White House calls CIOs and other agency leaders to summit on federal use of AI
The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy is gathering agencies’ tech leaders next week to hear about the use of artificial intelligence in government.
A “broad range” of federal IT officials — including chief information officers, chief data officers and chief technology officers — have been invited to the White House for a summit Monday to highlight current AI use cases across government and discuss future applications.
The meeting will be led by OSTP staff, namely U.S. CTO Michael Kratsios and Director Kelvin Droegemeier, in support of the Trump administration’s American AI Initiative. The agency has also invited members of academia and tech companies focused on AI to attend.
Lynne Parker, OSTP assistant director for AI, said Wednesday at the Billington CyberSecurity that the summit will highlight “a number of the key ways that government is actually making good use of AI” in improving services and delivering solutions to complex challenges.
Parker said there is a “wide variety” of applications the technology currently found around government but also described them as “mundane” — the “the low end of AI,” things like “business processing kinds of tasks, all the way up to humanitarian search and rescue.”
The summit will focus on those more basic applications, but it will also address “areas of key impact” in AI research and development and what’s to come, she said.
Parker highlighted two of the participating agencies: the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.
Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, director of DOD’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, will discuss his team’s work. He detailed the progress the JAIC has made over the past year and said 2020 will be a “breakout year” during a recent media roundtable.
NIH, on the other hand, will present on how it is using AI “to better index medical literature to advance the use of medical literature in R&D,” Parker said.
OSTP will also dedicate part of the summit’s agenda Monday to discussing the impacts of AI on the workforce, a spokesperson said.
The White House has made AI one of its major strategic focuses in the past year. President Trump issued an executive order in February launching his administration’s cohesive plan for American leadership in the development of artificial intelligence, called the American AI Initiative. Since then, the administration has also released its 2019 update to the National AI Research and Development Strategic Plan, directing federal agencies to partner with the private sector and universities in their artificial intelligence programs.
