A call to action to improve the federal hiring experience; DARPA competition shows promise using AI to find and patch bugs

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management issued a new memo on Wednesday calling on federal agencies to to improve the hiring experience for job seekers and officials who hire them. Among the various calls to action in the memo, the guidance orders agencies to develop hiring objectives that are informed by data-driven workforce planning, promote collection and use of data on the time it takes to hire people, and ensure that systems used in hiring are being effectively used to measure and track the priorities in the memo.

Last weekend at DEF CON, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency convened 90 teams and asked them to build autonomous agents to probe open-source code bases, find vulnerabilities and automatically fix them as part of its Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge. In the end, the 90 competitors were able to find 22 unique vulnerabilities in major open-source programs like the Linux kernel, automatically patching 15.

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