Quantum-level research to get $30M boost from Department of Energy

Secretary of Energy Rick Perry has opened a new avenue of agency funding for quantum information science, pledging $30 million in research grants for the department’s Nanoscale Science Research Centers.

DOE has five NSRCs based throughout multiple national laboratories, each specializing in a different facet of nanoscale research. Agency officials said Wednesday the grants are intended to fund up to $10 million in new quantum physics research per year, over three years, on a competitive basis.

Perry said that the grants will help the U.S. maintain a leading edge in its research and development. Quantum physics — the study of matter at levels so minute that the normal rules don’t apply — has gained increasing attention as both the private sector and several nations have committed billions to research its applications.

“Quantum Information Science represents the future in a wide range of fields from computing to physics to materials science, and it will play a major role in shaping the technologies of tomorrow,” Perry said. “It’s vital that American science and American scientists lead the way into this new era, and these planned investments in our DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers are an important first step.”

Quantum computers, for instance, could have serious national security ramifications due to concerns that their increased computing power may be able to crack most current security encryption protocols, as well as emerging technologies like blockchain.

Other federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have also overseen research into applications like quantum communication devices and encryption among other projects.

DOE officials said that quantum science’s emergence, combined the increasing promise of nanotechnology, offer scientists opportunities to further the development of new technologies.

The timing of the grants is auspicious as private sector companies like IBM and Google have each released new quantum computer processors in 2018 that may have crossed the threshold of quantum supremacy — the theoretical threshold where quantum computers have the processing power to solve complex mathematical problems that conventional computers cannot.

Pre-proposals are due by 5 p.m. EST on June 1. More information about the grants can be found here.

For more on quantum computing’s potential impact, check out FedScoop’s report on Emerging Technologies.

At State Department, IT modernization puts spotlight on data as ‘strategic asset’

Sometimes, IT modernization is about far more than upgrading old hardware or moving to the cloud.

At the Department of State, for example, the ongoing modernization of legacy systems is being treated as an opportunity to implement better data management practices. It’s a mission-critical decision because information is the “currency” of the department, Ken Rogers, acting deputy CIO for business management and planning, said at a Foreign Affairs and ATARC event on Thursday.

“As we’re launching more aggressively into the IT modernization, we’re looking at this as an opportunity to take a look at the data that we have in siloed applications, in centralized applications, in applications that are not that well integrated,” Rogers said. And as the agency moves to the cloud, Rogers continued, they’re looking for ways to “normalize” this whole mess. The goal? “Make it so that [the Department’s data] can be effectively managed, leveraged and used for decision making.”

“We’ve kind of taken a page out of the President’s Management Agenda — data as a strategic asset,” Rogers said. “Often times in the tech field we can get excited about the bling of technology and the latest thing, but our most sustained and valuable asset in this space is our data.”

One of the PMA’s three main pillars — along with IT modernization and workforce overhaul — is data transparency. The plan points to the 2014 DATA Act as inspiration, and aims to make government datasets public in “more useful formats.”

“The United States government holds some of the most important data in the world, yours and all of ours,” U.S. CIO Suzette Kent said at the unveiling of the PMA. “Under the PMA, we are embarking on efforts to define a data strategy that will serve as the foundation for the next decade.”

Elsewhere at State, stakeholders are drawing attention to the need to better leverage the available data. The Foreign Service Institute’s School of Applied Information Technology is looking to launch a more robust version of its data analysis and visualization training course, with the hypothesis that effective data use will benefit the Department’s diplomatic mission.

“I think that diplomacy … it is about your ability to negotiate and influence others to achieve our policy goals,” Laura Williams, the business applications director at the Foreign Service Institute, told FedScoop. “But how we do that, the how we do that effectively, changes in this data-saturated world. Technology, the access to data, it changes the calculous a little bit.”

“Written word and spoken word are not enough anymore,” she added.

Education Department says it’s ahead of the curve on using TBM

While the federal government gradually implements an accounting framework to track IT spending costs, the Department of Education’s CIO said the agency is already leveraging it to get better insight into its technology terrain.

Jason Gray said the department had applied the Technology Business Management framework and was using it in combination with its own IT visualization roadmap to identify the scope of its IT infrastructure.

