founder of Kinetica, said in a release. “Usually the velocity of data breaks the latest technologies of today, and this presents a serious challenge to many organizations that require real-time actionable intelligence from multiple domains.”

The prototypes built by the company were transitioned to an other transaction agreement contract to support a NORAD “pathfinders” program that aims to use machine learning and recent expansions in computing power to replace legacy air monitoring systems.

“This effort is a technology leap forward for Homeland Defense command and control systems,” NORAD and U.S. Northern Command Gen. Glen VanHerck recently said.

NORAD and Northern Command have held other early tests of the JADC2 operational concept. At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic when Northern Command troops were deployed to field hospitals around the country, the command was able to pilot the tech to monitor COVID-19 infection spread.

Former Democratic staffer and cyber policy expert lands in DOD leadership

Mieke Eoyang, a former senior congressional aide, will be a top cyber policy leader at Department of Defense.

Eoyang tweeted Monday that she will be the deputy assistant secretary of Defense (DASD) for cyber policy, a high-ranking civilian position in setting security policy for DOD networks; strategizing, implementing and budgeting for the cyber needs of the military; and working with international partners on legal agreements.

The DASD position falls under the undersecretary of Defense for policy, a position former Obama administration senior adviser Colin Kahl has been nominated for. One of the biggest DOD leadership positions with a cybersecurity portfolios — the chief information officer — remains unfilled for now.

“Delighted to be joining @DeptofDefense! … Use strong passwords and multi-factor authentication everyone!” Eoyang tweeted Monday. 

She worked for several Democratic lawmakers, including as a defense policy adviser to Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts as well as Rep. Anna Eshoo, who represents key parts of Silicon Valley. She also served as a senior staffer on congressional committees and has been a commentator on MSNBC.

Since leaving Capitol Hill, she worked at the “center-left” think tank Third Way on defense and cybersecurity matters.

Department of Labor gets a chief innovation officer

Chike Aguh is the new chief innovation officer of the Department of Labor, a position left vacant during the Trump administration.

Aguh took the job late last month, reporting directly to the deputy secretary. The office sets the department’s research and development agenda for open government, digital products and the introduction of new technologies intended to improve the workforce system, agency customer service and data sharing.

Aguh previously served as the inaugural head of economic mobility pathways at the nonprofit Education Design Lab, where he launched a multimillion-dollar effort to make community colleges avenues to high-growth fields for thousands of students.

“He is a class act, is incredibly well respected and is full of phenomenal ideas that will help propel labor to the next level,” wrote Xavier Hughes, the department’s chief innovation officer under President Barack Obama, on LinkedIn. “I can’t wait to see what you and the new team at Labor will accomplish.”

Aguh also focused on the future of work and racial equity as a technology and human rights fellow at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, as well as workforce technologies at New Markets Venture Partners. He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Future of Work Taskforce.

Aguh holds degrees from Tufts University, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

“Honored and humbled to be sworn in today as Chief Innovation Officer at the US Dept. of Labor,” Aguh tweeted the day of his appointment. “Eager to get to work on the most important task we have: creating a future of work that includes and dignifies all of us.”

For another top technology job, the department is sticking with Gundeep Ahluwalia as chief information officer — a role he’s held since October 2016.

VA piloting 5G network across Seattle health care system

The Department of Veterans Affairs is piloting a new 5G wireless network across a Seattle medical health care system in partnership with AT&T, the company announced Tuesday.

The network is powered by a new indoor distributed antenna system (DAS) and multi-access edge computing (MEC) that the VA hopes will boost speeds and decrease latency.

The Seattle-area pilot builds on other “5G hospital” experiments, like one at a Silicon Valley veterans hospital, to help enable the use of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) tools. This differs, though, in that it is the first network deployment of 5G across a larger VA hospital system, to include multiple facilities linked by the enhanced network.

“This 5G system allows for increased carrier speeds and provides the next generation of cellular and mobility technology for both veterans and staff,” Daniel Mesimer, director of WAN/LAN Infrastructure Engineering and Provisioning Solution Delivery at VA, said. “It sets the groundwork for future capabilities of mobility networks for VA users and applications.”

