DIU announces disaster-mapping AI challenge

The Defense Innovation Unit is looking for participants in its second computer-vision artificial intelligence challenge, this time to identify building damage in post-disaster areas.

The xVIEW2 challenge, to start in early September, asks machine learning experts to develop algorithms and models to analyze post-disaster satellite imagery to improve mapping.

Understanding the scale of disasters is still an often dangerous and time-consuming process that slows first responders. With AI analyzing satellite imagery, the Department of Defense hopes to improve response time and effectiveness in those critical moments.

Competitors will be judged on their ability to identify buildings and score how badly damaged they are. The competition will have three prize tracks based on how much of their solution companies will be willing to hand over to the government: open-source, non-exclusive government purpose rights and evaluation only.

The DOD, through both the DIU and Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, has said use of AI for humanitarian response is a top priority. Recently the JAIC announced updates to its plans to use AI to track wildfires, another computer-visualization project.

This challenge will use a new method for categorizing post-disaster damage.

“When exploring the task of building damage assessment, we discovered that there was no consistent scoring methodology being applied across agencies and aid organizations,” DIU AI government lead Mike Kaul said in an emailed statement.

To solve this, DIU created the Joint Damage Scale. DIU wants participants to use the new four-tiered system to rate building damage in its xBD data set, which all competitors will use to analyze. Algorithms and models generated in the competition will be used in disaster zones, Kaul added.

HHS partners with DISA on assured identity biometric login system

The Defense Information Systems Agency has an idea for how to remember your password: You are the password. And now, it’s catching on at the Department of Health and Human Services.

The system, dubbed Assured Identity, is embedded into a device and uses more than 200 biological and contextual traits to build a unique credential that is continuously checked. Jose Arrieta, HHS’s CIO, said Wednesday at the Nextgov Emerging Tech Summit he is working with DISA and brainstorming the idea — one that he said will be “empowering and streamlining” for health care professionals.

The first steps developing the behavioral-based login system were taken over a year ago when DISA approached a commercial phone chip manufacturer to build tech to authenticate a user by gait, Maj. Nikolaus Ziegler, military director of DISA’s Innovation Office, told FedScoop in an interview. DISA started with phone chip manufacturers in part because all of the personally identifying data will stay on the device. Eventually, these devices could be a watch, necklace or other wearables, Ziegler added.

Gait, or the way a person walks, is just one of many biometric traits that can be used — others being facial recognition, voice and eye-scan identifiers. Even more advanced contextual factors the intelligent system will check could be things from what Wi-Fi network the device regularly connects, who the user regularly texts and even how hard they strike their phone screen when typing.

For HHS, this type of technology is most attractive for health care workers and first responders — people who can’t pause to type out a password. First responders often need to access information from multiple networks. With one device that could log them into all of those networks, time spent taking care of patients will increase, Arrieta said.

However, in a battlefield environment, or even an emergency situation first responders might find themselves in, what qualifies as a normal gait or how they communicate, can suddenly change. That’s where artificial intelligence comes in.

In October, DISA signed an other transaction agreement with a New York-based AI startup to deliver the intelligent code to adapt to a change in behavior that the device would recognize as normal. If someone twists an ankle and changes their gait but all other factors remain the same — keeping the trust score high — the machine will learn to adapt. All of this remains embedded in the device to ensure privacy protections, Ziegler said.

AI is one of the system’s “founding requirements,” he said. It drives continuous authentication, “constantly validating through contextual and biological identification.”

Arrieta said HHS is doing a pilot, which still is in the brainstorming phase and hopes industry partner will help it innovate. For Ziegler, he said his office is actively looking to partner with “anyone and everyone” to get the technology tested and usable.

Army’s new cyber units come with serious workforce challenges, GAO finds

The Army’s accelerated attempts to build up capabilities in cyberwarfare and other technologies are causing challenges for staffing, equipping and training, a new Government Accountability Office report says.

The study of cyber and electronic warfare units found large workforce gaps, including one cyber battalion that was more than 80% vacant as of March. The Army did not assess the readiness challenges of activating the new units and proceeded at an accelerated pace to keep up with threats, the report found, causing related issues with training and equipping of the few soldiers it retained.

The Army’s largest retention problem in its cyber ranks was at the senior enlisted level, the GAO found. The service told the GAO it is working to fix those shortcomings with retention bonuses and increased pay.

The report was mandated in the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act in order to assess how the military’s largest service will try to retain its advantages over competitors like Russia and China. The Army also recently stood up Army Futures Command, a reshaping of the force’s development of weapons and tools for the future of conflict.