“We have implemented both of those to have a picture of our entire landscape,” Gray said Thursday at an event hosted by Foreign Affairs and ATARC. “It tells me where the systems that I have that have a bunch of manual processes, it tells me the systems that have [personally identifiable information], it showed me that I have over 20 cloud service providers not counting the government side.”

TBM standardizes the data taxonomy across a technology enterprise, aligning information about an agency’s financial, IT and business operations to provide more insight on where tech spending is going.

The framework had been widely used in the private sector, and the Trump administration has made it a significant portion of the President’s Management Agenda.

Gray said that because the department’s business operations include federal student aid — which accounts for 65 percent of its nearly $700 million IT budget — the combination of TBM and the IT roadmap provided an illuminative look at where he can reduce costs in the agency’s cloud infrastructure and direct savings toward modernization.

“What that’s done is it’s enabled me, from a strategy standpoint, to figure out what are the things that I’m going to target,” he said. “Right away, one of the first things is cloud consolidation.”

The Office of Management and Budget has prioritized implementing TBM government-wide, asking $1.5 million in the president’s fiscal 2019 budget to establish a TBM program office within the General Services Administration to guide adoption.

With the Modernizing Government Technology Act, which allows agencies to establish working capital funds with budget savings to promote IT modernization, Gray said he can now use both tools to target where he plans to modernize.

“So, I’m using the visualization and TBM to inform my decisions and what we are doing for modernization,” he said. “For example, the roadmap showed me these are all the systems that I have that have manual processes. It allows me to ask the question, and have dollars tied to it, which of are those manual processes worth it? So that’s our approach and how we are tackling it with MGT.”

OMB officials recently said they plan to apply TBM to the Federal Procurement Data System by October 2020 and the broader capital planning and investment control by fiscal 2021.

‘Destinations Digital’ will fund DOT’s IT modernization in-house

Department of Transportation CIO Vicki Hildebrand isn’t ready to tap the Technology Modernization Fund just yet, but she isn’t waiting to start upgrading her agency’s IT, either.

Speaking at an event hosted by Foreign Affairs and ATARC Thursday, Hildebrand detailed her initiative to modernize DOT’s technology infrastructure with funding from reductions in duplicative IT programs across the agency.

“I don’t want any money. I don’t need any money,” she said. “We have a lot of spend out there. We need to spend more wisely.”

Hildebrand said the transformation plan, dubbed “Destinations Digital,” uses many of the same strategies currently being used by the Centers of Excellence working to modernize the Department of Agriculture, but done internally across what she called a series of BHAGs, or Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals.

“We have nine BHAGs that we are driving toward very hard across the agency,” she said. “At the top of all of this is FITARA to help us drive that.”

Hildebrand didn’t elaborate on what those goals are, but said by leveraging the 2014 IT acquisition law, DOT is developing department-wide strategies across its component agencies and is seeking to consolidate some back-end operations, such as help desks.

By funding the project internally, the CIO said that DOT has not yet entered itself in the slate of IT proposals being submitted for the newly committed Technology Modernization Fund.

Federal CIO Suzette Kent said last month that the TMF Board had selected four agencies to submit final proposals for funding, but didn’t say which agencies had made the cut.

Hildebrand added that while she is excited by the fund, the Destinations Digital project has the potential to identify enough funding to fuel its current IT modernization efforts.

“It will be a while be for I tap into it,” she said. “As I said, we have a lot of duplicative spend. And we don’t have a strategic resourcing program out there right now that we are working on. It’s literally because we grew up in a very federated model. Everyone was doing all of the right things, it’s just that they were working in their mode of transportation. As we bring that together, there’s a lot of opportunity to reinvest.”

Another avenue for funds could come from a shake-up in the agency’s acquisition of services, which — as a former Hewlett-Packard executive —Hildebrand said are a little steeper for government and could be potentially be lowered through more competition.

“I was rather surprised when I got here from the private sector that the government gets charged more than the private sector, and sometimes for services that aren’t quite as good,” she said. “So I’m challenging that.”

NIST challenge targets better de-identification techniques for public data

One barrier to opening up valuable government datasets is making sure that all necessary personally identifiable information (PII) is removed beforehand — a process called de-identification. It’s a balancing act intended to protect individuals’ privacy while maintaining the integrity of the data.

