Biden promises federal website for finding COVID-19 vaccines on May 1
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with information on the U.S. Digital Service’s involvement and federal technology teams supporting vaccination scheduling.
President Biden teased a new federal COVID-19 vaccine website, capable of showing users places with vaccines available nearest them, during his first prime-time address Thursday.
Biden directed all states, tribes and territories to make all adults eligible for vaccination no later than May 1, when the site will launch.
The existing Department of Health and Human Services-run vaccines.gov provides general information on who is eligible for a vaccine and when they might expect to get vaccinated, but it can’t help users find places with vaccines available.
“At the time that everyone is eligible in May, we will launch with our partners new tools to make it easier for you to find the vaccine and where to get the shot — including a new website that will help you first find the place for you to get vaccinated and the one nearest you,” Biden said. “No more searching day and night for an appointment for you and your loved ones.”
The U.S. Digital Service, government’s fix-it team, “is engaged on the effort” but can’t provide additional details at this time, a spokesperson told FedScoop.
A call center will be stood up alongside the website to accommodate people without internet access or technical savvy.
The website will not let users schedule vaccinations, and instead the federal government will bolster state and local efforts on that front.
“Since so many Americans use their state and local websites to schedule vaccine appointments, the administration will also deploy technology teams to help to improve these systems,” said Jeff Zients, White House COVID-19 response coordinator, during a briefing Friday.
In the meantime VaccineFinder.org, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention works with regularly, began showing locations for COVID-19 vaccines in late February, a CDC spokesperson told FedScoop.
The locations shown are either part of the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program or in Alaska, Indiana, Iowa, New York (excluding New York City), Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Utah. Provider information includes the types of COVID-19 vaccine available, contact information, hours of operation and instructions on how to get vaccinated.
White House officials anticipate having enough vaccines for every adult in the U.S. by May’s end.
“We need to make it easier for every American to get vaccinated,” Zients said. “Too often it’s too difficult, too time consuming and too frustrating for people to identify where vaccines are available and where to schedule an appointment.”
Report: CISA hasn’t reached full operating capacity yet
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency won’t be fully up and running until it implements its third and final phase of organizational changes, according to a new report.
While the CISA Act of 2018 elevated the agency and saw it create a new organization chart and consolidate incident response centers and infrastructure security points of contact, 57 planned tasks were incomplete as of mid-February, the Government Accountability Office reported.
Until CISA’s organizational changes are finished, it will remain “difficult” for the agency to confront national cyber incidents like the SolarWinds hack that compromised at least nine federal agencies, reads GAO’s report.
“Until it establishes updated milestones and an overall deadline for its efforts, and expeditiously carries out these plans, CISA will be hindered in meeting the goals of its organizational transformation initiative,” the report states. “This in turn may impair the agency’s ability to identify and respond to incidents, such as the cyberattack discovered in December 2020 that caused widespread damage.”
CISA planned to finish the initiative in December, and all major tasks were completed by then, according to the agency. But CISA has yet to finalize mission-essential functions of its divisions or issue a memo defining incident management roles and responsibilities.
The agency’s deputy director and chief of transformation told GAO in November that delays were due to a need to obtain buy-in from government, including Congress, and industry. Coordination between Department of Homeland Security leadership and the Office of Management and Budget also took longer than expected, delaying later tasks dependent upon earlier ones.
Tasks affecting CISA employees need to be done right, and the COVID-19 pandemic has had “minimal impact” on completion, according to officials.
GAO recommended CISA set new expected completion dates for 42 tasks past their planned deadlines while prioritizing mission-critical ones. CISA already plans to create an updated, prioritized task list and reset its overall deadline for March 2021, the agency responded.
CISA generally addressed four reforms around using data and evidence, but five around workforce planning were only partially addressed.
“Workforce planning is especially important for CISA, given the criticality of hiring and retaining experts who, among other things, can help identify and respond to complex attacks,” reads GAO’s report. “CISA did conduct an initial assessment of its cybersecurity workforce in 2019; however, it is still working on analyzing capability gaps and determining how to best fill those gaps.”
A recommendation to ensure CISA’s employee performance management system aligns with the agency’s new organizational structure and goals remains unaddressed, despite officials’ assertion to the contrary, according to GAO.
