A NASA Pathways Internship Program participant has designed software that uses artificial intelligence algorithms to potentially diagnose physical faults of spacecraft and spaceflight systems in a more speedy manner.

The space agency said Tuesday Evana Gizzi developed the Research in Artificial Intelligence for Spacecraft Resilience (RAISR) software in an effort to reduce spacecraft down-time and enhance mission efficiency through real-time issue diagnosis.

Gizzi, who works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, explained that RAISR uses machine learning-based approaches to sift through large amount of diverse data to identify faults that have already been encountered in the past.

She added that the software employs classical AI techniques to inform decisions in more complicated situations that may not provide enough data because the faults have never been experienced.

Conrad Schiff, an assistant chief for technology in the software engineering division at Goddard, said RAISR could decrease needed resources for system maintenance, enabling better data collection and observation.

“It’s an autonomous system that attempts to reveal how it arrived at the ‘whodunit.’ It understands these associations. It helps us understand its reasoning in arriving at its conclusion," said Schiff.

According to Gizzi, the next steps for RAISR include a small satellite mission demonstration.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) worked with the General Services Administration (GSA) in March 2020 to come up with a cloud infrastructure for its Innovation Lab through GSA’s Centers of Excellence initiative and Tim Persons, chief scientist at GAO, said the congressional watchdog intends to ramp up its cloud capabilities through the lab to help increase its return on investment, Federal News Network reported Tuesday.

“We’re trying to leverage with the power of these tools – the data analytics, the artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, whatever it is – we want to really jack that up even higher. It would be great to think about, ‘What if we got $1,000 for every dollar put in GAO,’” Persons said Tuesday at a summit. “If we are successful, we might be able to make the $100 for every dollar look small.”

According to a report, GAO documented $77.6 billion in financial benefits for the government in fiscal year 2020, representing a return of approximately $114 for every dollar invested in the agency.

In 2019, GAO established the Innovation Lab to advance the use of analytics and other emerging technologies to help improve audits of federal programs and save taxpayer dollars.

Through the lab, GAO came up with a dashboard within weeks to monitor COVID-19 vaccine development work through the Operation Warp Speed program. Persons said the agency considers applying Agile methodology to its oversight work.

“In this space, you need to think agile and iterative and be willing to take calculated risks and then be able to back away, and adjust and adapt. It’s all about speed and agility, and there’s a lot of room for the government to grow,” he said.

Tonya Ugoretz, deputy assistant director at the FBI, said a potential data breach notification law should minimize the burden on companies and should be easy to follow, CyberScoop reported Tuesday.

She said such a measure should focus on reports about breaches that compromise critical infrastructure, national security and U.S. government data.

“I don’t think we’re looking at a threshold where every single incident and intrusion would need to be reported,” Ugoretz said in her prerecorded remarks that aired at the virtual 2021 RSA Conference Tuesday.

“What we’re most concerned about from the federal government perspective are incidents where there’s a national security or public safety concern, so things like U.S. government information that’s been threatened or U.S. critical infrastructure,” she added.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is developing a public database to track compliance of telephone service providers with standards meant to authenticate and display the caller ID of phone calls as part of efforts to mitigate robocalls, Nextgov reported Tuesday.

Voice service providers should certify that they have implemented the Secure Telephone Identity Revisited and Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs standards, according to a Federal Register notice posted Tuesday.

They will get certifications once they comply with STIR/SHAKEN standards to be posted on the Robocall Mitigation Database. Those certifications will include the contact information and other personal details of the carriers’ individual representatives.

The passage of the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence Act led to the creation of the STIR/SHAKEN framework for caller ID authentication in late 2019. FCC issued the standards in March 2020 and set a June 2021 deadline for carriers to comply with those standards.

“Once service providers submit their certifications to the FCC, the certifications will then be made available for download via a public website to ensure transparency and accountability for implementing robocall mitigation programs,” the notice reads.

The U.S. Space Force intends to consolidate large amounts of data in a cloud environment for faster data-driven decision-making, Space News reported Monday. To make this happen, USSF will make a large investment in cloud consolidation efforts throughout the next decade.

Col. Jennifer Krolikowski, senior materiel leader for space command and control at the Space and Missile Systems Center, said space operations require a lot of data for decisions to be made.

The service plans to address this need via a data-as-a-service procurement approach, which automates data management processes. The cloud-consolidated data can undergo artificial intelligence analysis to speed up deliveries.

Krolikowski told Space News that the effort's contracting strategy might bring an award pool of $10 billion.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has established a working group dedicated to the protection of space systems that contribute to the U.S. critical infrastructure. 

The Space Systems Critical Infrastructure Working Group combines industry and government expertise to develop risk reduction strategies for these space systems, CISA said Thursday.

The group will perform its duties in alignment with the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council's framework. These duties include identifying services and products that boost the security of commercial space systems.

Jim Platt, chief of strategic defense initiatives at CISA, and John Galer, assistant vice president for national security space at the Aerospace Industries Association, will co-chair the working group.

“This cross-sector working group will lay the foundation for our collective defense against the threats we face today and in the future," said Brandon Wales, acting director of CISA.