The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) says existing de-identification techniques aren’t good enough, however, and in a new challenge on Challenge.gov, the agency asking for ways to improve them.

“Currently popular de-identification techniques are not sufficient,” the challenge page reads. “Either PII is not sufficiently protected, or the resulting data no longer represents the original data. This competition is about creating new methods, or improving existing methods of data de-identification, in a way that makes de-identification of privacy-sensitive datasets practical.”

The “Unlinkable Data Challenge” specifically wants to stop “linkage attacks” — where multiple and possibly unrelated datasets are combined to glean personal information contained across the datasets.

“This valid privacy concern is unfortunately limiting the use of data for research, including datasets with the Public Safety sector that might otherwise be used to improve protection of people and communities,” the challenge page reads. “Due to the sensitive nature of information contained in these types of datasets and the risk of linkage attacks, these datasets can’t easily be made available to analysts and researchers.”

The first stage in the multi-stage NIST competition seeks ideas and concepts — later phases will test the efficacy of submitted algorithms. Participants have until July 26 to submit ideas.

NIST isn’t the only agency grappling with the challenge of protecting privacy while moving toward a model where more data is shared. The Department of Health and Human Services’ chief data officer, Mona Siddiqui, spoke about this impediment at the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin this year.

Data de-identification is a hot topic in the private sector, too, as Facebook in particular has faced strong criticism about how it handles users’ information. The company recently said it halted discussions with medical institutions about sharing data for research, as re-identification became a concern.

Beyond this latest callout, NIST has launched a number of competitions via Challenge.gov in recent months. The agency is also looking for crowdsourced ideas on how virtual reality might aid the public safety community in their work and how to build drones that can stay aloft for longer.

CIOs need to be let off the chain for IT modernization, Suzette Kent says

Agency technology leaders know what they’re supposed to deliver when it comes to IT modernization, but they need more leeway to make related decisions on acquisition, hiring people and managing budgets, Federal CIO Suzette Kent said Thursday.

The Trump administration is firm on holding agency CIOs accountable, Kent said at an event hosted by Foreign Affairs and ATARC, but it also wants to give them considerably more power in pursuing new technologies beyond what was spelled out in the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA). The White House also wants agency leaders and their CIOs to collaborate more on goals, she said.

“The accountability is there, but the second part of the equation is authority, and we’re still working on that,” she said. “So when I say authority, I mean things like setting the technology direction, authority to hire skills that are needed, authority to manage the budget and the opportunity to sit at the table with agency and government leadership to collaborate and contribute on how we make decisions on how we are achieving mission.”

The pursuit of that mission, and the tools that will drive it, could require those CIOs to not only to acquire a portfolio of different solutions —  like artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and others — but also to determine how those tools transform agency functions, she said.

“There’s always going to be a need for different types of technology, and I look at technology and business model together,” Kent said. “There are some cases where we actually need to change the business model, which would question what components of technology that we would need.”

But counterbalanced with that potential autonomy is the Trump administration’s increasing expansion of shared services, which Kent said provides agencies the opportunity to free up capital while ensuring a strong IT foundation built on tech standards.

“I do also question areas where have multiple agencies are doing the same thing that isn’t necessarily mission-related,” she said. “We have opportunities to change the business model and evolve the technology at the same time, and, in that case, create more capacity for mission-facing investments.”

Though CIOs will have to both be more creative in how they pursue solutions, especially now that the MGT Act has provided agencies with working capital funds, Kent noted that there will come a point where agencies will need an increase in IT funding to achieve their goals.

“If you look at most major transformations that have occurred over the past 20 years, there’s a spike during the transformation when you are sunsetting the old and adding the new,” she said. “That overlap creates the need for additional budget and that’s a conversation that we are going to have to continue to have.”

TSA turns to Silicon Valley Innovation Program for new ideas on bag screening

The Transportation Security Administration is partnering with the Department of Homeland Security’s Silicon Valley Innovation Program for the first time in hopes of getting “innovative solutions” to improve security screening of passengers’ belongings.

Through a new solicitation under SVIP, it’s looking for companies with fewer than 200 employees who have not had a government contract exceeding $1 million in the past year to submit pitches for techniques to automatically classify the contents of a passenger’s bag in such a way “that can support future algorithm development for explosives and/or prohibited item threats.”