Without the right plans in place, GAO said, the Army won’t be prepared for the future. One cyberwarfare unit activated in October 2018 with only 63 of the 199 authorized positions filled, or 32%, as the report states. Another unit was active as of March 2019 with only 30 soldiers out of the 171 positions.

The report notes that “cyber personnel are in high demand” — a problem not just for the military but for virtually any other enterprise that needs qualified IT workers.

For those who the Army has retained, training is still being formulated and specialized equipment still is not available to them, the GAO said.

Equipment is even more lacking during training, the report said, because the Army is prioritizing putting the tools it does have in the hands of its operators, not cyber students.

“Officials with the Army Cyber School stated that it could end up growing and producing a workforce that outpaces its ability to procure equipment,” the report stated.

The report recommended the Army “comprehensively assess” the risk for accelerated activation of units, which the Army concurred with.

NGA inks $824 million modernization deal with Perspecta

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency recently inked a secretive $824 million deal with Perspecta to up its “integration” across enterprise systems in an effort to increase big data analytics and cloud computing.

The award of the indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract to Perspecta, a government services provider, contained thin details on what exactly will be done. Perspecta has already been awarded a $223 million task order on the contract.

NGA’s award notice says the work will “transform” the intelligence agency’s legacy architecture, adopting cloud services, big data analytics, artificial intelligence and other IT services.

NGA did not return a request for comment on how Perspecta’s work will relate to the current Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract the intelligence community has with Amazon Web Services, and Perspecta declined to comment further than what was noted in its press release, citing classification.

A business notice posted in 2018 shows a wide range of enterprise engineering duties NGA was seeking in the contract.

This type of contract, at least in name, appears to have been around for years. A 2009 document shows that NGA has been awarding an “Enterprise Engineering Contract” to lead its transformation efforts since at least the mid-2000s.

“[T]he Enterprise Engineering Contractor will assist NGA in achieving its desired future state and help set the direction NGA must take to transform,” the document states.

FedBizOpps to be shut down by year’s end so a new awards site may rise

The government plans to change the website it uses for federal awards in the first quarter of fiscal year 2020, as the General Services Administration merges its legacy sites into one system.

Federal Business Opportunities, or FedBizOpps.gov, will be decommissioned in favor of beta.SAM.gov, which will deliver more precise results for number, keyword and location searches using new filters.

A new user workspace will allow people to set alerts notifying them when contract opportunities are updated. Previous versions of opportunity notices will also be made easily accessible and headers clarified.

“The entire process of building beta.SAM.gov has been a collaborative effort between and among our users and stakeholders,” reads the GSA fact sheet. “This remains true with the transition of FBO.gov.”

Several features will change names: Watchlist becoming Follow for contract updates, Search Agent becoming Saved Search, and Archived becoming Inactive for closed notices.

Interested Vendor lists will transfer to the new site, but non-federal users need an account tied to an entity to use them. Lists will be linked to a specific notice, sortable and searchable.

Public-facing application programming interfaces from departments and agencies will be available for download. All data feeds can be found under the data services section of the new site.

Users will need to create a new account on beta.SAM.gov via login.gov. Government-issued common access cards and personal identity verification cards can also be used to log in.

Government officials with roles on FBO can simply provide their active username and password to switch over seamlessly. Some roles will change names during the transition: engineers and limited buyers will be relabeled contract specialists, buyers relabeled contracting officers and agency administrators truncated to administrators.

Beta.SAM.gov consolidates nine other federal, legacy systems: the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation, Systems for Award Management, Wage Determinations Online, Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System, Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System, Past Performance Information Retrieval System, Electronic Subcontracting Reporting System, and FFATA Subaward Reporting System.

Tests of wildfire-tracking AI are just months away, JAIC says

The military’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center says that within months it will be testing an artificial intelligence program to track the spread of wildfires, a part of its mission to deliver humanitarian uses of AI.

The plan to use AI to analyze footage of blazes in California has been touted before, but a JAIC official provided new details about the timeline for testing and its potential benefit to firefighters on Wednesday. The center’s goal is to distribute maps much faster and more accurately to first responders, a step up from the daily distribution timeframe currently in place.

The tests will involve flying video cameras over wildfires with an automated visualization algorithm detecting where flames are moving in the frame. The updated maps will be pushed out through a mobile app the National Guard uses, said JAIC’s chief of strategy and communications, Greg Allen.

“We are really able to make an impact,” he said during the Nextgov Emerging Tech Summit.