GAO recommended CISA address outstanding reforms, to which the agency responded it’s working to create performance measures and a comprehensive workforce planning strategy.
Select government and industry partners across 16 infrastructure sectors — banking and financial institutions, telecommunications, and energy among them — told GAO they had challenges coordinating with CISA.
A total of seven partners reported a lack of clarity on organizational changes, seven a lack of involvement developing guidance, five a lack of timely response, three an inconsistent distribution of information, and three a lack of access to actionable intelligence.
CISA is tracking stakeholder inquiries for timely responses and holding tailored intelligence briefings, but it needs to address the three outstanding infrastructure challenges, GAO recommended.
Soldiers getting ‘constant’ practice with new robotic vehicles
In the Army’s hot pursuit of integrating autonomous vehicles into its forces, the service wants to ensure soldiers will trust and know how to work with new artificial intelligence “teammates.”
Even the most advanced technologies on the battlefield will mean very little if operators do not know how to use them or trust them. Recent research into the military’s AI investments found a critical lack of examination of human-machine trust, something that the Army appears to be trying to improve upon with exercises designed around soldier-robot interactions.
For its next-generation ground vehicles and future robotic vehicle development, the Army is following a mantra of “soldiers must touch the equipment,” Maj. Gen. Ross Coffman said during a virtual event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Coffman leads the cross-functional team working to field the next-generation ground combat vehicle, a major effort to replace decades-old combat vehicles with technology-enabled systems.
“Without those soldier touchpoints, we fully understand we would not be serving our customer,” he said. Coffman said there was a “platoon of robots” sent to Fort Carson in Colorado that every day underwent integration into soldier training for six weeks. For those who can work directly with robots, Coffman added there are exercises at least “once a quarter.”
Other initiatives go beyond in-person training with virtual exercises to familiarize soldiers with robots that can’t be sent to them.
“That doesn’t mean it’s over a camera. They are actually learning how to fight and use them in a computer-simulated game,” he said.
It’s unclear which robotic vehicles the Army is using in its testing exercises, but many autonomous vehicles are in the works. Some of the new vehicles the Army is designing range from small voice-activated robots for bomb disposal and reconnaissance to large “optionally manned” troop-carrying vehicles designed to follow other vehicles in convoy. Many will still rely on human directions, be they broad voice commands like “go look inside that building” or following a human-driven vehicle.
But despite all the money going into developing the technology itself, a research paper from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) found little evidence of developing the machines to interact well with humans.
“If the person doesn’t trust the system that is providing recommendations, then we are losing a lot of money that went into developing these technologies,” Margarita Konaev, lead author on the paper told FedScoop in October. She added that DOD-backed research on it was “something that we were expecting to see, but it really was not something that we found.”
USPTO business units begin picking their automations
Business units have started identifying processes they want to automate within the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, now that its CIO is managing the infrastructure and licensing.
The Robotic Process Automation Governance Team within the Office of the CIO handles configuration management and cybersecurity vetting to standardize the credentialing of bots, while business analysts pick the automations.
Analysts need only fill out an RPA intake form, the first step of the governance process, which asks nine questions before calculating the necessary bot’s complexity and expected time savings.
“We’ve reached a point with our maturity where we’re really encouraging different business units to come to the table with their own ideas for automation,” said Jacob Feldman, program analyst at USPTO, during an ACT-IAC event Wednesday. “This is implementing a federated model of development.”
Initially, USPTO attempted to automate whatever project was proposed, often using bots with if-then scenario logic. But the agency has since learned that some RPA candidates are better than others, and bots reliant on yes-no logic or linear decision-making can be implemented faster, Feldman said.
USPTO built its intake form with Microsoft Power Apps by combining a bot complexity assessment from UiPath, which also supplies the agency with RPA licenses, with a different method from the federal RPA Community of Practice. The form helps select better RPA candidates and has already been shared with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Commerce more broadly, Feldman said.
Rather than allow standalone bot licenses, USPTO automations must be done through orchestrator software. The orchestrator has different tenancies for each business unit so patent bots are classified in the patent tenancy.
Bots are developed in a formal qualification testing environment. This prevents rogue bots by thoroughly vetting them before deploying them to a quality assurance or production environment. Governance was set up this way after a mishap that required data cleanup, Feldman said.
