During this webinar, you will gain the unique perspective of top government cybersecurity experts:

• Sean Connelly, Federal Zero Trust Technical Architect, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
• Roy Luongo, CISO, US Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security
• Louis Eichenbaum, Zero Trust Program Manager, Department of the Interior
• Chris Roberts, Director, Federal Sales Engineering, Public Sector, Quest Software
• Steve Faehl, Federal Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft
• Wes Withrow, Senior Client Executive, Cybersecurity, Verizon
• Moderator: Luke McCormack, Host of the Federal Executive Forum

Panelists also will share lessons learned, challenges and solutions, and a vision for the future.

The post Federal Executive Forum Zero Trust Strategies in Government Progress and Best Practices 2024 first appeared on Federal News Network.

A few years ago, the Defense Department drafted a legislative proposal to get rid of principal cyber advisor positions across all services.

While this idea didn’t make it out of the Pentagon, three-plus years later, Chris Cleary, the former principal cyber advisor for the Department of the Navy, said that was a good thing.

Cleary, who left government recently and joined ManTech as its vice president of its global cyber practice, said the impact of the principal cyber advisor in the Navy is clear and lasting.

“This is challenging because all the services in the very, very beginning wanted to get rid of the principal cyber advisors. There was a legislative proposition that was trying to be submitted and Congress came over the top and said, ‘No, you’re going to do this,” Cleary said during an “exit” interview on Ask the CIO. “So year one in the job, I make the joke, I was just trying to avoid getting smothered by a pillow because no one wanted this position especially after we just stood up the re-empowered CIO office so what’s a PCA? And what’s this person going to do for the organization? I was very attuned to that and ready that if the decision is to push back on this creation, and maybe do away with the PCA job, I was just going to go back to being a chief information security officer. I was being a good sailor and focused on whatever are the best needs of the Navy. I was prepared to do that.”

The move to get rid of the principal cyber advisors never came to fruition and, instead, the Navy, and likely other military services, now see the value in the position.

Cyber advisor wields budget influence

Cleary said one way the principal cyber advisor continues to provide value is around budgeting for cybersecurity. He said each year his office submits a letter on the “budget adequacy” to the Defense Department’s planning process, called the Program Objective Memorandum (POM).

“I found that the PCA office really became the champion for advocating and supporting programs like More Situational Awareness for Industrial Control Systems (MOSAICS), which was a thing we were doing for operational technology systems ashore, and another product called Situational Awareness, Boundary Enforcement and Response (SABER), which was its cousin and for OT stuff afloat,” he said. “What you found is both of those programs are being championed by hardworking, honest Navy employees that just couldn’t break squelch to get a properly resourced or funded or programmed for. The PCA was able to champion these things within the E-Ring of the Pentagon. Things like MOSAICS, as an example, I am very proud of, we worked very closely with the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations and Environment, Meredith Berger. She very quickly recognized the problem, most of this fell kind of within her sphere of influence as the person responsible for resourcing all of the Navy’s infrastructure. She very quickly embraced it, adopted it and hired an individual within the organization to look at this specifically.”

Cleary said over the course of the next few years, he worked with Berger’s team as well as other cyber experts in the Navy and across DoD to do deep dives into how to secure OT.

When the Defense Department rolled out its zero trust strategy in November 2022, the services faced more challenges around operational technology than typical IT. Cleary said the PCA helped the Navy better understand the OT stack was more complex and the tools used for IT wouldn’t necessarily work.

“The further you get down closer to an actual device or controller you can’t just roll a firewall out against that,” he said. “They have their own vulnerabilities and risks associated with them. But they’re things that we haven’t traditionally looked at when you when I’m talking about OT, like weapon systems, defense, critical infrastructure, these massive foundation of things that not only enable what we do from an enterprise IT standpoint,  but we’ve got to keep the lights on and the water flowing, and the Aegis weapon system has lots of computers with it, but that isn’t an enterprise IT system so who’s looking at those, who’s resourcing those, it’s only been the last decade or so that we’ve seen a lot of these is legitimate target areas.”

Champion of attention, resources

Cleary said his office helped get the Navy to spend more money and resources on protecting operational technology because it wasn’t always a top priority.

The OT example, Cleary said, is exactly why Congress created the PCA.

“We didn’t do any of the work to create these things. We just champion them appropriately and ensure they got the attention they deserved. And then ultimately, the resourcing required so they can be successful,” he said.

Cleary said it was clear that after three-plus years as the principal cyber advisor for the Navy, the benefits outweighed any concerns.

He said with the cyber world becoming more convoluted and complex, the position helps connect dots that were previously difficult to bring together.

“I think Congress would come and ask a question and they would get 10 different answers from 10 different people. I’m not saying we got there. But the idea of the PCA was to get those 10 different answers from 10 different people and then try to consolidate that answer into something that made sense that we could agree upon and present that answer back to Congress,” he said. “I’m not going to say we fully succeeded there because there are a lot of ways around the PCA and the PCA offices, but I think as the offices get more and more established, organizations like Fleet Cyber Command for the Navy, the Naval Information Forces and others were seeing the benefit of the PCA’s job to be the middleman and deal with the back and forth.”

Continue to create trust

Cleary said toward the end of his tenure, these and other offices, including the Marines cyber office, started to work even more closely with his office on these wide-ranging cyber challenges. He said the principal cyber advisor was slowly, but surely becoming the trusted cyber advisor initially imagined.

“I use the analogy of a fishing line, when you start pulling out a fishing line and you’re not sure what the weight of the fishing line is, but if you break the line, it’s over. So the trick was to pull on it with just the right amount of tension without risking or breaking it,” he said. “I knew the PCA office was something new and if the relationships with those organizations became tenuous, or were cut off because of the PCA coming in and say, ‘Hey, you shall do this or that,’ it wasn’t going to work. The way I envisioned the role of PCA was not to tell anybody inside the organization how to operationalize their own environments. My whole job was to go to them and understand what it is they needed, based on their experience and their expertise, and then get them that. The more that I could be seen as a value and not here to check their homework and poke them in the eye about their readiness, the more successful I’d be.”

Cleary said for the principal cyber advisor to continue to be successful, they have to continue to establish trust, understand their role is personality driven and focus on getting the commands the money and resources they need to continue to improve their cyber readiness.

The post Why the principal cyber advisor ended up being a good thing first appeared on Federal News Network.

More than a quarter of the federal workforce is feeling burnout, according to a recent study, making them more likely to leave their agency or feel less engaged in their work.

A recent Gallup study of more than 5,400 survey respondents finds 26% of federal employees say they “very often” or “always” feel burned out at work.

Rob DeSimone, associate principal of workplace initiatives at Gallup, says that level of burnout can lead to high attrition rates.

“When people are burned out, they’re much, much more likely to leave their agency,” DeSimone said.

The study also finds a high attrition rate can also lead to higher labor costs. Gallup estimates that in an agency of 10,000 employees, with an average salary of $50,000, low engagement contributes to $66 million in annual costs.

Gallup bases those figures on research from the Society for Human Resources Management, which shows it costs six-to-nine months of most employees’ salary to replace them — and that the cost is even higher for more senior-level vacancies.

Mike Ritz, executive director of Gallup’s Federal Government Initiative, said these costs also stem from burned-out employees feeling less productive and less engaged with their work.

“When you become actively disengaged, when you’re a person that literally feels miserable at their job, and you are disconnecting from your job, let’s face it, you might even take down the ship, if you had the opportunity — because you have that much contempt for the employer that they’re not meeting your needs,” Ritz said.

No ‘silver bullet’ solutions

The study takes a closer look at some of the federal employee stressors that agencies have anecdotally observed, but not fully quantified.

The Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, is addressing burnout among its health care workforce through its REBOOT task force. The VA, more recently, is looking at artificial intelligence tools to reduce administrative burdens on clinicians — a driver of burnout.

The Partnership for Public Service is also tracking a steady decline in work-life balance scores from federal employees, as measured by its Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings.

Ritz said there are no “silver bullet” solutions to address burnout across the entire federal workforce. But Gallup identified five root causes of these challenges — unfair treatment at work, unmanageable workloads, unclear communication from managers, lack of manager support and unreasonable time pressure.

“It seems like the more we learn, the more we realize that it’s very individual for each person, and what works for one might not work for another. So, this idea of, ‘Let’s just give everybody time off, that’ll work’ — well, that might work for some, but not for others,” he said.

The study also finds that employees sometimes cope with burnout in ways that only exacerbate the problem.

“[If] you’re a person that really is a high achiever — you like to [be] task-driven, and really achieve your tasks and get things done — a natural coping mechanism, when you’re feeling burned out is, ‘Let me just do more. Let me get to it faster’ … If those executing folks would stop and take their time to think through their situation, stop and pause, think through the situation there, they will reduce their burnout by 48%,” Ritz said.

Role of managers contributing to burnout

Management behavior plays a major role in a federal employee’s workplace experience. Gallup finds managers account for about 70% of their team’s engagement scores. The study also finds managers experience burnout at a higher rate (35%) than the federal employees they oversee (23%).

“If managers are burned out, that’s flowing down to all the employees within the agency,” Ritz said. “It’s the manager that can be the one that can help prevent and reverse burnout among the team, while also increasing productivity —  and that requires a very individualized approach to understand how can we manage workloads. How can we manage prioritization, alongside what the wellbeing of the team is, alongside what some of the pressures are coming from whatever the performance initiatives are? It’s really the manager that has that ability to juggle those three things.”

Jay Hoffman, chief financial officer for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, agreed that managers play a major role in combatting burnout within agencies.

“When managers are engaged, their employees are more likely to be engaged as well,” Hoffman said.

Effective managers also help employees manage workloads and communicate clear expectations. Gallup found that about 42% of federal employees said they know what’s expected of them at work.

“What that’s really saying is that managers themselves, oftentimes, might lack clarity — not so much about what it is they have to do — they’re usually very clear about that,” DeSimone said. “They might not know, ‘What are the relationships that I need in this organization? Who do I need to be collaborating with in order to achieve our bigger goal?’ And for some organizations, they may not even know what their bigger goal is, or where exactly they fit in.”

Gallup’s research into employee burnout also finds that the way people experience their workloads has a stronger influence on burnout than the number of hours worked.

“In the federal government, there are a lot of empty seats right now. A lot of folks have gone elsewhere, for a variety of different reasons. And of course, talent is at a premium across all sectors and industries,” Ritz said. “So, if you’re already feeling like your workload is tough, and then the guy next to you is no longer there, and the guy to your right is gone … did my workload just get even tougher? Who’s helping me manage that? Who’s the person that is having that strong influence of how I experienced that workload?”

A ‘game-changer’ for burnout? Meaningful conversations

Ritz said managers who have one “meaningful conversation” with an employee who reports to them at least once a week are a “game-changer” for burnout. That conversation can take as little as 15-30 minutes.

“It needs to be a conversation that talks about their goals, their personal development, things that have meaning to that person that is reporting up to that manager. And that can make a massive impact,” Ritz said.

James Egbert, branch chief for human capital strategy at the Department of Health and Human Services, meaningful one-on-one conversations with employees can make a huge difference in employee engagement.

“I’ve learned that if you want to improve employee engagement, you must engage with your people. Listen, ask and listen some more,” Egbert said.

Ritz said employees who strongly agree that their employer cares about their overall wellbeing are three times more engaged, and 71% less likely to report feeling burnout.

DeSimone the most important thing managers can do to address burnout is to provide “meaningful feedback.” That feedback, he added, is valuable for managers to give their supervisors, as well as the employees they oversee.

“Employees don’t want to wait three months or wait 12 months to figure out in their performance review what their mistakes are. They want to know, that minute, if not that day. They want to know, what did I do right? And also, what are my areas for improvement? They want to hear both,” DeSimone said.

The study finds that engaged federal employees are not just more productive — they’re also more likely to stay at their agencies.

“If you have somebody that is fully engaged, then you need 20% more in terms of higher pay, in order for that person to want to leave their current job. But if you have somebody who’s not engaged, then they’ll leave for a 0% increase,” DeSimone said. “They’re just looking for a better environment, and you can send it their way. They’re looking to be alleviated from that burnout situation they find themselves in.”