Under this new pilot, the VA wants to further test the ability of the new technology to one day help connect rural hospitals to major hubs via 5G networks. The hospital system in Seattle includes critical care and training facilities, along with a host of other centers like an eye clinic, mental health center and a pharmacy.

“This public-private partnership to test our 5G and MEC capabilities is distinguished by the scope of implementation and innovation it allows, going well beyond a single-room care environment to encompass an entire medical care and training campus,” said Chris Smith, vice president of civilian and shared services at AT&T public sector.

The VA also choose Washington as the state to launch its new electronic health record modernization program.

JAIC inks deal for prototype of new AI acquisition system

The Department of Defense’s artificial intelligence hub recently signed its first prototype contract to build an acquisition portal to more easily work with private companies.

The Joint AI Center signed an other transaction agreement contract on Jan. 20 with the nonprofit Indiana Innovation Institute to set up and manage a prototype of an agile acquisition portal it’s calling “Tradewind.”

Once up-and-running, the portal will allow the JAIC to communicate directly with prospective vendors and stay in touch with those already on-contract, something the JAIC currently cannot easily do. The center will host Tradewind directly on its AI.mil website with the hope of growing into a project management suite, like a government Asana for AI projects.

“Tradewind will provide a user-friendly framework for our private sector partners to work more efficiently with the DoD to scale and implement AI for the warfighter and consumers across the military,” William Roberts, JAIC chief of acquisition, said in a release Monday. “We want to learn from this initiative to improve the way DoD works with all types of private sector and academic partners, and inject the much needed speed and agility necessary to scale artificial intelligence and transform the Department.”

Tradewind was announced during the JAIC’s AI symposium in September. The concept came together based on feedback from industry and a desire to have a novel acquisition and communication approach that allows for the quick iteration and agile development necessary for AI. Separate from Tradewind, the DOD is also working on contract vehicles specific to AI development.

“One of the key aspects of it is transparency,” Nand Mulchandani, JAIC CTO and former acting director, said of the portal during the symposium. “As a part of Tradewind, we will be building an online portal that will allow industry partners to create self-services and to interact with the DOD and the JAIC.”

While the initial OTA is for a prototype, the JAIC has plans to build out more capabilities to the online portal in the coming months.

DHS wants help with automating electronic invoicing

The Department of Homeland Security is looking for ways to automate electronic invoicing so it can process the more than 200,000 submissions it handles annually in accordance with federal requirements.

DHS wants information technology support that will help its Financial Systems Modernization (FSM) Joint Program Management Office (JPMO) implement products that properly receive electronic submissions and manage data, according to a sources sought synopsis issued Friday.

The current Kofax MarkView platform doesn’t rely on machine learning or artificial intelligence technologies that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) bureau within the Treasury Department mandates. FINCEN sets the rules governmentwide for safeguarding financial systems from fraud and abuse, as well as sharing data for law enforcement purposes.

“The objective of this requirement is to update and comply with federal law and regulations to deliver high quality financial services at the lowest price, and automation is playing an increasing role in the future of FINCEN operations,” reads the synopsis from DHS. “Utilizing current technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, as well as other technologies will enable processing volumes transactions in a more efficient manner.”

The invoices in question are all paper and electronic submissions from vendors and within government across all DHS headquarters programs and agencies.

JPMO coordinates all efforts supporting the FSM program, which DHS launched in 2011 to reduce the number of IT systems its agencies use.

While the type of solicitation hasn’t been decided, DHS is planning a one-year contract with a one-year option for software engineers, testers, business process re-engineering, change management, and IT portfolio management.

Contract support will be expected to complete five tasks:

Businesses that feel they can deliver the solution sought have until Feb. 8 to respond to the synopsis.

AWS cloud now available on milCloud 2.0

General Dynamics Information Technology has added Amazon Web Services cloud services to the Department of Defense’s milCloud 2.0.

Now, AWS is the only other commercial cloud service provided under the GDIT-operated milCloud 2.0 — a suite of hybrid cloud services housed under the Defense Information Systems Agency.