The RPA Governance Team doesn’t permit unattended bots yet, as it hasn’t yet addressed the USPTO cyber team’s concerns. But solutions like SailPoint and CyberArk are being considered for giving bots active accounts in the agency directory. Cyber experts within each business unit will determine what’s best for the systems they secure, Feldman said.
USPTO’s Office of the CIO initially kept bot development in-house, but now business units are more actively addressing their needs. The Office of the Chief Financial Officer is using a mix of government and contract personnel to develop bots, while the trademarks business unit is currently acquiring contract support, Feldman said.
The trademarks unit is currently looking to automate suspension checks, where the trademark process is halted to determine if it conflicts with others. Trademark attorneys and their legal support staff assess thousands of trademarks in this way daily.
“This is something a bot can do,” Feldman said. “It can fly through and take a look at any type of associations and then make a determination about whether to re-suspend or remove from suspension.”
The business unit is also looking into one intelligent automation where a bot would scan trademarks and identify words in the dictionary. Then it would attempt to recognize more nuanced trademark names, like “Nice2CU,” and attempt to match those to dictionary words, despite the strange spelling.
The TMF is set to get $1B payday
Editor’s Note: President Biden signed the American Rescue Act on Thursday afternoon.
With the House passage of the American Rescue Act on Wednesday, the Technology Modernization Fund is one step away from finally getting the $1 billion injection lawmakers and tech advocates have been lobbying for nearly a year.
Now that both chambers of Congress have passed the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, it is headed to the desk of President Joe Biden, who is expected to sign it Friday. The bill, among other things, will send stimulus checks of up to $1,400 to Americans who qualify, extend a $300 weekly unemployment supplement and provide billions in relief to businesses, governments and other organizations that have struggled during the pandemic.
Beneath those top-level provisions, the relief bill will expand funding for some critical federal IT and cybersecurity programs that play a key role in the government’s digital response to COVID-19. Namely, the TMF will with a single $1 billion appropriation receive five-times as much as it has in its entire existence from past funding bills — a meager total of $150 million since its creation in 2017.
The TMF is a central pot of appropriations intended to fund modernization projects under the stipulation that participating agencies pay back the funding within five years.
“Throughout this global health crisis, millions of Americans facing illness, unemployment, food insecurity, and an inability to pay their mortgages or rent have looked to the federal government for help,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., who is perhaps the biggest advocate for federal IT and the TMF on Capitol Hill. “Yet despite urgent Congressional action to provide unprecedented levels of economic assistance, those in need have had their misery exacerbated by a broken IT infrastructure that has prevented them from receiving timely support,”
The administration of the fund is led by a board of federal IT officials, headed by Federal CIO Clare Martorana, who was announced in the role this week. Leading this board and administering the fund will likely be a huge early priority for Martorana in her new job.
Former Federal CIO Suzette Kent told FedScoop in a prior interview that the TMF works — but “it’s not at the scale that we need,” meaning more money is needed to make it more effective.
“When you look at $25 million, I am not diminishing the importance of $25 million, but in a government initiative that impacts something that serves all citizens of the United States, that number doesn’t give you the opportunity to do very many projects,” Kent said last August. “When you look at the size of major investments on the IT dashboard, you can pretty quickly get your head around the fact that $25 million isn’t going to go very far. It was originally envisioned with more, and more was asked for.”
Roughly a year ago during the early days of the pandemic, lawmakers proposed doling out $3 billion for the TMF to help agencies fund IT upgrades tied to the coronavirus response. That proposal was cut from the final draft of the bill that would become the CARES Act.
Ever since then, across D.C., advocates, including Connelly and his colleague Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., have argued how modernized tech and cybersecurity play an essential part in federal COVID-19 response efforts with little success. Tech associations like the Alliance for Digital Innovation also pushed repeatedly for TMF funding, penning letters to leaders on Capitol Hill in defense.
It wasn’t until Biden took office and Democrats took over both chambers of Congress that it looked possible that the TMF would receive funding. The Biden administration proposed a whopping $9 billion deposit in its initial outline of the American Rescue Plan. Even then, in February, it appeared TMF might get shorted by the Senate, which cut the proposal from an early draft of the most recent relief bill.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said in a statement she is glad to “secure some funding, but we need much more to fully address the vulnerabilities of our aging federal IT systems.” She added: “We are working closely with the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on additional legislative options to ensure the federal government has the technology infrastructure it needs to serve Americans efficiently, effectively, and securely.”