The post A quarter of federal employees feel burnout, causing high turnover and low morale, study finds first appeared on Federal News Network.

Two commercial space companies have agreed to work together on enhancing national security capabilities in the commercial space domain. Voyager Space and Palantir are using their abilities to help support and protect new technologies to be used on the International Space Station, and the soon to come Starlab commercial space station. I wanted to find out more about what this agreement means and get an overview of those involved, so I spoke to Matt Kuta, Co-Founder, President and Chief Operating Officer of Voyager Space.

Interview Transcript: 

Matt Kuta Voyager Space and Palantir are both Denver based companies. And Voyager, we’re a space technology company, largest commercial user in the world of the International Space Station. Notably, we’ve also are prime contractor to build through a public private partnership the replacement of the International Space Station, owned by private industry. And when we think through a space station and, the platform, there’s a lot of data that is generated in space, structured and unstructured data. And for lack of a better analogy, the ability to send all of that data down the pipes are restricted to pipes are kind of clogged. It’s very difficult to send all the data down to Earth to transmit it. So when you think about how do we capitalize on all this data that is, generated on a space station that’s privately owned, and then think through the concept of maybe computing on the edge, or you’re using a company like Palantir, and they’re proving credibility and capability of artificial intelligence and machine learning to basically kind of transmit down to the customer, the end user, the answer or and a few options of answers for them to then go use however the customer might need. That’s how you kind of arrive at this really unique partnership with Palantir and Voyager space, where Palantir is not in the business of building space station. Voyager is. At the same point Voyager is not in the business of, creating from scratch in organic AI machine learning capability. So that’s kind of, how it came about.

Eric White So when you say AI and the machine learning capability, you primarily mean creating a mechanism that can take all of the vast amounts of data that, you know, whatever machine you have up in space right now is gathering at all times and being able to do what with it, break it down, or just categorize it in a way that’s actually useful because it’s a lot it is a lot of data, as you mentioned.

Matt Kuta Right? Yeah, it’s a little bit of both. I, I actually turn out to say it’s a little bit of what the customer needs. Right. So, some customers might say, hey, here’s our constraints and our, our desired outcomes and send me the answer like it’s maybe it’s to track, certain things in the ocean or something like that, or send something down to a warfighter on the battlefield. And it’s a very precise solution we’re delivering to a customer. But it can also be to your other point, hey, you know, we have all this data. Here’s more curated assemblage or smorgasbord, if you will, of options for you to kind of go and use. But the bottom line is, how do we leverage a space station’s higher power supply computing on the edge to partner with a company like Palantir to send a much more concise, user friendly answer versus giant packets of data that, might not be able to all complete and be able to be transmitted down to Earth.

Eric White And so let’s focus back on those said customers. Who might that be? Would that be government agencies, I imagine, and maybe some other entities that could find that data useful. Who are you looking to work with? And what are the fruits of the labor going to look like?

Matt Kuta Yeah. Well, I say, as I mentioned today, Voyager is the largest commercial user of the International Space Station. As a matter of fact, Voyager and Palantir have actually already worked on a joint proposal to a Department of Defense customer already. So, they think to replace that ISS. It’s a spectrum of it’s a continuation of stuff we’re already doing today and what will occur in the future, if you think to those customers, certainly national security customers. But, given the future space station called Star Lab will be a commercial station, it can certainly also be both national security and commercial use. So, example could be maybe in Star Lab, we’re serving, a DoD customer, for example, maybe like United States Navy or something like that to help support naval assets. But we think through a commercial application. Maybe there’s some, tangential or direct application of helping a commercial company with our shipping vessels. Something like that.

Eric White Got it. We’re speaking with Matt Kuta. He is the president of Voyager Space. And so, as you talk about these national security implications, you know, just from a person who covers this, beat, and sees the amount of business that these commercial space companies have been doing with defense entities all over the world really, that amount of work together has exploded. And it’s part of the importance, you know, in defense industry and Defense agencies seeing the importance in space. But can you talk about a little bit about that and how, you know, how much more are you working with, government entities for national security purposes?

Matt Kuta Yeah. Well, it’s a bad a bad use of the word when talking to a space guy about the industry exploding. oh. Yeah.

Eric White Sorry. We’re full of puns here at Space Hour.

Matt Kuta Right, right. But when you think through rapidly growing, if you will. Yeah, it’s really exciting time to be in a space, sector. Commercial space sector. You know, just a couple things. One, the I’ll call it the national security apparatus is in this transition. And what you know it won’t happen completely for many reasons. But it’s in this transition where instead of the U.S. government owning some of these hard assets, government owned, government operated for decades, they’re seeing how efficient the private sector can be and looking to capitalize on that efficiency, both in the capital markets, that innovation nimbleness speed to execution and completion, and have the ability to buy it as a service. You know, we talked about the space station. You know, the International Space Station today is owned by the government. It’s really five space agencies, five kind of government entities. It’s NASA, the European Space Agency, Roscosmos, JASA, the Japanese space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. It’s effectively owned and capitalized by those five entities. And when the International Space Station is deorbited in 2030, which is publicly announced, the United States government will never own another low-Earth orbit space station. It will be owned by private industry. That’s what we’re working on. And when it is in orbit, the industry will own it. And then the customers governmental customers like NASA, ESA, national security customers, commercial customers like pharmaceutical companies, life science companies or basically build a microgravity laboratory. We’ll use it as a customer. And it’s an infrastructure investment. And there’s a precedent for this. If you go back in time to the late 1990s, early 2000s, and you ask yourself, well, who owned the space shuttle with the wings, you know, come in and land? That was the government. Government owned that NASA. And then, early 2000s around 2006 seven, the US government ended the space shuttle program. And so, we have to privatize it. And at a time, two companies want a public private partnership contract called a Space Act agreement. One was Orbital Sciences is with now orbital ATK, owned by Northrop Grumman. They built a Cygnus resupply vehicle down to about two dozen times to the ISS. And the second company was a four-year-old SpaceX. It had never launched a rocket. And fast forward 15-20 years, if you ask anybody, well, who owns SpaceX, who owns the rockets? No one says the government. They say, well, the company does, the investors do. And then the customer, the government, venture capital backed satellite companies, tourist, whoever pay SpaceX as a customer to launch their payload and they charge margin. You’re seeing it you being used in applications like in the in the Ukraine conflict with Russia and Planet and Max are you know, governments are buying imagery from commercial companies now. So, there’s lots of exciting, you know, developments in us.

Eric White And talking a little bit about the past, before I talk about the future, I’d like to get a little bit more into Voyager’s past itself. You’ve mentioned a couple times now on how you’re the biggest commercial user of the ISS. How did you all get to this point? And, you know, where did you all start? Where did you all actually start out?

Matt Kuta Yeah. So, over the last few years, Voyager has been basically vertically integrating core parts of the space station supply chain in anticipation that the US government was going to look to deorbit the ISS and privatized ISS. Over the last couple of years, Voyager has a series of seven acquisitions as part of our space station supply chain, strategy. And so, Voyager itself, the company is, just over four years old, the underlying operating history of Voyager, it goes back, you know, about 20 to 30 years.

Eric White And so now, towards the future, what is it looking like? You know, you just spoke a little bit about how you’re preparing for that deorbit of the ISS. But, you know, as this moves forward, do you all see you yourselves going into other areas of space acquisition or, you know, working in other sectors as you increase, you know, in the national security realm as well?

Matt Kuta Certainly. I mean, as I mentioned, we do a lot of work on the ISS today. We do a lot of work, in communications. I think, we have around over 4 million space flight hours in communication technology and in orbit. I think we have about 450 assets in space today. So, when you think through space station and the space station replacement, that’s, a very marquee program. It’s very exciting. It is a strategic asset. It’s a demonstration of sovereignty in orbit, to the to the United States and our allies. But at the same point, there’s a lot of other exciting, opportunities both within space sector that Voyager, you know, is already capitalize on. And we’ll continue to we’re very excited about the continued development of cislunar infrastructure, basically the place between Leo and in the moon, a lot of, for lack of a better word. Railroad tracks need to be laid between, the Earth and the moon. There’s a lot of stuff happening on the moon. So, I think there’s a lot of opportunity here or there over the next, you know, 10 to 20 years. And, of course, always, close to home. And Leo is kind of the government agencies have ceded through, you know, ceding investment, if you will. The lower Earth orbit, geography, and economy, they’ve been working on it for 70 years. And what you’re seeing in the last ten years is a slow transition, where now NASA and the government can free up budget dollars to go deeper into space. As they hand the baton and the keys to private industry for the stuff closer to home, in low-Earth orbit.

Eric White Matt Kuta is the co-founder, president, and chief operating officer at Voyager Space. Find the rest of this interview at our website at Federal News network.com. Search the Space Hour.

The post A joint business venture to help maintain national security in space first appeared on Federal News Network.

The National Institutes of Health’s BioData Catalyst cloud platform is only just starting to take off despite it being nearly six years old.

It already holds nearly four petabytes of data and is preparing for a major expansion later this year as part of NIH’s goal to democratize health research information.

Sweta Ladwa, the chief of the Scientific Solutions Delivery Branch at NIH, said the BioData Catalyst provides access to clinical and genomic data already and the agency wants to add imaging and other data types in the next few months.

“We’re really looking to provide a free and accessible resource to the research community to be able to really advance scientific outcomes and therapeutics, diagnostics to benefit the public health and outcomes of Americans and really people all over the world,” Ladwa said during a recent panel discussion sponsored by AFCEA Bethesda, an excerpt of which ran on Ask the CIO. “To do this, it takes a lot of different skills, expertise and different entities. It’s a partnership between a lot of different people to make this resource available to the community. We’re also part of the larger NIH data ecosystem. We participate with other NIH institutes and centers that provide cloud resources.”

Lawda said the expansion of new datasets to the BioData Catalyst platform means NIH also can provide new tools to help mine the information.

“For imaging data, for example, we want to be able to leverage or build in tooling that’s associated with machine learning because that’s what imaging researchers are primarily looking to do is they’re trying to process these images to gain insights. So tooling associated with machine learning, for example, is something we want to be part of the ecosystem which we’re actively actually working to incorporate,” she said. “A lot of tooling is associated with data types, but it also could be workflows, pipelines or applications that help the researchers really meet their use cases. And those use cases are all over the place because there’s just a wealth of data there. There’s so much that can be done.”

For NIH, the users in the research and academic communities are driving both the datasets and associated tools. Lawda said NIH is trying to make it easier for the communities to gain access.

NIH making cloud storage easier

That is why cloud services have been and will continue to play an integral role in this big data platform and others.

“The NIH in the Office of Data Science Strategy has been negotiating rates with cloud vendors, so that we can provide these cloud storage free of cost to the community and at a discounted rate to the institute. So even if folks are using the services for computational purposes, they’re able to actually leverage and take benefit from the discounts that have been negotiated by the NIH with these cloud vendors,” she said. “We’re really happy to be working with multi-cloud vendors to be able to pass some savings on to really advanced science. We’re really looking to continue that effort and expand the capabilities with some of the newer technologies that have been buzzing this year, like generative artificial intelligence and things like that, and really provide those resources back to the community to advance the science.”

Like NIH, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is spending a lot of time thinking about its data and how to make it more useful for its customers.

In CMS’s case, however, the data is around the federal healthcare marketplace and the tools to make citizens and agency employees more knowledgeable.

Kate Wetherby, the acting director for the Marketplace Innovation and Technology Group at CMS, said the agency is reviewing all of its data sources and data streams to better understand what they have and make their websites and the user experience all work better.

“We use that for performance analytics to make sure that while we are doing open enrollment and while we’re doing insurance for people, that our systems are up and running and that there’s access,” she said. “The other thing is that we spend a lot of time using Google Analytics, using different types of testing fields, to make sure that the way that we’re asking questions or how we’re getting information from people makes a ton of sense.”

Wetherby said her office works closely with both the business and policy offices to bring the data together and ensure its valuable.

“Really the problem is if you’re not really understanding it at the point of time that you’re getting it, in 10 years from now you’re going to be like, ‘why do I have this data?’ So it’s really being thoughtful about the data at the beginning, and then spending the time year-over-year to see if it’s something you should still be holding or not,” she said.