GDIT added AWS to provide defense customers “leading cloud services” and boost the availability of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to be used on DOD data.

MilCloud is a DOD-specific cloud service that DISA has run for military services and Fourth Estate agencies since 2015. With AWS now onboard, the partnership increases AWS’s size in the defense market and gives agencies a new option to migrate to the public cloud in the pay-as-you-go milCloud 2.0 system. Prior to this, milCloud 2.0 was largely an on-premise, private cloud offering.

“Through this collaboration between AWS and GDIT, DoD customers can access leading cloud services from AWS in areas such as compute, storage, database, networking, analytics, machine learning, migration, security, and more,” Dave Levy, vice president of U.S. government, nonprofit and healthcare at AWS, said in a statement.

MilCloud 2.0 is one of the DOD’s many cloud vehicles that agencies are using to migrate away from on-premise compute and data storage. AWS has been an aggressive pursuer of government cloud contracts, especially the DOD’s tactical edge-focused Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, which it lost to Microsoft but is protesting.

The milCloud partnership between AWS and GDIT gives defense agencies “another mechanism” to move highly sensitive data to the cloud securely with Amazon’s industry-leading security clearances.

“This aligns precisely with the DoD Hybrid Cloud Strategy and actually simplifies acquisition and choice for DoD and DISA mission partners,” Leigh Palmer, senior vice president of GDIT’s defense division.

Census Bureau makes substantial updates to COVID-19 data hub

The Census Bureau has made substantial updates to its interactive COVID-19 data hub to help better represent the evolving pandemic’s effects on communities and businesses.

Version 2.1 launched this week with new data from the bureau’s County Business Patterns (CBP) data series on payrolls and employment, as well as its latest Non-Employer Statistics, which cover businesses that have no employees.

Those sets and others are geared toward improving how the COVID-19 hub tracks vaccine distribution, said Andrew Hait, an economist with the Census Bureau, during an event Thursday. Employment data is an important piece of the puzzle, he said.

“We know that some additional statistics might be useful to help understand the distribution of vaccines across the nation,” Hait said. “For example, we know already that … occupation is likely going to play a role in sending out vaccines to Americans.”

Various Census Bureau surveys already gather data related to the spread of COVID-19. Like other federal agencies interested in the response to the pandemic, the bureau is entering a new phase of data collection and analysis as vaccine distribution ramps up nationwide.

The bureau recognized at the pandemic’s outset that it needed new programs to measure the coronavirus’ impact and began by reorienting its Business Formation Statistics (BFS), launched in 2018, around pandemic data. New business formations declined at the start of the pandemic but began to rebound in the second half of 2020, Hait said.

BFS data updates are moving from weekly to monthly in January, as the bureau prioritizes more pressing pandemic-related statistics.

The second and third programs with hub dashboards started by the bureau were the weekly Small Business and Household “pulse” surveys gauging the pandemic’s impact on various economic sectors and families, respectively. The former naturally validated the large, negative impact the pandemic has had on the accommodations and food services sector, Hait said.

The Small Business Pulse Survey continues to be revised as the bureau changes its questions to reflect a new stage in pandemic response.

“We started adding new questions that made more sense as the pandemic was evolving,” Hait said. “That will continue to happen as we move forward, so users can make sure that we’re getting data out to you that can help you understand how businesses are not only responding to but hopefully recovering from the pandemic.”

The fourth new bureau program was the Community Resilience Estimates (CRE), which use existing American Community Survey (ACS) data as a baseline to see how states and counties currently fair in 11 risk areas. The fewer risk factors a state or county has, the higher its potential resilience.

CRE is the program most likely to continue after the pandemic ends to estimate resilience with respect to other disasters like hurricanes, Hait said.

The bureau continues to update its hub with the latest data from those four programs, and with its mid-December release of Version 2.0 added data from two new ones: Monthly State Sales Tax Collections and Monthly Retail Sales. Both aspects of the economy have taken a hit during the pandemic and represent new avenues for evaluating its impact.

As for what’s coming, ACS 2019 data will soon be added to the hub, presenting an opportunity for even more variables tied to how different industries and occupations are recovering — provided the pandemic is under control by then, Hait said.