“This solicitation allows us to create a partnership between TSA and the nation’s innovators to develop revolutionary technology solutions to keep this country and our people safe,” William N. Bryan, the senior official performing the duties of undersecretary for DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate, said in a press release.

As an example use case, DHS describes a situation where a new electronic reader — like a tablet computer or other gadget — becomes more convenient for travelers, but then TSA finds out the “internal components of all electronic readers are being manipulated into threat objects that are more challenging to detect with existing X-ray screening technologies and procedures.”

To detect the threat, the agency could use a solution involving artificial intelligence to help the algorithm intuitively recognize new variations of an already identified threat, according to the solicitation.

Or in a similar scenario, if only the new type of e-reader was impacted, the agency would want a solution that didn’t categorize all e-readers as a threat — only the new ones, according to the solicitation.

Through the new solicitation, TSA is looking for technology that can “recognize, interpret and adapt to changes in objects, materials and other aspects of passenger property,” according to the press release.

The California-based SVIP has a streamlined application and pitch process to snag a certain subset of “non-traditional government contractors” who have innovative technology to offer the government, according to its website.

SVIP issues Other Transaction Agreements (OTAs) for prototypes, and many aspects of those agreements are negotiable, such as intellectual property terms, according to its set of frequently asked questions.

The agency is looking for solutions that can be easily deployed onto “hundreds of machines nationwide,” and those which consider the user experience. And the ideas have to be deployable to any screening hardware, according to the release.

Companies participating in SVIP are eligible for as much as $800,000 in funding through several phases.

“TSA is excited to partner with the Silicon Valley Innovation Program for the first time and engage with the startup community,” TSA Administrator David Pekoske said in a press release. “The current threat environment requires a proactive and agile agency that coordinates closely with partners in government and industry. This is key to identifying the very best ideas for increasing security while easing the passenger experience.”

Applications are being accepted on a rolling basis, but there are four quarterly deadlines, the first of which is July 13. The final quarterly deadline is April 17, 2019.

SBA Small Business Week hackathon created ‘real substance’

Sixty-five developers, user experience designers, entrepreneurs and other tinkerers recently descended one Friday on the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. They drank coffee, they raced drones and by that Sunday each of the 13 teams had built an app designed to help American small businesses with financial management responsibilities.

All things considered, the National Small Business Week hackathon, a partnership between the Small Business Administration and the credit card company Visa, “worked out really well,” G. Nagesh Rao, of SBA, told FedScoop.

Top ideas that stood out from the April 27-29 event included an integration for the popular office messaging software Slack that manages small businesses’ invoices and payments (this one won the $10,000 grand prize); a business intelligence solution that drew on a whole host of Visa and SBA APIs; an app that would allow small businesses to connect with social media influencers for marketing purposes; and a chatbot project that would allow users to get pertinent small business support information from the SBA via the Amazon Alexa.

SBA CIO Maria Roat served as a judge, and agency Administrator Linda McMahon even showed up to give out the prizes. “She was like ‘Wow… this is really ingenious. We need to be doing more of this,'” Rao said, of McMahon’s experience.

The event was a first “in a long time” for SBA, Rao said. But it left a positive mark — the agency is “very interested” in building off the momentum and being part of similar hackathons moving forward.

BeMyApp, the company that facilitated the event, has run “hundreds” of hackathons over its eight years in business but few, if any, with a U.S. government partner. “It was really cool,” project manager Patrick Medina told FedScoop. “This event helped people kind of re-think the way that the government is trying to help small businesses.”

“There’s real substance here,” Rao reflected. “Let’s build off this. Let’s not just do it because it looks cool — yeah, that’s an added benefit it’s cool and fun — but there’s actual tangible benefit here to crowdsource better ideas and better data solutions and help us convey the information better. This is all part of the demystification and democratization of information from the federal government.”

One key element of the weekend’s value to SBA, Rao said, was seeing which available agency open datasets interest developers and, on the flip side, what data developers would like but perhaps can’t get. This will help inform the agency’s data management decisions moving forward, he suggested.

And the SBA wasn’t the only federal data owner present — members of the code.gov and data.gov teams also showed up to mentor hackathon participants and introduce them to the available federal open datasets. Medina told FedScoop that the federal teams took a “very involved approach” in helping out.