Understanding the business, policy and technical aspects of the data becomes more important for CMS as it moves more into AI, including generative AI, chatbots and other tools.

CMS creating a data lake

Wetherby said CMS must understand their data first before applying these tools.

“We have to understand why we’re asking those questions. What is the relationship between all of that data, and how we can we improve? What does the length of data look like because we have some data that’s a little older and you’ve got to look at that and be like, does that really fit into the use cases and where we want to go with the future work?” she said. “We’ve spent a lot of time, at CMS as a whole, really thinking about our data, and how we’re curating the data, how we know what that’s used for because we all know data can be manipulated in any way that you want. We want it to be really clear. We want it to be really usable. Because when we start talking in the future, and we talk about generative AI, we talk about chatbots or we talk about predictive analytics, it is so easy for a computer if the data is not right, or if the questions aren’t right, to really not get the outcome that you’re looking for.”

Wetherby added another key part of getting data right is for the user’s experience and how CMS can share that data across the government.

In the buildup to using GenAI and other tools, CMS is creating a data lake to pull information from different centers and offices across the agency.

Wetherby said this way the agency can place the right governance and security around the data since it crosses several types including clinical and claims information.

The post Understanding the data is the first step for NIH, CMS to prepare for AI first appeared on Federal News Network.

You may remember our interview last year with Collins Aerospace. A subset of RTX, it’s working with NASA to develop the next generation spacesuit. Well the company has hit a new testing milestone, recently demonstrating its capabilities in a zero-gravity environment. One of those who got to give the suit a test drive was Danny Olivas, chief test astronaut and director of mission systems at Collins Aerospace. I got the opportunity to ask him about the new suit and where things stand currently.

Interview Transcript: 

Danny Olivas So I joined Collins Aerospace probably almost a year ago, today. And I have, I was brought on initially, within engineering to help them build the next generation spacesuit, which is a follow-on spacesuit to the international space suit, which the NASA currently uses. And, this job really intrigued me, because one obviously has an affinity and, a special place in my heart for the EMU, the spacesuit which is on orbit. Did you know, five spacewalks? You know, back in my days at NASA. And so having an opportunity to participate in the next generation space suit, to me was a really exciting venture. Not only because I’m working on spacesuits, but when you consider the EMU was built by the same people at Collins Aerospace 40 years ago, and it’s still functioning today, you know, really gives me an opportunity as an engineer to contribute to something that, you know, could well outlive me. And then certainly is, is a testament to where this company is going, in the future of space exploration, human space exploration. So, it’s exciting to be part of that. You know, that that that bold venture. We are headlong into our test program. We’ve completed our preliminary design review of that replacement suit for ISS. And, we have just completed a couple of milestones. I’m happy to tell you about those, a little bit later on.

Eric White Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, why don’t we just get right into those milestones? You know, I imagine there’s got to be quite a bit of testing when you’re, designing a new spacesuit. What is the most recent one that has been accomplished?

Danny Olivas Well, so for those who don’t know the difference between the old suit and the new suit, the best way to consider them is by considering what’s the same about them. And basically, they have two arms, two legs, a helmet, and they’re white. Beyond that, everything is different and there’s a reason why it’s different. The old suit had for the workhorse that it was for the International Space Station and NASA’s space shuttle program. Is that it was it was conceived at a time when we didn’t know what really the suit was going to be asked to go do. And then we went we built the International Space Station. Well, since then, we have learned a lot. And Collins is embedded those lessons learned into understanding what we can do for the future of space suit building. Some things, for example, that we learned were that the design of the suit was such that it was very restrictive in its motion. Weren’t really sure how the suit was going to be used. And then once we realized how it was going to be used, we realized, well, we could have made some improvements had we known then what we know now. So, we’re actually doing that. We’re taking what we have learned and actually embedding that. So, mobility is an issue. Also being able to fit the anthropometric range that NASA has been hiring astronauts for over, you know, since the beginning of the shuttle program. Originally, the space shuttle was built, to handle astronauts that were between the fifth and 95th percentile of the U.S. population. We are building a suit that will handle the, an opportunity to fit between the one and 99th percentile of the entire global population. So, it’s really a diverse suit. And with that comes all sorts of challenges of, of correcting things that, that you saw in your previous design and implementing them for future designs. So, we just have come off of a series of tests. One was a 1G test, basically just some basic demonstration of mobility and fit in the suit in a 1G environment. And then more recently, in January, we completed our Zero-G test, or microgravity tests, where we subjected myself and another colleague of mine, Dan Burbank, to 40 parabolas each over the Gulf of Mexico, 22nd increments of micro G environment to do a variety of demonstrations to give confidence to NASA that not only do we know how to build a suit, but it can satisfy all the objectives and more. What’s going to be required of the suit in the future?

Eric White So specifically in the tests, you say 20-second increments. Are you okay on the next 20 seconds, I’m going to try and do a flip for Croucher. And you, you know, obviously you’re probably looking at more than just actual movement, but what are you trying to test within those 20-second increments?

Danny Olivas Well, you know, it is one of those things where you just like doing a spacewalk, you know, you develop a choreography if you don’t know what you’re doing when you go into a test, you’re not going to know what you’ve done and whether you’ve done what you thought you were supposed to go do. So, we actually started planning early on the test team and we would practice in our laboratory downstairs and basically, you know, lay all the equipment out on the floor that we were going to be evaluating. And then we would go through each one of the parabolas. So, you know, for those who are unfamiliar with the Zero-G flight profile, you basically, you know, fly these, you know, giant arcs. You know, you go up really high in about 35,000ft and come barreling down to about, you know, 16,000ft. Then you pull back up again. And during that time frame of the fall, the plane is supposed to match roughly the equivalent acceleration of gravity, so that inside the plane you feel like you’re weightless because it happens pretty quickly. Each one of those parabolas, you experience micro-G for about 20-seconds before you kind of have to start pulling yourself back up because you don’t want to go into the ocean. That’s a that’s a bad day, right? So those pull ups or pull outs are actually, somewhere in the order of like two G’s. So, you go from a series of zero g to two Gs to zero G to two Gs to zero G to two G’s. That’s all of 40 times during the flight. Hence the name is lovingly called the Vomit Comet. Right? And so that term before it is a very provocative flight profile, but it’s really the only way to test in a micro-G environment here on planet Earth. There is no other place. We don’t have a room at NASA that you can push a button, and all of a sudden everything starts to flow. That just doesn’t happen. And so, it’s a way for us to test those things that we cannot test in a 1G environment. It’s also meant to test things that we cannot necessarily test in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, which actually is going to be the next step for us now that we’ve completed this, these series of tests, I should say. Our next objective is in the next couple of months is to get into the big, you know, swimming pool at NASA. You know, take our suit, throw belly button inside, toss it inside the tank and have them kind of work around on the space station, similar to what the current EMU does. That is what we refer to as us as our task capability assessment. You know, and the system that we’re testing right now, by the way, is a pressure garment system. You know, we have, as you might know, we actually have two, two teammates, ILC Dover and Ocean Air and Space Systems. ILC Dover is the prime on the pressure garment system. That’s the thing that the astronaut is in when they’re doing a spacewalk. Now, that’s something that we can test in zero G and one G and a Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. Collins Aerospace is prime on the primary life support system. So, it’s a backpack in place. Now it turns out that that that primary life support system only functions in the vacuum. And all. It’s meant really to operate in space. So, you can’t test that, like in a Zero-G environment or in a, in a swimming pool environment. We have some tests that are slated later on this year, which will ultimately, you know, you know, it’ll the apex of that is going to be a test where we put a person most likely me, in the suit with a primary life support system in a vacuum chamber. And we have one of our other, partners. Oceaneering is providing, a lot of our interfaces with the ISS. So, at that point we’ll be testing their interfaces out as well to make sure that, you know, that everything works together. And, you know, we can do what we need to do in order to be able to get the crew ready to go outside to do a spacewalk.

Eric White Gotcha. Okay, so you said most likely yourself as a former NASA astronaut, you’ve worn the old suits. I’m just curious, you know, when you first got involved with this, was there something at the top of your list where you were like, okay, the first thing I’m suggesting is, you know, more space in the crotch area. What was there something that was at the top of your mind that you were like, please do this first?

Danny Olivas Yes. And it’s actually been my rallying cry for everything that I do. And that is diversity. You know, one of the things that the astronaut that the, EMU was unable to do was to take advantage of the full diversity, that the crew office provided, primarily because it was built for what at the time, we didn’t know really know what kind of astronauts, typically male astronauts. Right. So, as it turns out that, a guy is almost six foot tall, you know, I weigh 200 pounds plus. Don’t tell anybody. Right? It’s just between the two of us. And would you believe it or not, the smallest suit that was available is the one I trained in. And it was actually the medium sized, because they do make a small. Now, there’s a variety of reasons as to why and how we got to the point where we never ended up making a smaller version. But people who were anthropologically much smaller than I am, which is a large percentage of the population, by the way, meant that that suit fit was not like an ideal suit fit. So they had some strategies that they would use everything from putting foam and cushions and harnesses and whatnot inside the suit, but it put a portion of or a crew office in a kind of an unfair disadvantage in their training for EMUs, which meant that if you take a look at the backgrounds. So, if you take a look at the people who actually gone off and done EVAs what you’re going to notice. Very few females actually have done EVA’s. And the reason being is because unfortunately, they were hampered by an ill-fitting suit. So, by designing this suit, really for the full anthropometric range that we’re really targeting with the suit, we’re going to open up human exploration tremendously, because now you’ll have a much more diverse population that can actually participate in that. And so, to me, that has been one of the most important things in that I have front of my mind. Safety first and foremost. Right. But equally up there is the fact that this suit has to basically fit everybody and for a suit that was a workhorse for as many years as it has been. We’ve really been able to leverage into what we’ve learned about the previous suit, to be able to make those really kind of not just incremental changes or like, you know, significant changes in the suit to allow smaller crew members to be able to actually operate effectively and efficiently in the suit.

Eric White Yeah. You know, with the EMU, you know, why? Why weren’t those little incremental changes able to be made? Was that just, you know, you either have to make the whole suit and you can’t really make the changes was not designed that way. Was that part of the issue or was it coming down to the almighty dollar?

Danny Olivas Yeah, that’s a great question. And I would say it was a mixture of both programmatic economics and then just geometry. The first talk, first about the geometrical aspect of the geometry of the suit is that on the front of the suit you have the display and control module. That’s the intelligence that you need to communicate with everything that’s in the, in the backpack, the primary life support system. It’s what controls your fans and your power and your communications, etc., etc.. So it turns out that if you’re going to make a smaller, hard upper torso, which was kind of the, like the vest, if you will, of the suit, right, that you attach your arms to and you attach the legs to that was made out of fiberglass. And so, if you made the chest portion of that too small, like you brought the shoulders in too narrow. Now the DCU or DCM wouldn’t fit. And so, there was a geometry problem, right. And then there was the fact that, you know, there was also programmatic issues of like, okay, we have a lot of competing things at NASA that we’re having to go fund. Where are we going to put our money? And then it was like, how much is it going to cost to actually build a very small hut in order to be able to accommodate these, you know, the rest of the, the office. And so now you spent a lot of time looking at that, you know, I don’t know exactly how and the real behind why each one of those decisions were made. But the fact of the matter is, is that we never got to the point where we had a small hut available. You know, so now we are actually building a hard, a hybrid upper torso. So, it’s part hard and part, soft, like the, like the arms and the legs. Right. So, this hybrid system actually allows us to really only offer two sizes. And it turns out that the overlap in the sizes is significant enough that we should very easily be able to accommodate the entire anthropometric range that there were looking for. So not only is a suit want to be more robust in its ability to be used by other people and different types of people, but it’s also going to be safer. One of the other challenges that we had with the previous suit is that the shoulder joints, because of the way that they were oriented and the fact that it was a hard upper torso resulted in a lot of shoulder injuries for your astronauts. I think I heard one time a, one of the flight surgeons reflect that 85% of the people who did spacewalks actually suffered some level of shoulder injury or trauma. And, you know, so we had shoulder injuries. We had, you know, people who had, you know, severe hand injuries and numbness. We had, you know, back strains and things of that sort. So, the idea is to build a suit that is more comfortable and more accommodating to the astronauts. That’s safer for the astronauts. It’s, you know, comfortable for them. That’s intuitive for the astronauts. And, you know, we have a slogan that we like to say that this is a spacesuit that is by astronauts for astronauts. And we really do mean it is like we’re taking the astronaut experience it, and we’re embedding it in everything that we do.