The TMF isn’t the only federal IT program to benefit from the relief bill. When signed, it will also send $650 million to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) for “cybersecurity risk mitigation,” $200 million to the U.S. Digital Service — once again multiplying several times over what USDS has received in funding so far during its short life — and $150 to the General Services Administration’s Federal Citizens Services Fund.
Top admiral says IT platform is ‘key’ to deterrence in the Pacific
The top admiral overseeing all forward-deployed forces in the Pacific — from North Korea to New Zealand — is working to convince Congress that stronger IT platforms are key to winning future fights in the region.
One of the programs Adm. Philip Davidson, commanding general of the Indo-Pacific Command, wants Congress to continue to fund is the Mission Partner Environment (MPE), which allows partner nations to link into U.S. military systems and communications. Davidson said the platform is critical in deterring the military’s top strategic competitor China as it allows the U.S. to work more closely with allied nations.
Davidson’s argument — which he presented during a pair of hearings this week before the House and Senate Armed Services committees — is that the U.S.’s strongest asset in the region is its partnership with allies. To further deepen those ties, the military needs to link communications and tactical data networks with those friendly countries, he’s said while making rounds on the Hill in the early days of this month.
Lawmakers appeared receptive to boosting funding for Pacific operations and tech being a part of that.
“MPE provides universal battle management and automated decision making by accessing a multi-domain sensor network,” according to Davidson’s written testimony.
The environment would be funded in part through the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), a larger $27 billion request over the next six years. The PDI is a specific pool of money authorized by Congress to fund troop deployments and other deterrence-related activities in the Pacific. It’s modeled after the European Deterrence Initiative, created to counter Russian aggression in Europe in 2014. Davidson described the broad strokes of the PDI in the open part of the hearings but saved intimate details for a closed, classified briefing with lawmakers.
While in fiscal 2021 MPE specifically got $50 million in funding, it’s unclear what Davidson wants for the program in the years to come.
MPE is already available and in use by some high-level officers, but Davidson wants to expand that.
“My key objective…is to pursue the MPE,” he told senators of strengthening alliances.
Former DOD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy told reporters in July that the MPE was a key priority of the CIO’s office as well. But, he estimated that the cloud-based system wouldn’t be in widespread use until 2028.
“This is the next generation of how we fight and communicate with our allied partners,” Deasy said.
The military is currently in its own internal battle to link data from the different services and domains. Trying to link tech from different countries may prove even more challenging as it will need to not only bridge languages but ensure interoperability with equipment built by other militaries.
“Interoperability is at the very core of our Republic of Korea-U.S. military alliance, and it has been that way for decades,” Gen. Robert Abrams, commander of U.S. forces in Korea, told the House Armed Services Committee during a hearing Wednesday.
Government leaders tout AI successes at Google Cloud Public Sector Summit
At the outset of the pandemic, public sector organizations saw large spikes in call center activity and website traffic, forcing them to quickly turn their attention to artificial intelligence-enabled tools to help with the initial pandemic response.
According to Marco Palermo, director of digital government and modernization for the City of Toronto, their initial AI pilot program has been so successful for the city that leaders are looking at other programs where they can expand the tool’s use.
“Getting information out to our citizens was extremely important. And we were looking for alternative channels to deliver that information,” Palermo recalled in December 2020 at the Google Cloud Public Sector Summit.
He described how city officials first reached out to their existing vendor partners for help. This is how they learned about a partnership between Cisco and Google and subsequently turned to Google Cloud’s Dialogflow, an interactive voice-response platform that uses natural language understanding to answer different questions citizens were asking.
Palermo said the chatbot setup was surprisingly quick. On April 1, 2020, they had their first conversation with Google and by April 4, they had a prototype in place. Then, between April and May, city employees worked to add content and make their AI chatbot smarter and interact with citizens more accurately.
The success of the platform surprised Palermo and Toronto leaders. He cited recent figures showing the chatbot answered 80% of questions.
In many ways, the pandemic amplified a need that had been bubbling beneath the surface for many public agencies, said co-panelist Franco Amalfi, strategic business executive for Google’s public sector operations.