AI leaders in government say they are looking for “low hanging fruit” for AI applications. In many cases, agencies are still only taking preliminary steps. The Internal Revenue Service and Defense Logistics Agency, for example, are still working to improve the data AI can learn from and to use it on basic tasks to improve efficiency, panelists said Wednesday.

The JAIC was staffed and funded in January. Going from nothing to operational testing in a matter of months is “light speed” for the DOD, Allen said.

Others have criticized the government’s lack of tangible progress on AI, including former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work.

“I can’t shake the nagging feeling … that we should be a lot further along than we are and we’re losing ground to our competitors,” said Work, now a distinguished senior fellow for defense and national security at the bipartisan Center for a New American Security.

At the panel on Tuesday, many were confident the Department of Defense and the U.S. as a whole are still in a good place with AI development. The U.S.’s main AI competitor, China, has been investing heavily in building data sets and other technology.

“You can throw a lot of money at something it doesn’t mean it is money well spent,” said Valerie Browning, the director of Defense Sciences Office in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Browning spoke during an earlier panel at Wednesday’s event and added that she believes China is still trying to catch up with the U.S.

How to keep enterprise-IT-as-a-service networks agile and secure

The U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force are all embarking on projects to develop an enterprise-IT-as-a-service (EITaaS) model, shifting the burden of managing the military’s collection of IT systems to more agile and technically advanced commercial providers.

One key step the military services can take to ensure a flexible outsourcing framework is to work with vendors that embrace open source networking standards, according to a new FedScoop special report.

The Army is moving quickly to establish an EITaaS procurement prototype initiative. According to CIO Lt. Gen Bruce Crawford in the report, 70 percent of the servers, routers and end-user devices in use at 288 of the Army’s facilities worldwide — and 90 percent of equipment handling communications — are at or near the end of life. Replacing all of that gear would take until at least 2030, he said, and finding replacement parts in the interim is becoming increasingly difficult and expenses.

But if the Army hopes to successfully fast-track the outsourcing procurement process, it must overcome various technical and cultural challenges, say DOD IT experts in the special report, which was underwritten by Juniper Networks.

As organizations outsource network infrastructure and services to third parties, military officials need to pay particular attention to governance and design principles to help them preserve both overall management control and the flexibility to innovate down the road, according to Greg Bourdelais, who heads up DOD sales for Juniper Networks.

While most contractors insist that they are committed to the DOD’s mission, history suggests that when commercial contractors are in charge of the technology, government is going to get a solution that pretty much just meets the requirements of the service level agreement (SLA) – a box-for-box replacement, he said.

Military services also need arrangements with third parties that allows them to maintain pervasive visibility, security and control over essential operations, he said.

The report highlights steps to take — and avoid — to ensure EITaaS initiatives aren’t only about delivering on SLAs, but also developing a flexible, scalable, ever-evolving networking ecosystem to meet the military’s future needs. The report references, for instance, five design principles CIOs should continue to manage even as they turn over network infrastructure and services to third parties:

• Multi-domain connectivity
• Multi-vendor orchestration
• End-to-end visibility
• Pervasive security
• Reduced complexity

It also highlights why open source standards play an even greater role in designing networks of the future when working with third parties.

“Leveraging open standards allows you to take advantage of the best of the best without being locked into a vendor,” said Mike Loefflad, systems engineering manager for federal accounts at Juniper Networks. Open standards also support a wider range of APIs for more seamless integrations between enterprise data centers and multicloud operating partners.

The report points to lessons learned from the Navy Marine Corps Internet (NMCI) outsourcing program in which the Navy succeeded in creating a single, standardized, enterprisewide computing and communications program but also experienced critical pitfalls in its approach to outsourcing.

Read more about how open standards networking solutions can help an organization build best of breed platforms.

This article was produced by FedScoop and sponsored by Juniper Networks.

Google engineers are demanding the company cease work with CBP

A group of Google employees is demanding that the company stop working with or supporting the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In a petition published to Medium on Wednesday, 200 signatories argue that, together with  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), CBP is committing human rights violations in its treatment of immigrants at the southern border.

“We demand that Google publicly commit not to support CBP, ICE, or ORR with any infrastructure, funding, or engineering resources, directly or indirectly, until they stop engaging in human rights abuses,” the letter states.

The letter cites a recent CBP request for information in which the agency expresses interest in finding potential vendors to lead its ongoing move to the cloud. This is precisely the kind of contract Google should abstain from, the signatories argue.

“In working with CBP, ICE, or ORR, Google would be trading its integrity for a bit of profit, and joining a shameful lineage,” the letter states, before bringing up IBM’s ties to Nazi Germany. “It is unconscionable that Google, or any other tech company, would support agencies engaged in caging and torturing vulnerable people.”