Eric White You mentioned a few of the tests that you have coming up, where you yourself could be stepping into a vacuum chamber. I’m wondering, you know, do you miss space? And do you ever see yourself being the first one to wear this suit? Actually, on the on the or not on the ground, I guess, in the air, back up in space.

Danny Olivas Well, look, Eric, I’m going to be honest with you, I, I’ve had an opportunity to do my do. You know, I was blessed to have flown on the space shuttle when I did. I don’t I’ve never said to myself, boy, I could fly in space again because I did have my opportunity. And that’s part of why I’m here, is because I feel like it’s a way for me to pay back the opportunity that I was given. I’m working with the same group of, you know, same company, the same group of engineers and people and many of them that were here back when I was with the program and their suit kept me safe. Brought me back from five spacewalks. You know, basically in a place where human beings were never meant to live and work. And yet this suit allowed us to do so as human beings. Right. And so, it’s my opportunity now to give back to the next generation of astronauts. You know, this suit. What makes me excited about this suit is it’s not just a suit about going up and replacing the one it’s on space station. You know, after space station’s gone, we’re going to have commercial destinations. Those are going to be there. CLD is going to have, you know, maybe one, two, who knows how many types of space stations which will be on orbit. That’ll be commercial. And, anytime you build a space station out there, you need to go outside and do work. And so, this suit is basically meant to be a microgravity suit. Additionally, the technology is 90 to 95% extensible to the lunar surface. So, we’re not just building the suit with the intention of if it only existing in low Earth orbit. We’re looking at a cislunar. So, between here and the moon we’re looking at gateway, which is going to be orbiting the moon. And then also boots on the ground at the lunar surface. This suit will be able to do well once you get to the lunar surface, you have some different requirements that you have to meet. But again, it’s only going to be 9 or 5 to 10% of the additional changes. Mostly, the suit will be the exact same suit that you see on ISS.

Eric White And they can be as short as they need to be, astronauts.

Danny Olivas Exactly, exactly they that while I like to think I do like to think of it from a standpoint of flight, I just like to think that it’s going to it’s going to greatly allow for the full complement of astronauts that are out there. It’s going to diversity is an important thing for me, being, you know, Mexican American, you know, being the, you know, the first Hispanic or first Mexican American to do a spacewalk. And I know the importance of, of enabling these kinds of, of opportunities. And so, I’m excited to be part of this and give back in a way that I feel like I’m, again, paying back for the opportunities that I was given with the space shuttle program. This is not a spacesuit about astronauts. This is a spacesuit about human beings here on Earth who put the suit together for those astronauts. You know, I’m so proud to be working alongside all the engineers that I work with. They’re the ones who I wish you could talk to because they’ve got great stories. You know, I was just having lunch with, you know, five of them today, young, young engineers. And it was just it just so exciting to see them excited about the work that they’re doing, the contributions that they’re making. And everyone has zeroed in on this mission of building, you know, a safe space suit that is going to take the lessons that we learn from the past and propagate them forward. You know, many of our names will never be remembered in history. I know mine; I don’t care if anyone remembers me in the history, but the fact that my thumbprints show up on the suit alongside many of the other thumbprints from everybody else I’m working with here today, gives me a great sense of pride. And so, this is why I’m an engineer. This is why I do what I do. This is why I’m happy to be where I’m at is because it’s really about that. This accomplishment is really about a testament to the teamwork here at Collins. And so, I’m just very proud to be here. And I’m happy for people to know that, that this is an engineering endeavor that makes human spaceflight possible.

Eric White Danny Olivas is chief test astronaut and director of mission systems at Collins Aerospace.

The post A major milestone for developing a new spacesuit first appeared on Federal News Network.

We all share life on this big blue rock, and we all share the space around it as well. So in order to get the most out of it from a business and defense aspect, the U.S. is going to need allies. So how are the relationships between the U.S. and strategic partners when it comes to space-related goals? The RAND Corporation was recently tasked with looking into that very topic. To learn more about what that research found, I got the chance to speak with Bruce McClintock, Senior Policy Researcher and lead of RAND’s Space Enterprise Initiative.

Interview Transcript: 

Bruce McClintock So in about the 2022-time frame. Lieutenant General Whiting and he was at the time was in Space Operations Command commander, a Beatles commander in United States Space Force, asked Rand to take a close look at how the US was currently cooperating with select allies on space operations matters and where they’re all ….. those relationships. So that was very active in the project in that time.

Eric White All right. And so, in looking through that, you know, what entities did you speak with, and how did you go about trying to find out those answers for them?

Bruce McClintock So we used a very rigorous approach where the project started off by. Well, throughout the course of the project, we conducted over 140 interviews with more than 115 people that represented 24 different organizations. And those organizations included representatives from select allied countries, NATO Space Center, …, Space Command headquarters, EUCOM headquarters, several Department of Air Force organizations all the way up to senior policy level. And then below, on top of those interviews, we actually conducted 13 different site visits, to include visits to the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and then several U.S. military networks. In conjunction with all that, we then analyzed close to 200 different documents, ranging from U.S. policy documents to plans for space operations to country specific documents. So, it’s a pretty rigorous, very holistic approach to conducting the research for the project.

Eric White All right. And so, then the next question is what some of your findings were. So, let’s go through it. You did a lot of site visits. You talked to a lot of allies. When it comes to space and U.S. space policy, you know, what were some of the concerns that that you were hearing from counterparts in other governments?

Bruce McClintock So one of the most common things that we heard from counterparts in other governments are what they often euphemistically referred to as the gap, or the policy or practice gap, if you will. And what they mean by that is that the U.S. was often cited as being very much publicly committed to integrating allies in the space activities and operations. But at the end of the day, in many cases didn’t deliver at the level where it was stated publicly.

Eric White Were there any, you know, examples of this that you can give me that were brought up? And, you know, I don’t need you to go through the litany of, of any policy failures, but just an example of what they meant by that.

Bruce McClintock Sure. So, you know, one of the most frequent, especially in interviews with specific allies, one of the most frequent examples that we would encounter once the failure of the US in many cases to fully include exchange officers from other countries in space related discussions or activities. And I think it’s an important distinction here. In the U.S. parlance, there are two types of foreign officers involved in activities. There are liaison officers, which are officers that represent the interests of their country, but their liaison with the United States. So, it’ll be a representative of their foreign country that might be assigned to the US or another nation as a liaison. On the other hand, there are exchange officers which are intended to be a foreign national that are embedded in the US positions of filling US roles and responsibilities. And often what we heard was that means these allies will put into exchange ops or billets. And were told they were going to be doing a specific job in support of US national interests. Often weren’t given access to information that was necessary to perform the job that they were posted to. But that’s just one example. There were many others, but that’s not that was a very common.

Eric White Yeah. This comes down to you know, disclosure policies. I mean, the U.S. works in many arenas with its allies, whether it be, you know, on the waters or even in ground operations or anything like that. My question is, why is space such a vexing problem for when it comes to what information we can disclose to our allies and what we can’t? What exactly are the hurdles? Or, you know, is it just, you know, bureaucratic? Oh. I’m sorry. You know, you should have access to this, but you for some reason, don’t.

Bruce McClintock So I think it’s a combination of at the highest level and it’s just an evolution, based on information sharing between two different major departments in the U.S.. So that’s Department of Defense and intelligence community. At that very high level, even though their guidance flowed originally from the same executive order, they’ve both taken different approaches to that kind of process for information sharing. And then it does flow down because of that high level disconnect between those two organizations. It does flow down to lower levels, where there are essentially bureaucratic impediments that could be overcome, but there’s not necessarily motivation to overcome those impediments that exist.

Eric White Yeah. And what were some of the solutions that you all garnered? And then we can also get into some of the other, other aspects of this report. But as far as that solutions go. What is the idea there of, you know, making sure that everybody is at least on the same page when it comes to information sharing?

Bruce McClintock So one of the one of the very high-level things we recommended was that we thought there should be a deputy secretary defense level coordination effort with the ODNI. Obviously, director of National intelligence that really spanned that divide between DoD policies. And what is generally referred to as the ICC, the intelligence community policy on information sharing. And that that would be a very high-level effort, a working group if you will, that we thought would take a couple of years, but we thought we could be that high level because there are still disagreements within DoD components and uncertainty about their own internal DoD roles and responsibilities. So, because of those two aspects, we recommended a very high-level working group billet.

Eric White We’re talking here with, Bruce McClintock. He’s a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation and also the lead of the Rand Corporation Space Enterprise Initiative. So, let’s get a little bit more holistic here. What is the optimal amount of coordination that needs to happen between the U.S. government and its allies when it comes to space? What would be the ideal situation there?

Bruce McClintock I’d say before we get into the actual optimal level of involvement, I think the first step to the United States is just come up with a coherent holistic policy on involving our allies, and that doesn’t exist right now. That contributes somewhat to the capacity do gap problem. Some of the outstanding options, and one of the things that we would say more about holistic approach is it’s not every ally is going to be treated the same way. Right. So, this isn’t about opening the floodgates that we will and sharing everything with every ally. There needs to be a thoughtful approach to how much we’re going to share with people allies. But the US need to be clear upfront about mutual relationship levels so that that’s point one. I would note on that. Once you have decided on those different levels. And by the way, this is what this is a relationship that goes two ways. There are different allies that want different levels of interaction with the United States. Not every ally wants to be fully integrated with beyond states in terms of space operation. And that’s, of course, their national sovereign right. So, both sides need to be clear with each other. Once you establish those different relationship level expectations by ally, then you set up a U.S. structure that addresses those different levels. And the U.S. has made some progress in this area. Some of that starts with just basic information exchange and information sharing at the fully unclassified level. So, this is not always about having a very highly qualified conversation. That makes sense.

Eric White Yeah it does. And you know, not to be you know, two to our own horn or anything. We’ve got a pretty good space program especially you know; we’ve got the Space Force that now is doing its own thing. What exactly does the U.S. need or rely on its allies? You know, the major allies out there? You know, since their space programs may not be as advanced, what exactly are is the U.S. getting from these, allies in the space arena?

Bruce McClintock Two broad terms to describe what the advantages to working with allies, because the US don’t have a very robust, very strong space program when you speak about national security in general. But the first thing I would talk about is coverage of sector one, diversity. And there are other aspects that we could talk about later in life. So, the coverage thing, I think, is the one that is arguably the most important commercial quality, because space is not just about putting things on orbit, it’s also about being able to detect, characterize and track things that are on it. And that requires geographic locations across the globe. Right. So, we’ve been doing a little use of the parameter space power. Now we need geographic access to other territories to be able to improve our space situational awareness network and also our space domain awareness infrastructure. And the same is true for potential future adversaries like China. Like, so we’re out pursuing locations to be in the satellite tracking territory and not China. So that’s one very obvious example. It’s the information sharing like space situational awareness, which is the most fully developed program in the U.S.  The U.S. has a large number of agreements signed with other nations and other entities or SSA Galaxy. So that goes to the coverage piece. But there’s also value in diversity and space capabilities. Things like things that are on orbit but also ground stations become more vulnerable to threats. It’s good to have a diverse set of resources available.

Eric White Are there other areas. And you talked a little bit about it as far as intelligence sharing and coordinating with ODNI, are there other areas where the U.S. government works with its allies, you know, in other arenas that these space policy folks can draw from and see? Okay, so that’s how they do it. You know, maybe we can apply that idea when it comes to, coordination on the space end when you’re up, up higher a little bit.

