The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been housing larger amounts of data as it continues to employ artificial intelligence to inform weather forecasts, Federal News Network reported Tuesday.

Jamese Sims, NOAA's senior science adviser for AI, said the agency uses the technology to set physical parameters for prediction models and analyze associated errors.

About 200 of NOAA's projects use AI across research and operational activities. NOAA currently uses supercomputers to store the corresponding workload but considers turning to cloud technology in anticipation of AI's further development.

The agency's National Centers for Environmental Information stores 37 petabytes of data on geophysical, oceanographic and coastal observation.

“We need to better understand what data is actually needed, as we talk about using AI more across the agency,” Sims said.

Lockheed Martin has opened a new production line for Block 70/72 of the F-16 aircraft to address the jet's growing demand from foreign military sales customers.

The new production line will operate in partnership with the U.S. Air Force from Lockheed's existing site in Greenville, South Carolina, the service branch said Tuesday.

The line's opening took place three years after Lockheed concluded F-16 production activities at a facility in Fort Worth, Texas. Lockheed holds a $14 billion contract with USAF to produce 128 units of the F-16 up to the year 2026. The contract supports five FMS customers in negotiation with USAF.

“The line helps us meet the global demand that a number of nations have for [F-16] aircraft and gives us the additional capability to provide the aircraft to countries interested in purchasing it for the first time," said Col. Brian Pearson, integrated product team lead for F-16 FMS within the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Fighters and Advanced Aircraft Directorate.

The directorate also plans to update the radar and other systems of 405 existing F-16s through the V-Configuration.

Comtech Telecommunications Corp. (NASDAQ: CMTL), a world leader in secure wireless communications technologies, announced today, that during its third quarter of fiscal 2021, its Government Solutions segment was awarded an order worth approximately $2.0 million to provide the U.S. Marine Corps with command and control modules for Program Manager Light Armored Vehicles (“PM LAV”).

“This order places our rugged baseband products with the U.S. Marine Corps soldiers that need them,” said Fred Kornberg, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Comtech Telecommunications Corp.

Comtech Telecommunications Corp. is a leader in the global communications market headquartered in Melville, New York. With a passion for customer success, Comtech designs, produces and markets advanced secure wireless solutions to more than 1,000 customers in more than 100 countries.

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.