“Even before the pandemic people were telling us that they want easy, flexible personal experiences with companies and as well as a public sector,” shared Amalfi. “People want support outside of the normal 9-to-5.”
Palermo’s story was part of a larger discussion on the advantages of AI in government. During Google’s Public Sector Summit, held virtually on Dec. 8-9, 2020, a number of government IT leaders discussed ways AI tools have helped to solve a variety of scaling challenges.
Improving medical outcomes for patients
In addition to addressing communications challenges, AI has also helped public agencies analyze complex large-scale, unstructured data repositories, like medical image files. That was the situation Dr. Hassan Tettah found himself in, trying to improve patient outcomes for the Department of Defense.
Using AI to identify and mitigate health challenges and provide better outcomes for patients is the primary driver for Tettah’s research. As health mission chief for the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), he is helping the DOD to advance predictive analytics in their diagnostic capability with certain cancers.
“In the DOD, cancer diagnosis treatment in the defense health agency alone costs over $1.7 billion,” he said. AI holds the potential to provide huge cost savings with early diagnosis and effective treatment options. He discussed the research in a panel, AI Fuels Smarter Medical Imaging and Better Outcomes.
Using an AI-augmented microscope, they have reduced time it takes to review a biopsy specimen of breast and prostate cancer by 30 seconds on average — or about a 12% savings in overall review time, Tettah said.
In order to train these algorithms, Google prototyped the new microscopic tool they call an “augmented reality microscope,” explained Dr. Craig Mermel, staff research scientist at Google. This tool brings AI analytics into the microscope.
The microscope uses a beam splitter to grab a copy of the image and passes it on to a high-resolution, high-speed digital camera. The camera passes those images on to an associated compute unit which analyzes the image and renders a prediction of, and where, the cancer might be present. Then the image is projected back to the field view, superimposing a form of augmented reality — an information layer — on top of the tissue image the pathologist is viewing.
“This entire process is happening incredibly quickly. We can go from an image back to a result displayed with oncologists and about 30 milliseconds,” explained Mermel. All of this happens in real-time as the slide changes, or the view magnifies.
“2020 has shown the maturity and power of applied AI to enable transformation, boost productivity and drive critical outcomes at scale. The power of AI to improve service delivery and to power public sector transformation will play out well into the future,” said Mike Daniels, vice president for Global Public Sector at Google Cloud, during the opening keynote at the summit.
While AI has proven helpful, public officials still face challenges — like fostering cultural acceptance of AI programs — which leaders said that their peers should consider as they build any new AI program.
Making strategic decisions to start an AI project
In the session All the Right Moves, Prioritizing Investments in Technology, government leaders recommend finding key use cases that show high value for business and a return on investment as a critical first step to AI adoption. According to Dominic Sale, assistant commissioner of Technology Transformation Services at the General Services Administration, getting employees comfortable with applying AI can be a struggle. One of the first critical steps in getting internal buy-in is to find key use cases that show high-value for the business and therefore on investment for AI adoption.
Sale also advised that before agencies begin a project, leaders need to look at institutional barriers preventing them from moving forward. These could be things such as a lack of talent needed to adopt and manage these tools or inadequate policies to address potential bias that may do more harm than good.
Former U.S. CIO Suzette Kent encouraged government leaders nevertheless to take a first step and get hands-on knowledge in applying AI through pilot programs.
“What’s really important is to get started, to understand the journey and begin to apply it to something that is specific to a mission,” said Kent. Pilot programs help leaders form broader strategies around sound IT investments and can help them future-proof mission delivery, she said.
Learn more about how Google Cloud is helping government agency leaders implement successful AI projects to improve mission outcomes.
View these sessions and more at the Google Cloud Public Sector Summit.
FEMA working to clarify cyber controls
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s IT shop is working with others across the Department of Homeland Security to clarify cybersecurity controls so processes can be automated across the department.
By working with other DHS IT organizations, FEMA can get on the same page and automate its compliance, said Ted Okada, chief technology officer at FEMA.
However, compliance with data and privacy controls coming out of agencies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology is challenging because they haven’t kept pace with developments in cloud computing and DevSecOps.
While emerging NIST standards like the Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL) are diving deeper into Cabinet-level departments’ approaches to compliance, outdated controls remain.