Bruce McClintock So for our research, we took a pretty close look at a couple of other domains to draw lessons in best practices from those other domains. And the first area that we looked at in particular was nuclear weapons cooperation. For a couple of reasons. We thought that would be an interesting case. First of all, nuclear weapons will probably be most carefully guarded about capabilities, most sensitive, even more so than space capabilities. And so, we wanted to see if there was even any potential share at that level. And there was, in the mid-1950s, we had the United States had exceptional capabilities in that domain, but the Soviet Union was a threat to us. And so, the United States worked closely with the United Kingdom to come up with, neutral …. That were related to nuclear weapons. There was some level of data sharing between the United States and United Kingdom. And there was other, information exchange and coordination that, was important if you consider to be best practices. We also looked at, special operations, any newer area where there has been much touting about being able to cooperate with allies and share information in a way that hasn’t been demonstrated yet in inspection of it. So those are two areas that we looked at. Looked at the two others, two clearly are in charge and sharing opinions, see, and the three primary areas limiting jamming.

Eric White All right. And so yeah, there’s really nothing more that you can say about what’s at stake when you talk about nuclear weapons, but what’s at stake when it comes to space. And, you know, if we don’t get this right as far as working and we’re getting the most that we can out of these relationships with our allies in that domain.

Bruce McClintock I think it, I’ll start at the lowest level of what’s at stake. It’s just a reduction in efficiency. And by that, I mean, in some cases, if allies feel like they can’t depend on the US to share important national security related information about space, then these allies that have significantly more limited resources than the United States has, they feel obligated to invest in their own capabilities for things as simple as space situational awareness, which I talked about earlier, whereas we had a much more robust information sharing, relationship where it was maybe not fully reciprocal, but it share the pieces of information that they could invest, that those resources in other aspects of space security that could be to the benefit of the U.S. So that’s one example. It’s reduced efficiency if we just don’t cooperate as well with our closest allies. If you move up the scale in terms of the significance of the impact, the adverse impact. If we don’t, find ways to become allied by design. There are things like reduced trust and willingness to depend on the United States in times of crisis when it comes to space. So those are now obviously more extreme, but they are package, and I don’t feel like they could count on the United States to share information when the quote unquote chips are down. Then they sometimes say, well, we need to figure out ways to be not only independent but have our own capability. And then there’s less of a need for them to turn to the US on geopolitical policy decisions.

Eric White Wrapping up here, I’ll give you a chance to say anything else on this topic that you think is important for the conversation. But if you could run through also just, you know, some of the other recommendations that you all made, based on what you found in, you know, talking and also what did DoD have to say about this? I guess we could actually ask them and include them in this.

Bruce McClintock Yeah. So I would say as far as what the DoD has to say about this, first of all, you know, I applaud the Department of Defense, starting with, Gerald Whiting for taking an interest in this topic and asking somebody like Rand to look at it because they knew that they were going to get an independent, objective and rigorous analysis of the problem. That we weren’t going to just tell them what they wanted to hear. So not only by initiating process, but then listening to throughout the course of the last couple of years and they provided preliminary insights and recommendations on our final findings and recommendations. I want to applaud, you know, the Department of Defense for being so willing to listen, because it’s not always easy to listen to something that might be tough love. They’re not telling you exactly what you want to hear. And in that vein, I think over the last couple of years, the Department of Defense has taken on some of the recommendation, not all of them by any means, but that’s their prerogative. But they have done things like made expanded the interaction with allies in select venues. So, they have grown and see SPO initiatives that combined space operations in which, you know, that used to be seven nations, it now 10. They’re working on our international space cooperation strategy that was informed by this Rand research. And it’ll also want to applaud a recent announcement from OSD, where they signed a memo that removes a lot of the legacy classification barriers that have inhibited the United States’ ability to collaborate across the U.S. and with allies. Now, that’s a direct example of a recommendation we made, not necessarily because of the Rand report, but in line with the Rand report’s findings and recommendations that the department backs. So, there been great steps taken. There’s a lot more to be done.

Eric White Bruce McClintock is senior policy researcher and lead of the Space Enterprise Initiative at the Rand Corporation. There is indeed more to the interview. You can find it along with a link to the report at Federal News network.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next. Governments aren’t the only ones joining forces to improve national security in space. Some commercial entities are as well. This is the space our on federal news network returning after this break I’m Eric White.

The post How well does the U.S. work with its allies when it comes to space? first appeared on Federal News Network.

Don Bauer, the chief technology officer of the State Department’s Bureau of Global Talent Management, said last month that the department recently obtained an Authority to Operate (ATO) to use AI on sensitive internal data.

“We’re literally looking at the next steps of how do we now leverage internal information and start making decisions that way,” Bauer said Feb. 29 during a Federal News Network-moderated panel at ATARC’s AI Summit in Reston, Virginia.

Before President Joe Biden’s sweeping executive order on AI in government last October,  agencies such as the Department of the Navy, General Services Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency had put limits on how their staffs could use generative AI tools in the workplace.

But Bauer said the State Department is taking a closer look at what generative AI means for its mission.

“The ability to summarize and pull data from multiple sources, and do a lot of information gathering really resonates with the diplomatic community,” Bauer said. “The State Department’s been very much forward-leaning on just telling everyone, ‘Go out and get an account and get familiar with the technology. Just make sure you don’t put any sensitive information into it.’”

The bureau is looking at generative AI to help develop career paths for State Department employees.

“We have a demonstration project to extract skills from resumes and start building out pipelines for civil servants, as far as career progression,” Bauer said. “If I identify a career path for you, then I’m using publicly available position descriptions, extracting those out, and then building up the ability for you to recognize skills you need. Then we’re going to tie that with our learning management system, so we can actually say, ‘If you want to be this person, here’s the skills you need and here’s how you can go get trained.'”

Along with this culture of experimentation, Bauer said the State Department is prioritizing workforce training around AI.

“We need training, we need to have a common understanding of what AI is to the organization,” he added.

Generative AI ‘on guardrails’ at DOE

Bridget Carper, the Energy Department’s deputy CIO for architecture, engineering, technology and innovation, and its responsible AI official, said the department is giving employees a sandbox environment to experiment with generative AI.

“We actually took the initial stance of, ‘Oh, ChatGPT, we’re going to block it.’ Then, we realized that everyone was just doing it on their personal computer. So, then we started putting in guardrails,” Carper said. “Now we’re going in it with the education aspects, or doing training across the board,” Carper said.

Carper said DOE is currently using AI for enhanced cybersecurity, and to improve the customer experience of individuals and organizations applying for federal grants.

“We were fortunate enough to have funding to be able to provide to different communities, but how do they access that? Most people don’t have the time to go through the different sites — is it EPA? Is it IRS, to be able to obtain that information? So we’re using AI to help put that out there, to make it more readily accessible for users.”

‘You have to have good data’

Bauer said the rise of AI use cases puts increased pressure on agencies to improve their data maturity.

“I’m under tremendous pressure for very accurate HR data — whether it’s positions , whether it’s where people are assigned, how the department moves around at large.

“We’re looking at opportunities, for use cases, around using AI to help us find bad data and clean it up,” he said. “When you have somebody that retires after 30 years and retirement tells them you’re in the wrong retirement code, and you owe the government $25,000 before you can leave — you say, ‘Well, how can that happen? It should be really easy to root those things out.’ But there’s so many different legal authorities and combinations of information that  human beings could probably do it, but we’re really honing in on the ability to actually start looking at that as a data cleanup exercise,  because we’re all under pressure now to have these very very robust data models that decision makers are all wanting. Everything’s decision data driven now, so you have to have good data.”

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Women make up about 40% of the intelligence community’s workforce, a percentage that ranks behind both federal workforce and civilian labor benchmarks.

That’s according to the latest demographics report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And women are even more underrepresented in the leadership ranks throughout the IC.

But agencies aren’t ignoring the issue. The National Security Agency’s “Future Ready Workforce” initiative has already led to several changes that will likely make the NSA a more attractive employer for all employees, including women. And the NSA is also investing in education and other programs that encourage girls to get involved in STEM.

Inside the IC spoke with three women leaders at the NSA about the past, present and future for women at the agency. They are Morgan Adamski, chief of the NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center; Kristina Walter, director of the NSA’s Future Ready Workforce Initiative; and Tahira Mammen, acting chief of the AI Security Center, which is housed within the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center.

This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity: 

Justin Doubleday I’d love just to kick off by asking any of you to reflect on the role that women have played at NSA, historically, maybe some of the challenges and how we got to where we are today?

Kristina Walter I think the NSA is a unique space in that we do have a history of women being involved in the cryptologic mission. So we think of Elizabeth Friedman, and a lot of cryptographers that have contributed to the National Security Agency’s mission from World War Two, when we’re talking about codebreaking.

And so a lot of us can see that in the day to day. We have a lot of strong women leaders here. But I think we face the same challenges that any organization does, especially a predominantly military organization, where we’re still working through the balance of women being visible and at the table. And I think what we found is, we need to be inclusive of that environment. Women have a lot to offer in that space.

And so what systems can we put in place to just be inclusive of everybody’s thoughts and ideas and really bring that diverse perspective in? And so that’s really what we’re trying to achieve, as we move into this new era of rapidly evolving technology changes, rapid competition for talent that we haven’t had to face before. So how can we be really an attractive employer for all people, including women?

Justin Doubleday Morgan, there’s this overlap between the challenges that women face in the intelligence community but then also in the cybersecurity field. I think maybe the numbers are even worse writ large across the cybersecurity field.

Morgan Adamski There’s definitely a really strong focus right now on getting more women involved in cybersecurity, more women involved in STEM roles. And I think that’s really important. Just because when you have diverse opinions, diverse backgrounds, whether you’re male or female, they, however you want to describe yourself, it’s really important that we have those conversations. In cybersecurity, you need innovation and unique solutions to complex problems. And that means you have to approach that in many different ways. And so you have to have a lot of different people at the table to have that discussion.

Kristina talked about some of the things we’re doing at the agency in focusing on people. The cybersecurity community, and NSA historically, has been involved in strong technical backgrounds. That’s what we do here. And so the same challenges you see on getting more women in STEM is how we try to encourage and recruit more women in NSA. It has to go hand in hand.

Justin Doubleday Tahira, AI is one of the newer fields, depending on how you define it. Are you seeing any specific challenges in that field kind of pour over from maybe the legacy STEM challenges that we’ve seen? How are you confronting this as a woman in the AI field, a leader in the AI field?

Tahira Mammen I’ll start by saying that we have many brilliant women at NSA who are experts in AI. I think one of the challenges in the AI or cybersecurity space, in these deeply technical fields, right, is making sure that when we think about women — how to help women advance, how to help women with mentorship — sometimes there’s a lot of focus on “women helping women,” which is very important.

But there’s a critical role for allies who are different than you. So as Morgan was saying, I believe that a diverse group makes the best decisions. And that’s also true in helping people rise up through the ranks. And so while and all the women at this table are definitely committed to helping women, I just want to emphasize how important it is that men also see their role in helping bring the diverse voices to the table.

Justin Doubleday If you look at some of the data from the ODNI demographics report, it shows this consistent trend where women and men start out at the same at the GS-10 level. It’s 50/50, almost. And then, as you go up, that gap widens where we get up to GS-15, and it’s 65% men 35% women. And it’s just this widening gap as you go up. You all have become leaders in this space. Do you want to share maybe how you’ve gotten to where you are? Maybe any specific challenges that you’d be willing to share today?

Morgan Adamski When you talk about the intelligence community, you talk about NSA, you talk about cybersecurity, They’re all fast-paced, unique environments. And part of that requirement is being in an office for a certain amount of hours a day. And for those of us who do have families or children, you’re trying to balance that in your head of how do I continue to succeed at mission and deliver outcomes, while also not having “mom guilt,” because you can’t pick your kids up at a certain point in the day. And that’s difficult for people to balance.

That flexibility, whether you’re male or female, especially for some of the newer generations, is really critical to having happiness at work. And so I think that for me in particular, I don’t necessarily think about work-life balance, as others might. I think about it as prioritization. What is the most important thing that I need to do today for my family, for my work? And then I execute that prioritization, and then that prioritization may change the next day. It’s constantly a trade off, and you have to determine what’s going to be the most valuable on any given circumstance.

Kristina Walter I think what we’ve seen is because women sometimes feel like they can’t achieve that balance, they self select out. So when you look at trends of women kind of growing, they think, “I could never handle that, or I’ve never seen another woman who is working at the senior executive level, because you can’t maintain that balance.”