This isn’t the first time Google employees have taken an ethical stance against potential or actual government work. In 2018, Google employees protested the company’s involvement in a Department of Defense artificial intelligence project known as Project Maven. The backlash eventually led Google to announce that it would not seek to renew that contract. It also led to the creation of Google’s AI Principles, and the existence of these guidelines ended up being the stated reason for the tech giant to drop out of the competition for DOD’s $10 billion JEDI cloud contract.

The company has also been wrapped up in some of the drama over government use of facial recognition technology.

In the past, government officials haven’t seemed overly concerned about the prospect of losing Google as a partner on certain projects. After all, there are plenty of contractor fish in the sea. “There will be those who will partner with us and will help us do the things that we need to do to be successful,” Lt. Col. Garry Floyd, who works on Project Maven, said in 2018.

Per the writers of the petition, it is still circulating within Google and will be updated with more signatures.

GSA announces STARS III IT contract for small businesses

The General Services Administration released a draft solicitation Friday to replace an expiring governmentwide acquisition contract (GWAC) for small IT businesses.

The 8(a) Streamlined Technology Acquisition Resource for Services (STARS) III GWAC will replace its predecessor, 8(a) STARS II, when that ends Aug. 30, 2021.

Agencies will issue task order requests via 8(a) STARS III for information technology services from active participants in the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development program for startups.

The contract will primarily allow agencies to procure custom computer programming; computer systems design; computer facilities management; computer-related services like disaster recovery and software installation; data processing and hosting; and emerging technology like artificial intelligence, blockchain and quantum computing. But ancillary support like training and hardware acquisition, including telecommunications infrastructure, will also be covered by 8(a) STARS III.

The contract has a $20-billion ceiling and a five-year base period with one three-year option.

Awardees are guaranteed a $250 minimum for task order work, and prime contractors will periodically be reviewed.

In February, STARS II was included in the Department of Homeland Security’s EAGLE Next Gen portfolio of “best-in-class” contract vehicles being used for services like cybersecurity staffing at its Security Operations Centers.

How the Intelligence Community can modernize legacy TDM networks — and lower costs

Government agencies, especially within the Intelligence Community, may have transitioned many of their systems to cloud computing services. However, IC agencies still rely on critical applications that run on old, time division multiplexing (TDM) technology.

How to keep those systems operational as TDM technology reaches the end of its service life is a looming question.

Intelligence analysts, military commanders, national security policy makers, law enforcement teams and others who depend on specialized legacy systems to manage specialized workloads and sensitive information are caught in a dilemma of how to keep these systems operating as their agencies push to reduce overall IT operating costs.

That’s where advanced circuit-to-packet (CTP) platforms can help, according to a new report produced by FedScoop and underwritten by Juniper Networks. CTP emulates the work that hard-wired switches perform in TDM networks, allowing data to move over high-performance IP and Ethernet networks.

“The Intelligence Community is confronting many of the same challenges other federal agencies face in needing to rationalize their applications and decide where the cloud makes sense,” says Hank O’Rourke, director of Juniper Networks’ National Security Group.

Because TDM technology is reaching the end of its service life, it is becoming increasingly expensive to find the parts and personnel needed to keep systems up and running. The pressure to shift to less costly platforms is growing more intense, but as O’Rourke says, not enough attention is being given to what is needed to keep these legacy systems operating.

“They have to make the hard call whether to kill an app, put it on life support, or re-engineer it. CTP adds life to an existing solution, so IC agencies have more time to get the best mix of legacy and cloud capabilities,” he explains.

According to the report, CTP makes it possible to modernize TDM systems and improve their overall performance. The report also details how CTP can reduce total operating and support costs, for instance, by eliminating redundant point-to-point circuit connections. And because CTP facilitates end-to-end data delivery, it also saves software and hardware upgrade costs at the receiving end.

Additionally, modern CTP platforms streamline network management and improve performance. The report gives a checklist of expert-recommended capabilities agencies should look for with CTP solutions that Juniper Networks has helped pioneer over the past 15 years.

“Our solutions simplify operations across heterogeneous environments, focusing on infrastructure orchestration, automation, programmability, ease of management, visibility and analytics,” says Manoj Leelaniva, executive vice president and chief product officer for Juniper Networks.

Read the full report: “The Intelligence Community’s IT dilemma: How to upgrade legacy TDM networks” to learn more about circuit-to-packet technology and how to extend the life of legacy systems while reducing operating costs.

This article was produced by FedScoop and sponsored by Juniper Networks.