“The common controls in the existing paradigm of client-server, hub-and-spoke computing, which are still with us even with cloud computing, those controls are fast becoming antiquated,” Okada said during an ATARC event Tuesday.
One such control asks whether organizations have a fire extinguisher, and no one would ever ask Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services that, he added.
At the same time that FEMA is establishing better cyber metrics, it’s developing application programming interfaces (APIs) that communicate with authorizing engines to generate system security plans and standardize them in open, text-based language for automation.
That way FEMA can store data and compute at the edge, closer to the source of the data, while adopting a zero-trust security posture that assumes breach, Okada said.
Biden taps Clare Martorana as Federal CIO
President Joe Biden has selected Clare Martorana as his federal CIO, the White House announced Tuesday.
Martorana takes on the federal CIO role within the Office of Management and Budget after serving for more than two years as the CIO of the Office of Personnel Management.
She got her start in government during the waning months of the Obama administration as a digital services expert on the U.S. Digital Service team, with a focus on digital modernization at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Prior to that, she served in leadership roles at Everyday Health and WebMD.
“Throughout her career, Clare Martorana worked to improve and simplify the digital experiences people have when interacting with businesses and government,” says the White House announcement. It goes on to credit her for her time at OPM “where for the past two years she stabilized and secured agency operations to deliver better digital-first services for the Federal workforce.”
Martorana is the first to hold the role of federal CIO under the Biden administration. Until now, Maria Roat, deputy federal CIO, had been serving in the role in an acting capacity. She is preceded in the role by Suzette Kent during the Trump administration. Basil Parker, another OPM transplant, also held the role for a brief period at the end of the last administration.
As federal CIO, one of Martorana’s biggest priorities will be leading federal agencies in the ongoing response efforts to COVID-19. In particular, the Biden administration has placed an emphasis on using the Technology Modernization Fund as a vehicle to drive needed digital transformation in support of digital services and recovery. The TMF could see as much as $1 billion in funding under the next pandemic relief bill.
Management of federal cybersecurity will also fall under Martorana’s purview to some degree. She will work with Chris DeRusha, newly hired federal CISO, in the federal response to the recent SolarWinds breach and the broader security of federal networks.
Martorana was a recipient of a 2020 FedScoop 50 Federal Leadership Award.
Her deputy at OPM, Guy Cavallo, will take over as acting CIO with her departure.
Jason Matheny to serve Biden White House in national security and tech roles
Former Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) head Jason Matheny has been tapped to serve in the White House with a focus on the intersection of technology and national security.
Matheny officially was given three titles: deputy assistant to the president for technology and national security, deputy director for national security in the Office of Science and Technology Policy and coordinator for technology and national security at the National Security Council.
In addition to his time as the leader of IARPA, Matheny recently founded and led Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). He also served as a commissioner on the Pentagon-housed National Security Commissions on Artificial Intelligence, which recommended in early March several changes to national AI policy he will now help oversee at the White House.
“In just a few short years, Jason has built CSET into a major player in the field of emerging technology and national security policy, recruiting an incredible roster of researchers and fellows and producing influential papers that are shaping the policy dialogue,” Joel Hellman, dean of Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, said in a note to staff about Matheny’s departure. Dewey Murdick, the current director of data science at CSET, has taken over for Matheny as interim director.
Matheny appears well-liked and respected by his colleagues, both for his intellect and kindness, with many taking to Twitter to congratulate him:
Matheny’s new job comes at a critical time for technology and national security. The so-called race for AI is increasing in speed and importance with leaders expressing strong desires to adopt AI in critical defense systems. During Matheny’s time at the helm of CSET, much of the think tank’s research focused on the impacts of AI and similar emerging technologies and their national security implications.
“We are excited to have his expertise as President Biden and the NSC elevate US investment in technology and innovation and work with our allies and partners to ensure emerging technologies are safe, secure, and beneficial to free societies,” an administration official told FedScoop about Matheny’s appointment.
The NSCAI report Matheny helped author is already getting traction one of his new bosses, national security advisor Jake Sullivan. “The U.S. and its allies must continue to lead in AI, microelectronics, biotech, and other emerging tech to ensure that these technologies are safe, secure, and beneficial to free societies,” Sullivan Tweeted after saying he received a briefing by the commission