And I 100% agree with Morgan’s perspective of, balance is hard. I’m good at compartmentalization. So when I’m home, I’m 100% home. When I am at work, I’m 100% at work. Building the support system around you to do that is important. I think showing women that it’s achievable, and then putting policies in place to help it are really helpful. So things like paid parental leave, where we’ve rolled that out at NSA. Phased parental return, so you don’t have to come back immediately, and you can phase that in.

How do we look at the policies that can help women think, “This isn’t too overwhelming, it isn’t too hard”— or anybody who’s balancing challenges — and “I can continue to grow in my career here and not self select out,” is really what we’re looking to reinforce.

Tahira Mammen I think that encouraging women to take up space, to use their voice, to voice the solution to a problem they’ve identified. I think everyone in work or in life, you can say, “Okay, this is really a problem. And it bothers me.” And for my personal path, most of my success has come from being able to identify a problem, really advocate for being allowed to fix it, and then doing that work.

And then when you do it, people say, “Wow, okay, look at what you were able to do. Let’s give you a harder problem.” And that is what rising has looked like throughout my career. And I think a space where, if you’re taking a step back, as Morgan and Christina, were saying, you miss the opportunity to do work that you’re passionate about that also helps your career.

Justin Doubleday Is there specific data you can share about the NSA? Are there any specific trends that you’re seeing in terms of the share of women at the NSA, the share of women in the leadership ranks?

Kristina Walter We set goals every year for our hiring to reach about 40% women where we’ve been able to meet or exceed that over the last several years. And we want to be reflective of society. So recognizing across the board that we are bringing in people that reflect the American people, since that’s who we serve.

And so those are the trends and we see that we’re consistent, but we want to make sure, digging into the data, that that’s across all skill sets. We’re looking at the technical skill sets, the STEM roles. Maybe there’s a smaller pool, and we’re really targeting those. So we’re doing a lot of recruitment and engagement, targeting female schools and underrepresented populations, and making sure that those folks see themselves at NSA.

And I think what we found is when we start in college level, we’re too late. And so engaging at that K-12 level. We run GenCyber camps, we’re really trying to expose younger students to STEM, cybersecurity and federal service. And so we’ve seen great success in that space. I talked to a recent student of Stanford, who said, “I was first exposed to cybersecurity at an NSA GenCyber camp. And that’s what made me pursue this path of participating in other events.” And making sure that we’re out in the community so that girls at the young age can see where they’re going, and then we can make sure that those girls follow through and then commit to the agency with our relevant programs.

There are benefits and negatives to working in a classified environment. One of the benefits is that balance. You come in and you work in a secure environment. And you can work on really hard problems that you can’t do anywhere else here. But then you can also leave that job when you leave and you can’t bring work home in certain spaces, and have that balance. And so we do try to make sure people are aware of the opportunities that are here, so that we can hit our hiring goals related to female and minority hiring and all the different objectives that we set every year.

Morgan Adamski One thing I’d like to highlight is just the focus that the NSA’s Cybersecurity Directorate has taken on really promoting, advocating and recruiting women into the cybersecurity mission. I’m proud of the fact that the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center is over 55% female. That’s great in the cybersecurity arena. It is just kind of the way we formed.

But we also spend a lot of time trying to invest in things like women-in-cybersecurity conferences, recruiting from the right schools. We recently hosted a women’s cybersecurity event here where we brought in students from different colleges. We talked about the entirety of the NSA mission. We talked about recruitment and how they could join. And trying to do those very concentrated efforts on, how do we encourage more women to get into the cybersecurity field.

Tahira Mammen Women are not a monolith. Women come in so many different, diverse experiences. And so at the agency, we have employee resource groups that are employee-led organizations that do some of that work I was talking about before. Identifying issues or challenges within their demographic, and then seeking to improve the culture for everybody.
And so on the inside, especially in my experience, through the employee resource groups, we’re working on building the culture when people come in the door, then they find their place, they find their mentors, they find opportunity to drive change and mission.

Justin Doubleday This is a somewhat nebulous question, but what do you view the future for this issue. With some of the changes you’re making now, 10or 20 years down the line, do you have a sense of where this is going in terms of securing a better place for woman at the NSA and the IC?

Kristina Walter Fundamentally, what we’re trying to do is think about all of our employees and what they need. And there’s talent out there, a lot of which is women. And so we want to take advantage of all the talent. We want women to feel like there’s a place for them here and a space for them at the table.

I think when you look at the leadership teams at the National Security Agency, it’s an exciting time, because you can really see yourself there right now, both in the established leadership, but also the up-and-coming leaders. And so I think the more we can share that with the public and make sure that they see that there’s a space for them here, and then just make it easier for them to come in and stay. One of the best parts about the National Security Agency, talking about my experience, is you can reinvent yourself. You can join different career fields. You can explore lots of options, and so enabling our whole workforce to do that is important and that will inherently benefit the women that are coming into the agency as well.

The post NSA women leaders find opportunities to ‘drive change and mission’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to play an important role in the evolution of agency people management, processes and technology. But how are strategies evolving to meet tomorrow’s mission?

During this webinar, you will gain the unique perspective of top government AI/ML experts:

• Dimitri Kusnezov, Under Secretary, Science & Technology Directorate, Department of Homeland Security
• Shane Barney, Chief Information Security Officer, US Citizenship & Immigration Services
• Ramesh Menon, Chief Technology Officer, Defense Intelligence Agency
• Matthew Graviss, Chief Data & Artificial Intelligence Officer, State Department
• Katie Tierney, Area Vice President, Digital Services & Operations Management, BMC
• Sujit Mohanty, General Manager, Public Sector, Field Engineering, DataBricks
• Michael Hardee, Chief Architect, Law Enforcement & Justice, Red Hat
• Moderator: Luke McCormack, Host of the Federal Executive Forum

Panelists also will share lessons learned, challenges and solutions, and a vision for the future.

The post Federal Executive Forum Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Strategies in Government Progress and Best Practices 2024 first appeared on Federal News Network.

A year after a scathing report from the Defense Business Board found general unhappiness with the user experience with technology across the Defense Department, the chief information officer’s office is taking a simple approach to fix the computers.

A big part of this effort came earlier this year when DoD’s CIO created a customer experience office, led by Savanrith Kong, who now serves as the senior advisor for the user experience (UX) portfolio management office (PfMO).

Leslie Beavers, the principal deputy CIO for DoD, said the overarching philosophy behind this improved CX approach is putting the user and their mission first.

“I always lead off with, it’s got to be functional first. If it’s so secure that we can’t connect, we’re going to go around it and that’s not good,” Beavers said on Ask the CIO. “We have to be able to scale it. That’s the other big challenge that we have in the department. Not just internally, but we have to be able to scale to international allies and partners into the commercial world.  Then the third piece is we have to be secure, and in this case, it’s with the zero trust. It’s tagging the people, tagging the data and doing the audit so that we know what’s happening and we can identify intrusions.”

The DoD CIO’s office got the message multiple times about function over form when it comes to why the user’s experience is so important.

The first time happened in the “fix my computer” post by Michael Kanaan, the director of operations for the Air Force – MIT Artificial Intelligence Accelerator in June 2022 that went viral.

The second moment of truth came from the Defense Business Board in February 2023. The DBB released survey results showing 80% of survey respondents rating their user experience as average or below average. Out of about 20,000 respondents, 48% rated their experience as “worst,” and 32% fell into the category of average.

Over the last year, the DoD CIO’s office has been addressing both process and technology.

DoD’s holistic perspective

DoD CIO John Sherman said last summer that the idea is to bring some standardization to the refresh cycle across all of the military and ensure user experience is a part of every technology initiative.

Beavers said now that Kang is on board, he is shaping DoD’s user experience effort.

“We’re looking at it from a holistic perspective because user experience is more than just having the latest equipment. It is all around the functionality and in the department, it’s different than in the commercial world,” she said. “If you think about an F-35, it’s a flying interoperable networked computer with the pilot. So the user experience is from the warfighters’ perspective. But whether you’re sitting in an operations room or behind a desk or out in a plane or on a ship, does your IT and your communications equipment work together and can you stay secure? The department is also standing up a big effort to get after the IT for the warfighter.”

Through this initiative, Beavers said the challenges are much different, ranging from a huge install base to legacy technology not designed to be interoperable and a limited budget.

At same time, Beavers said there’s a lot of opportunity to make some improvements to the user experience.

“We should make a concerted effort to look at where our policies are standing in the way of the interoperability. Where do we need an engineering solution? And where do we need just a process change?” she said. “The department is really pretty good at buying big things over long periods of time and buying quick things and bringing them when there’s an imperative like a war. But it’s not ingrained as part of the standard operating procedure in the department as much as we would like so we’re working on building that piece out, to help bring in the new technology and also to improve the customer experience.”

DoD, VA collaboration

Beavers added DoD is using the Lean Six Sigma business process improvement approach to help sort through the potential changes and to better understand the broader impacts of process and policy revisions.

Some recent work with the Veterans Affairs Department is a customer experience win, Beavers said.

At the North Chicago Veterans Medical Center, VA and DoD staff have worked closely together for the past decade or more. But their systems and networks were separate and data sharing was basically non-existent.

She said in some cases, it would take around 36 mouse clicks to send an email between the DOD and the VA.

“We spent the last six months pivoting to Office 365 in the cloud and turning on some business functionality,” Beavers said. “This really was a cooperation problem where the security folks on both sides had to decide to configure the clouds the same way to enable that interoperability. We are rolling that out now to the people working in less than six months.”

The post DoD’s approach to fix its computers is function over form first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Office of Management and Budget’s 2022 IT Operating Plan highlighted the need to reduce complexity of systems to bring down costs. And, of course, it promoted the idea of using data to better drive decisions.

Over the years, agencies and vendors have made their technology environments a little more complex due to too many bespoke tools and a lack of integration of data. With all those challenges that that have come up over the last 20-25 years, OMB has actually pushed agencies toward enterprise services as one way to overcome many of these IT modernization obstacle.

There’s other opportunities for agencies to become more efficient, more secure, and improve how they deliver services decisions. One way: the use of end-to-end observability tools that can help agencies innovate by consolidating the tools that they use, reducing the complexity of those tools, and of course, give them visibility across many of their tools across the technology stack.

Brian Mikkelsen, the vice president and general manager for US public sector at Datadog, said end-to-end observability gives organizations an opportunity to observe or monitor any application, any infrastructure, anywhere. This includes infrastructure and applications no matter if they are on-premise or in the cloud.

“The three pillars of observability at its core context is infrastructure metrics. This is understanding the health of my operating systems, my virtual machines, my containers, all the way up into cloud native serverless functions,” Mikkelsen said on the discussion Innovation in Government, sponsored by Carahsoft. “It’s infrastructure metrics paired with application traces so now I’m starting to think about on top of that infrastructure, where am I running my applications, whether it’s on-premise or in the cloud, but what can I actually see in terms of how my applications are performing? What are they doing from a memory constraints perspective? What’s their overall performance? How much lag time is there between requests and actions? The third component of that three pillars of observability is logs. So it’s the end-to-end observability part is really this idea that we’re creating context for the users of these systems.”

Reducing time to solve problems

One of the biggest benefits of this approach is reducing the number of tools required to monitor networks, mitigate risks and creating context between infrastructure, applications and logs.

“The real benefit is to try and reduce the time to know when I have a problem. And the reduced  time to solving that problem is correlating all that information and not having separate teams working in separate tools, all with a separate perspective,” Mikkelsen said. “One of the key characteristics of a more modern observability and security solution, we talk all the time about the cultural changes of getting people out of individual tools and individual contexts, and giving everybody the same view of the same information. I don’t want to have five tools and five teams looking at it from a different perspective. I want one tool with all the teams in that same tool, folks having the same context so we’re not arguing about what’s happening. We’re observing what’s happening, and we’re solving for it.”

The need to solve problems more quickly is as much about the evolving nature of the cyber threat as it is about meeting the growing expectations of an organization’s customers.

A recent Government Accountability Office report found agencies are struggling to meet the cybersecurity logging requirements as required by President Joe Biden’s May 2021 executive order.

