Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced on Monday that NTT Business Solutions has selected the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform to deliver its growing ‘Regional Revitalization Cloud.’

“NTT WEST Group’s Regional Revitalization Cloud initiative to accelerate digital transformation for local governments, educational institutions, and corporations is truly advanced and extremely innovative,” said Hirokazu Mochizuki, managing director, HPE Japan. “I would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to NTT WEST Group for selecting HPE as a partner for the revitalization of the region.”

The key driver of the NTT WEST Group’s ‘Regional Revitalization Cloud’ is to solve regional issues and help businesses and institutions accelerate their digital transformation. 

The new hybrid cloud service meets the demands of their customers for robust cloud services which span public and private cloud environments and ensures that critical data are located close to the end customer, thus alleviating any concerns about data sovereignty.

NTT WEST Group is implementing a true hybrid cloud approach that leverages Microsoft Azure public cloud combined with the HPE GreenLake platform to provide a strong regional delivery model.

Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division is using an other transaction authority (OTA) to speed up the process of prototyping and evaluating tools built to support the fleet’s electronic warfare missions. 

NSWC Crane has used the Strategic and Spectrum Missions Advanced Resilient Trusted Systems (S2MARTS) OTA, managed by the National Security Technology Accelerator, for more than 10 spectrum-related projects in 2021, Naval Sea Systems Command reported Monday.

Specifically, the contract vehicle has accommodated research projects for a wide range of technologies such as software defined radios for counter-small unmanned aerial vehicles and electronic warfare applications for autonomous systems.

“We are using the S2MARTS OTA to prototype innovative EW capabilities for various unmanned systems and to seek different technology and capabilities to counter the unmanned system threats,” said Stacey Mervyn, the chief strategist for EW at NSWC Crane.

Mervyn said the OTA has been instrumental in validating the fleet’s existing electronic warfare strategy and predicting future capabilities. NSWC Crane also uses the vehicle to develop a prototype predictive modeling tool for assessing technology trends and operational effectiveness in the electromagnetic spectrum domain.

The U.S. Army will conduct a completely unmanned test-flight of the Sikorsky-made Black Hawk helicopter’s optionally manned variant in January, Vertical reported Monday.

The optionally piloted vehicle (OPV) Black Hawk’s first uncrewed flight will take place at Fort Campbell and follows the Project Convergence exercise where the experimental helicopter underwent demonstrations.

The optionally manned helicopter first flew in 2019 and has since undergone tests with safety pilots who supervised the autonomous flights while inside the aircraft. Now, the Army wants to demonstrate Black Hawk’s autonomous flight with no human in the cockpit.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) developed OPV Black Hawk, which can autonomously operate through DARPA’s Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System.

The Defense Logistics Agency is using bots to automate tedious tasks that are repetitive across operations, as DLA continues to pursue digital transformation, Nextgov reported Monday. The agency is implementing robotic process automation to increase the availability of human personnel for the more critical types of work.

George Duchak, chief information officer of DLA, said at the Roadmap to Modernization Summit that the agency is reviewing all its business processes to determine how to streamline operations.

DLA’s digital transformation effort, which began two years ago, includes developing approximately 40 bots per year. The agency now has over 120 deployed bots. Duchak’s office now plans to implement training programs that can bolster bot development.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is pursuing a multiyear research program that seeks to develop next-generation technologies for data storage using synthetic DNA. 

The Molecular Information Storage (MIST) program intends to use manufactured DNA to build data storage platforms that can scale into 1 million terabytes while allowing organizations to reduce the physical footprint, cost and power requirements, IARPA said Friday.

“When fully realized, MIST will be a game-changer for the Intelligence Community, government, industry, and academia by significantly expanding data storage capacity while dramatically reducing the space needed, environmental impact, and expense,” said David Markowitz, MIST program manager at IARPA.

Some of the organizations selected to work on the MIST program are the Broad Institute and the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory will work with Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories to test the technologies that will emerge from the program.

“I’m excited about the possibilities DNA storage technology offers,” noted Markowitz.

The U.S. Air Force is working on a draft strategy to guide the military branch’s investments in robotic process automation (RPA) and other areas and Lauren Knausenberger, the service’s chief information officer and a 2021 Wash100 Award winner, said a large portion of that strategy seeks to automate data sharing, Federal News Network reported Monday.

“When we’re talking about moving data, or talking about visualizing data, we want to do more and more with feeds that are automatically sending data to where it needs to go, rather than having operators have to get into loops,” Knausenberger said. “So we still do have a problem with that in certain places, or you know we’re passing data via chat in certain places.”

In 2020, the Air Force inquired about tasks warfighters want to be automated through the Vice Chief’s Challenge and selected 15 proposals as part of the program, including a chat bot that could respond to financial queries at Air Education Training Command.

Knausenberger said those initiatives are now in various implementation phases and that she wants to see the service make RPA applications widely available as part of its cloud platform.

“What I’d like to get us to is for robotic process automation is, here are the products that are accredited for our networks. Let’s have them available and easily consumable in cloud one,” she said. “And let’s have industry be thinking as part of their solutions, ‘How do I use those enterprise services to help you?’”