“It was just a lot of fun,” Rao said. “It was a nice way to kick off National Small Business Week.”

ODNI and GSA want to help smaller agencies manage supply chain risk

With the federal government putting a more watchful eye on the cybersecurity vulnerabilities within IT supply chains, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is looking for new ways to provide agencies with information to manage their risk.

Speaking at symposium hosted by D.C. law firm Venable, Joyce Corell, assistant director for supply chain and cyber at ODNI’s National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said that with the increasing number of contractors the government works with, agencies need to assume there will be vulnerabilities in their supply chain from third-party suppliers. Resilience has to be baked in, she said.

“It’s not the all-hazards kind of resilience, but if you are going to have to live in a messy environment, are you thinking through resilience from a cybersecurity perspective and from a risk reduction perspective,” she said.

An agency probably should know, for example, if a supplier farther away on the chain might have filed for bankruptcy or been bought out by a foreign company, she said. While Cabinet-level agencies may have the resources to pursue such due diligence through accessing information networks like a Bloomberg terminal, smaller agencies could be limited to using mere internet searches to stay up-to-date on where weaknesses could develop.

So Corell said ODNI is working with the General Services Administration to develop a product that smaller agencies can use to keep track of developments with their supply chain providers.

“They are in a position where they can put in place something like an information service to make access to due diligence more readily accessible to agencies that are under-resourced,” she said.

The basic concept has become popular of late, with the Department of Homeland Security has recently begun a program that offers cybersecurity risk assessments to critical infrastructure companies centered on products that could introduce network vulnerabilities, following the government’s Kaspersky ban.

But for some agencies, Corell said due diligence has become a “cottage industry” where access to the supply chain information is determined by resource allocation. By ensuring that all agencies have access to information that could affect their risk further down the supply chain, they can take steps to prepare for it.

“Often times, there is a minimal amount of functionality that people would like to have from that type of data,” she said. “For example, if you get into business with a firm and in the life of your business relationship with them, they end up in a financially vulnerable perspective and are about to file for bankruptcy, that’s information you might want to know. The algorithms for bankruptcy predictors have been out there for quite some time, so that’s information that you would like to have pushed to you.”

Corell said she anticipated that GSA would release a request for information to industry for market research on a potential information service sometime later this year.

Trump’s Office of American Innovation must be more transparent, senators say

Questions have long been swirling about what, exactly, the White House’s Office of American Innovation does. Now, two senators are getting in on the questioning.

In an April 25 letter to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., and Gary Peters, D-Mich., ask for documentation on what the office — led by presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner — is up to.

“Technology and innovation are critical to our modern economy,” the letter begins. “Exciting developments in artificial intelligence, telemedicine, transportation, and countless other functions mean that strong leadership is required to ensure our nation’s success in the twenty-first century. That is why we have interest in writing you today to request information related to the White House’s Office of American Innovation.”

News reporting on the subject, the letter goes on to say, has been less than satisfactory. The senators cite a Buzzfeed article from March in which a dozen people inside or close to the White House told a reporter they have “no real idea” what OAI does.

There has been some public activity, though: Since its creation, OAI has been involved in a variety of IT modernization efforts, including the administration’s IT Modernization Report. The office also teamed up with the General Services Administration to launch the new Centers of Excellence initiative. Members Chris Liddell, who now has an additional role as deputy chief of staff for policy, and Matt Lira have often joined the speaking circuit to talk about the administration’s approach to modernizing government services.

The senators’ letter also mentions the run of recent departures from the office, including Reed Cordish and spokesperson Josh Raffel.

“This high level of turnover raises concerns about the effectiveness of the office,” the letter states.

The senators go on to request that Kelly provide a number of documents, including a list of all private sector partners the office has met with as well as the dates of these meetings; a list of all current and former office staffers; and details on the office’s budget.

OAI was created by presidential memorandum in March 2017 within weeks of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The memo sets the office up to “bring together the best ideas from Government, the private sector, and other thought leaders to ensure that America is ready to solve today’s most intractable problems,” a mission Politico called “almost comically broad.”

“The goal of OAI is admirable, but these recent reports suggest that rather than encouraging efficiency in government, the office is potentially a vehicle for cronyism and waste,” the senators’ letter concludes.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.