“What it’s really asking you to be able to do is track issues in real time, hold those logs in storage for, I think, a minimum of 12 months in hot storage, and I think 30 months in total,” Mikkelsen said. “The benefit of an end-to-end observability and security company is that we think about logs in multiple perspectives. We can talk about IT infrastructure and application. But here from a cybersecurity perspective, now, we’re really talking about cloud security management.”

Solving mission problems

From a customer experience perspective, end-to-end observability also includes tools that provide digital experience monitoring.

Mikkelsen said the tools help organizations understand the user’s experience from login throughout the entire front-end event.

“They can generally understand what’s working and where are the bottlenecks. What are the challenges with that customer’s front end experience?” he said. “If you think about this from a synthetics [data] point of view, what synthetics allows you to do is proactively understand ‘is that system up and is that front end application up and running the way I want it to? Is it handling requests from various operating systems? Is it working with various browsers?’ And we can actually set up proactive tests so even more important than knowing when you have an issue and fixing it is knowing you have it before it’s a real issue, and resolving it before you have a negative customer experience or citizen experience. This all boils down to the real drive for a lot of our IT mission owners across government: They’re in the business of solving for the mission. A lot of times the mission is improving the citizen’s experience with government.”

Mikkelsen said the Agriculture Department’s Digital Infrastructure Services Center (DISC) took advantage of end-to-end observability tools and saw immediate improvements.

“They had one ongoing problem with memory utilization. The way I think about it was it was an executable loop and every time it fired up, it was causing memory depletion. That same or systematic set of tickets had popped up something in the neighborhood of 700 times in a short period of time,” he said. “They’ve taken that memory utilization challenge down from 700 plus tickets down to zero tickets relatively quickly because we were able to show them what the challenge was. On top of that, they were able to bring, I think, 95% of their target infrastructure up and running with monitors and dashboards from an observability point of view within 75 days. I think that includes over 4,000 containers as part of that infrastructure setup.”

The post Using end-to-end observability for cyber, CX improvements first appeared on Federal News Network.

CBP is recognizing not only the time and cost savings, and more importantly the safety to officers that small, unmanned aircraft can provide.

Quinn Palmer, the National Operations Director for small unmanned aircraft systems at CBP in the Homeland Security Department, said the use of drones has evolved across the agency’s mission sets.

“Small drones are really filling a critical niche between fixed surveillance systems and crewed aviation or manned aviation assets because of their range, because of their price point and the quick deploy ability,” Palmer said on Ask the CIO. “They can offer us surveillance over a much larger area on the border, like for search and rescue where we can cover broad swaths of territory very quickly. But another interesting piece of that is the nature of the drone, meaning its covertness, that’s been a hugely impactful component to how why drones are so valuable to us and to our agents in the field. What I mean by that is having the ability to surveil a target or a law enforcement situation covertly or silently allows our folks that situational awareness, that critical time element, to prepare more smartly to position themselves to make that initial engagement, which lends itself to officer safety, but also to the effectiveness of the law enforcement resolution.”

This type of impact is true across many CBP mission sets. From border surveillance and related missions to facility and tower inspections to creating training videos, using drones, for internal communications, the agency is using these unmanned small aircraft systems in more ways than ever imagined.

CBP flew 100,000 sorties in 2023

To that end, Palmer said CBP has grown its drone pilot crew to about 2,000 strong operating more than 330 systems from just half a dozen systems and 20 operators a about five years ago. It plans to grow to more than 500 assets and continue to train and hire operators in 2024.

“The response by the field, by the folks that are out there on the front line, are really engaging in and advocating for this capability in this technology. The leadership now see the value too,” Palmer said. “It’s always a trade off when you’ve got a workforce that’s stretched amongst many competing requirements and commitments, adding one more thing to do is something we’ve got to be very conscious about. It can be a distraction. It can be a negative to the labor cost of conducting a border security mission. But drones have not been that. It’s been a labor saving capability. We see an effect at the ground level, but not just in the price tag but in the time it takes to resolve law enforcement situations.”

In 2023, CBP flew about 20% of all of the direct air support missions for ground agents of the border patrol. From those flights came 48% of all apprehensions and seizures, Palmer said.

“We’re putting out about 25% of the output, but yielding about 50% of the outcome. That’s due to the proliferation of more drones being more places than manned aviation, but also the nature of the drone being covert and the effectiveness it lends its self to that interdiction aspect,” he said. “We apprehended about 42,000 folks crossing the border illegally. In fiscal 2020 through 2023, about 2,800 pounds of narcotics were seized, 95 vehicles seized and 13 weapons seized. That resulted from about 100,000 sorties about 50,000 hours flown.”

Sustainment plans for drones

All of those efforts in using drones instead of manned aviation in 2023 resulted in about $50 million in cost avoidance. Palmer said that money can be put back into mission and operational priorities helping the agency extend its limited budget.

“We’re actually benefiting not just from the cost savings associated with deploying drones versus some of these other more expensive surveillance capabilities. But we’re also benefiting because we’re able to control that interdiction much more efficiently, which translates into savings on the ground level because the labor costs associated with and the time associated with accomplishing that interdiction, and that resolution is minimized,” he said. “In many different ways, we found that drones are impacting and it’s not just from the budgetary standpoint, but they’re impacting the tactical advantage in the field.”

As with any new technology, CBP is learning how to manage the drones and educating the industry.

For example, the agency runs drones in austere environments whether cold, heat, dust or precipitation in a way that many manufacturers didn’t intend the systems to run in.

“We are using our equipment a lot compared to some of the other drone users in the United States. We’ve had industry partners say we never intended to fly this this much. We’re like, ‘well, don’t sell it to us,” Palmer joked.

Palmer said this means having a strict sustainment plan is more important than ever to keep the drones flying.

“This gentlemen at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) told me this, and I’ll share it with you because I was thought it was very relevant. Drones are engineered to do very sophisticated things. But they’re engineered also at the same level as the toaster on your kitchen counter. So we do very intricate and very sophisticated things with drones, but they are consumable, for lack of better term,” he said. “We do have for our higher costing assets have sustainment plans and lifecycle plans associated to those acquisitions We do our due to our hard work to make sure that that that battery rotation and those kits are tracked and the motor arms and the propellers are replaced per manufacturer specifications. We’re doing all those kinds of things on the ground. But ultimately, small drone is should be considered as a consumable. They’re just not built to sustain.”

At the same time, Palmer said the marketplace is moving so fast that CBP or any organization could move to the next generation fairly quickly and inexpensively outweighing the cost of long-term sustainment plans.

The post Drones becoming central to a variety of CBP’s mission sets first appeared on Federal News Network.

When it comes to adopting secure artificial intelligence capabilities, the General Services Administration is doing all it can to make sure the government isn’t late to the game.

The draft Emerging Technology Framework from the cloud security program known as FedRAMP could be a key piece to that effort, especially if industry and agencies help drive the new approach.

Eric Mill, director of cloud strategy in the Technology Transformation Service in GSA, said the draft framework, for which comments are due March 11, is helping to ensure agencies get the expected benefits of using secure AI and large language models.

“This is strategically important for the program because what we’re doing here is FedRAMP is prioritizing its work around the strategic goals that the government has. It’s not just a first in, first out program. We are breaking a little bit of ground for the program,” Mill said on Ask the CIO. “It is that something we think is a good thing. As we engage in a prioritization process where FedRAMP is really important for what FedRAMP does, we have to make sure it’s well understood, that we are transparent to stakeholders, that it is fair and clear. That’s the foundation we’re trying to lay with this framework.”

GSA released the draft framework in late January as part of its effort to meet the requirements of the AI executive order President Joe Biden signed in October. In the document, GSA says it’s initially focused on emerging technology capabilities that use large language models (LLMs) and include chat interfaces, code-generation and debugging tools and prompt-based image generators.

Mill said the framework will help prioritize and manage the excitement around AI and LLMs.

“How do we strike the right balance? And, then, how do we operationalize that? How is it that we are prioritizing this thing in effect and that means having to come up with things like limits?” he said. “So part of what you see in the framework is the proposal that we stop at three. When we have three services that are based around chatbots, for example, using generative AI, and we’ve prioritized three of those things, we’re going to stop prioritizing that until we come back around and think again about what the priorities of FedRAMP should be. That is making sure that when we say prioritize, we’re actually prioritizing, and we’re not just focusing on AI as a program. FedRAMP is a program for the entire cloud market. But we want to be able to support this initiative so this is important strategically for figuring out how we answer those kinds of questions that are not at all totally AI specific.”

GSA to manage concerns over backlogs

That prioritization and limits to the number of cloud services is exactly why Mill said GSA is pushing vendors and others to comment on the draft framework.

He acknowledged the limitations, especially around AI, could cause some heartburn for vendors. FedRAMP already is seeing a lot of interest from vendors and agencies alike around AI and LLM services in the cloud.

“We definitely are seeing some services that are have already been in the marketplace that have added AI capabilities. We’re seeing things come in through the agency review process. We’re expecting that to go up,” Mill said. “We’re not responding to an abstract thing, but the things that we actually see coming in front of us.”

One of the big issues GSA still must address is what are the metrics or benchmarks it should use to determine if a technology fits into one of the three priority categories.

Mill said GSA is aware of possible backlogs building of vendors asking for their AI capability to go through the review process, and then that creating a bigger backlog for more typical cloud services.

“We very much are intent on making sure that the urgency that we see around accelerating the government’s use of emerging technologies doesn’t compete with those other things. That it doesn’t worsen the problem,” he said. “That is part of what we mean when we talk about the prioritization process and some of the limits associated. That’s how we’re ultimately going to make sure that the program stays responsive. We’re very engaged on short and long term structural changes to make sure that the program is operating at the pace that it should. We are treating speed as the security property that we know that cloud providers and agencies all believe in as well. That’s the spirit that you should see from us. And we’ll have a lot more to say later this year.”

More on tap for FedRAMP

Mill said he couldn’t speak to the timeline to get the version 1 of the framework out. He said he doesn’t expect GSA to sit on the comments and any updates from those comments for a long time. But, he said, it also will depend on what people say about the framework and how much GSA got correct already.

“I think we’re very much expecting for this to be an iterative process. This is not going to be the only bite at the apple for engaging with the FedRAMP team about this framework. Folks should feel absolutely feel free to reach out and suggest how we can do better on that,” he said. “We did put we put a lot of effort into that [blog] post to sharpen those questions. We absolutely encourage folks to go read the announcement and on this questions. Chief among them is, this question of are we are we measuring this right? I think the concept of prioritization means making some kind of hard choice somewhere, so when the agency does that, we want to know that, at the very least, everybody understood why we would make that decision and what factors went into that.”

Mill said beyond the finalizing the framework in the coming months, other priorities for FedRAMP center on improving the customer experience, both agency and industry users, and understanding the costs involved in obtaining approval.

Mill said GSA is trying to make sure it is on the same page with vendors about the time and cost to get through the security process.

“What we think it takes, is it the same as what the cloud providers think is one of the exercises that we’re going to be engaged on this year. We are updating what some of the key metrics are around that and talking pretty directly with stakeholders before we finalize those things. We will be keeping a feedback loop so that we are really orienting ourselves formally as a customer oriented program in that way,” he said. “I think you’ll see us engaging in that in a more in a pretty public way, maybe in a more tangible, mechanical sense. We’re definitely focused on speed as a security property. We’re definitely very interested in in identifying cloud providers that want to want to pilot different ways of working. There’s never been a more open mind to looking at process changes and piloting different approaches that don’t lower the bar for security, but allow us to focus the review energy on the process and on the items that we all understand are the most closely tied to security.”

Of course, Mill said once the draft memo from the Office of Management and Budget is finalized, a whole new set of priorities will open up.

“I hope folks see there is a sense of energy and responsiveness where the program wants to hear where it can change and where it can do a better job of threading that eternal needle of speed, security and everything else people want from the system,” he said. “It is not trivial, but it is the whole job of the program. I think there’s going to be not just this Emerging Technology Framework, but a pretty good series of feedback opportunities over the course of the year. I really encourage folks who come at that with the spirit of improving these processes, and feel please bring up things that maybe died on the vine a few years ago. But let’s not let the past foreclose the future. There’s not been a more open minded period of time in the program than I think what’s there right now.”

The post GSA’s emerging tech framework is a priority setter for AI first appeared on Federal News Network.

NASA has made it’s latest grant awards for its Bridge Program, run by the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. The program aims to improve diversity in the science and engineering communities, as well as NASA‘s workforce itself.  The Space Hour wanted to hear more about this program and some of the projects it’s sponsoring this go round, and I did so by speaking with Padi Boyd, who is the director of the Bridge Program at NASA.

Interview Transcript: 

Padi Boyd The SMD bridge program is a program whose goal is to expand the opportunities for research experiences to students from a very wide array of institutions, many of which do not partner with NASA traditionally. So, the goal of the program is to make basically triads of faculty at what we call under-resourced institutions. Students at those schools, and scientific researchers at NASA centers to work together on cutting edge research that is important to NASA and can be a really, great bridge for the student into a Stem career.

Eric White Yeah. So, bridge there, you obviously use the title of the movie within the dialog, you know, as a bridge, how does that work? You know, you’re working with these folks and, you know, is that’s just sort of a way for them to build a relationship and say, you know, hey, maybe I’ve made some connections, and I might be able to make a career out of this.

Padi Boyd There’s I would say two goals. There are short term goals for students, to either propel them into a Stem career or help them to persist in something that they’re interested in by having a really exciting experience with NASA research. But there’s also, a very intentional desire to build new partnerships between NASA research projects and the people who do them and faculty at under-resourced institutions.

Eric White Yeah, you all definitely get something out of this as well. You know, DEIA has been a big push for all agencies because it’s been a big push of this administration. Where does this lie within NASA’s overall DEIA hopes?

Padi Boyd So I would say not, like 100% DEIA program specifically. But certainly, it was encouraged by executive orders and presidential directives, that basically, at the top level, have the goal of making the federal workforce look like America. And if you look at the science and technical workforce, demographics, they are far from that. So, there was a report, that’s done every decade called the Decadal Survey. Each science, area does something like this. And the 2020 decadal survey in astrophysics had a finding that bridge programs, which already exist out there, are something that is showing some promise in this area, giving opportunities to students from different schools, rural schools, small schools, community colleges, an opportunity to do research in an area where they’re connected by this type of bridge to a place where the research is going on, does help students persist in those careers. And these are great careers, right? Stem careers are high paying. They’re very exciting. They really are helping humanity do the next great thing out in space. So, the subject matter is very, very intriguing, motivating. And this is a program that is definitely looking to expand opportunities to get your foot in the door to research while you’re still a student, to students at a wide array of, of institutions.

Eric White Working in an arena, as NASA does, where innovation is so important. I’m wondering if you might be able to talk a little bit about how you personally have seen how important equality efforts are and diversity efforts are in the Stem realm.

Padi Boyd Well, I think innovation is basically baked into what we do at NASA. The missions that we launch are first of their kind. And when they get old, and they start to break down in space, you don’t just fly out there and fix them. Many times, you are trying to fix them from the ground, and you need all kinds of ideas, and you need them quickly. And of course, people bring to the table their experiences, their lived experiences. And when you see innovative ideas coming into the table, to the discussion, these are often ideas that are not traditional ideas that are coming from, you know, kind of the tried-and-true methods. A lot of times you’re seeing ideas coming in from left field that are like, well, I hadn’t really thought of that. That’s a solution we should try. So, innovation is really important to get us new ideas. You know, things to try that we may not have thought of before. And it’s definitely true that people bring their experience in life and their ideas to the table in these types of situations. So, diversifying the people in that conversation can lead to great new, innovative ideas for sure.

Eric White So let’s turn the focus back to the project itself. You all have made the selections so far for 11 projects that are being supported within this program. I want to first get into the selection process. How do you all choose which one you would like to undertake for this program?

Padi Boyd Great question. So, before we even began the project, we spent a good amount of time. Listening to the community of potential partners, and we did that through a community workshop that took place over a week virtually in October of 2022. And it was organized around the goal of hearing from communities that don’t traditionally partner with NASA. What do the faculty want to see in a program like this? What do their students need? Students were involved as well. NASA was involved. What would NASA like to see out of this program? What existing programs at NASA are similar to this? Where are there gaps where we could fill this meaningfully? So, we spent a lot of time listening to the community discussing the program and what a new bridge program would look like. And based on what we learned, there’s two pieces of the puzzle going forward. We’ve got a workshop report that’s public, and if you look for the SMD bridge program online, you can find a link to the public workshop report. And it includes many statistics about students, their desires from the faculty for this program. What could we do new. And we took the perspectives and themes found in that workshop report. And we wrote what we call a call for proposals. And this is the way that NASA gets the majority of its grant funding out to the community through calls for proposals. So that’s sort of like a piece of the machinery that’s been, you know, existing, at NASA and other federal agencies for quite a while. But we got to design our program in our call for proposals to reach out to new institutions that don’t traditionally partner. And one of our first steps that we were very committed to was offering something called seed funding. So, if you’re looking to build a new partnership and you don’t have a partner yet, how do you fix that? You don’t just, you know, pick up the phone and, expect somebody on the other end to be, you know, yes, let’s be new partners and let’s write a proposal quickly. So, the seed funding opportunity is, what we have on the streets now. It’s still open. It’s what we call new due date proposal opportunity. We’ve selected, the first 11 teams, as you mentioned, from the first review of proposals that came in, over the summer of 2023. And one of our main goals is to fund new partnerships, based on something that is of interest to NASA. So, what’s strategically relevant to one of the science divisions of the Science Mission Directorate? And we’re also looking to hear what the faculty will get out of that. So, what new research will they be doing that can propel their career forward? What proposals do they see themselves and their new NASA partner, proposing for together in the next five years? But then, most importantly, we would like to see the faculty and the NASA researchers really focusing attention on the mentoring of the students. That will be, it’s a critical part of this triad, the student research experiences. So, we ask for a mentoring plan. One of the goals of the mentorship for the student, for the faculty, for NASA. And those are the elements of our proposal. Tell us about your partnership. Tell us what the impacts will be and tell us how the mentoring will work. And those proposals are reviewed by a panel of peers. And that’s how we select the best ones according to the peer reviewers’ opinions.

Eric White I hope I don’t get you into any trouble here for this one, but I’m going to ask if there are a couple that you could highlight for me from the projects that you did select this year.

Padi Boyd So I think one of the elements that was very exciting to see is how the faculty and the NASA folks worked together to, design research programs that were really relevant to the environment that the students live in. So, some of the most exciting proposals that have come in have focused on things like, you know, what can we learn about, say, wildfires and responding to wildfires from space? So that’s got a lot of relevance to NASA. What we do in space, how we observe the Earth from space. But it’s also very relevant to students in California’s lived experience. And how do wildfires impact their lives, the lives of their families? We saw some other proposals coming in about water health. And, you know, how do you monitor the health of waterways? Proposals about mosquito borne illnesses. And those are the just the ones that are focused on, you know, science that is really relevant to people’s lives on Earth. I think that was very rewarding and motivational, from, from the whole program. But we’re also seeing some, proposals coming in from engineering department. So, NASA does cutting edge technology development that leads to future missions. So, this is the type of thing that NASA invests in long term. You know, how are we going to design a mission that, say, will launch in 25 years, that might be able to disentangle the fingerprints of atmospheres of planets around other stars, to tell us if there are potential biosignatures, signs of life in those atmospheres of planets. That’s a very lofty goal, and it requires exquisite technology development. And people who develop technology are often engineers, and many small schools may not have an earth science major or an astronomy major, but they certainly have engineering and computer science programs. So, it was also very exciting to see, you know, some cutting-edge technology development proposals coming in from faculty at engineering, departments that is directly related to. The types of observations that NASA wants to be making from space in the next generation. And of course, those students will be the ones that will, you know, benefit from the fruits of that labor because they’ll be the scientists of the future.

Eric White Right. And it seems as if, you know, some of these ideas listed, you know, just additive manufacturing of electronics, you know, that could have implications within like the space industry itself. Even if they don’t come on to work for NASA, they could very well create a, a product or a technology that NASA could use down the road to make their make the agency’s job easier, no?

Padi Boyd Absolutely. Thank you for highlighting that, actually, because NASA is only one part of, you know, a very rich and vibrant space ecosystem. And we’ve got commercial space companies that are thriving and growing and doing, you know, all kinds of new things and exciting things and really expanding that envelope of what we can do as humans from space. And all of those careers are very rewarding. So, we’re not really necessarily singularly focused on the NASA workforce of the future. We’re focused on the Stem workforce of in the US in the future, and there are great jobs there in the commercial space field as well. And I’m very excited to think that students may see themselves in that role in, say, the next ten years.

Eric White And there is actually still time for other people to send in those applications to be part of the program. Can you just talk a little bit about how anybody who’s listening to this might still be able to be a part of it?

Padi Boyd Sure. If you are a faculty or, NASA researcher or even a student at a smaller institution, please check out the call for proposals. It’s part of something called ROSES, which stands for Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences. And the 2023 ROSES includes the bridge seed funding. Call for proposals. We’re still accepting proposals through March 29th of this year. I mean, those proposals will lead to projects that we expect will start by the end of the calendar year. And we’re also planning to be offering new opportunities. And the next ROSES. So, ROSES 2024 will also have some proposal opportunities for the bridge program coming forward.

Eric White If there’s somebody yourself, you are an astrophysicist. You’re in sort of an administrative role now. And I just want to pick your brain a little bit about, you know, what that transition has been like instead of, you know, are you still kind of working in the field? Do you still consider yourself an astrophysicist or what do you see yourself as now?

Padi Boyd I absolutely still consider myself an astrophysicist. But, you know, careers, they grow, and they evolve just like human beings. I mean, that’s a really important part of the human experience, I think. So certainly, now where I am, my role is not necessarily so focused on my own personal research output. You know, what data am I collecting? What papers am I writing based on that? My conclusions am I drawing and where would that go? You know, forward with me in that role personally. But a huge part of what I do now is the development of younger scientists. And you see this in the scientific community at large. You know, students come along, they find an advisor. Hopefully that person is also a very good mentor. And in that relationship, they’re sharing the load on the research. And at some point you, you know, you hand that research down to your student and they take it to a much higher level than you ever could. So, I, I’m very focused on developing scientists of the future. And I still see that as a very key role to astrophysicists, working astrophysicist. And I hope that we all see it that way.

Eric White Let’s turn the clock back. And let’s say Patty Boyd is a student sending in an application to NASA Science Directorate. What area would you be sending that application for? What would be something that you would be excited to study if you were an up-and-coming student?

Padi Boyd That’s a great question. So, these proposals come in from faculty, but they’re focused on student opportunities as well as faculty opportunities.

Eric White Yeah. Yeah. I mean, come on. It’s all hypothetical. I’m doing my best.

Padi Boyd The first thing I would have to do is convince one of my, professors to apply for the program, and I think they would have been very excited about it because I went to a small, undergraduate focused institution. And in fact, if you look at the Stem workforce of today, 80% of the students, of the working scientists today were students at smaller institutions that were focused on undergraduate work or even community colleges. So, I think my faculty would have been very excited to get involved for our school. We had a ground-based observatory, so a small telescope on the top of a building there at the university. So, I think we would have looked into expanding that into combining observations from the ground and space. And I think one of the most exciting areas where you can do that today is in exoplanet detection. So, you’re looking at light dimming of a star when a planet crosses in front of it. That’s called a transit there. What is being used by the test mission and was used by the Kepler mission before that to detect now thousands of exoplanets just in our Milky Way galaxy. So, I would really encourage my faculty to think of putting a proposal in so that we could combine our telescopes on the ground and what’s going on in space to confirm some of those exoplanets and, you know, find those Earth twins out there someday in the future. I would add that we’re, you know, very excited about the teams that we have selected. We. Are looking to build community as well. So, another important part of a student’s experience is the other students that they know, and you know, getting through it together and supporting each other. Same thing is true of new partnerships. We want to make sure that we’re nurturing new partnerships. And so, we’re very excited to take some opportunities, within the SMD Bridge Program at NASA to start building some community between the teams that we’re selecting. And we definitely want to be, learning from them as we go. What about the bridge program is working and where it could be better? We would like this program to grow and evolve, as we bring teams on and learn more about, their needs and their desires from the program.

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