Army Research Laboratory (ARL) worked with the University of Southern California (USC) to study how soldiers would communicate with autonomous robots. 

The Army said Monday it worked with the Institute for Creative Technologies, USC-hosted research center funded by the Department of Defense (DOD), to prototype the Joint Understanding and Dialogue Interface (JUDI) system.

“We employed a statistical classification technique for enabling conversational AI using state-of-the-art natural language understanding and dialogue management technologies,” said Felix Gervits, an Army researcher.

He said the system features a statistical language classifier that allows autonomous systems to understand the intent of what a soldier communicates. Gervits said JUDI has the potential to reduce the amount of time needed for deployment in new environments.

The General Services Administration (GSA) is working on a network-as-a-service that would help agencies continuously modernize network infrastructure via a cloud-centric business model, FedScoop reported Monday.

Allen Hill, GSA's deputy assistant commissioner of category management, said the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) contract team will help agencies adopt emerging technologies and shift away from legacy systems.

The $50 billion EIS vehicle so far has 164 released task orders out of a total expected number of 212. 

“The agencies can certainly reach out to us, and we’ll work with them and help them to facilitate any type of challenges they may be having with the vendors," Hill said at an event hosted by the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC).

Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., and Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., have introduced a bill that aims to involve key stakeholders and resources in federal performance planning. The two introduced the Performance Enhancement Reform Act during a biannual hearing last Friday, Connolly's office said the same day.

Connolly, who chairs the House's Subcommittee on Government Operations, administered this hearing to review the implementation of three existing technology laws.

The subcommittee assessed the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA), the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) and the Modernizing Government Technology Act during the hearing.

Jay Mahanand, chief information officer of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), said FITARA has helped government CIOs establish, quantify and further develop critical IT programs.

Oracle today announced that ServiceNow, the leading digital workflow company that makes work, work better for people, now supports Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).  Enterprise customers are now able to access and manage OCI resources via their existing ServiceNow Service portal and the ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) Visibility application, which gives them a single dashboard to manage their public cloud resources from Oracle and other major cloud providers.

"Enterprise customers are increasingly moving toward a multi-cloud environment and need an easy way to manage all of their cloud resources," said Scott Twaddle, vice president of product, industries, and partnerships, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. "This is a big step forward for all of our customers that are using Oracle, as well as other major cloud providers to run their business-critical applications.  Now customers can leverage their existing ServiceNow Service portal to view and manage all of their cloud resources, including Oracle." 

Customers including Network Rail are already benefiting from the Oracle and ServiceNow integration. Network Rail runs 20 of the United Kingdom's largest railway stations, and operates and develops Britain's railway infrastructure, which consists of 20,000 miles of track, 30,000 bridges, tunnels and viaducts and the thousands of signals and level crossings.

A National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) official said the agency is looking to award multiple contracts to access commercial imagery from synthetic aperture radar satellites to study how space data products could support the intelligence community mission, SpaceNews reported Monday.

Pete Muend, director of NRO’s commercial systems program office, told the publication the agency began the sourcing process after its market survey in November drew many responses from the private sector.

NRO awarded a series of study contracts during 2019 to Maxar Technologies, BlackSky Global, Planet, HySpecIQ, Capella Space and HawkEye 360.

The awards sought to determine the sector's capacity to help the agency expand its enterprise geospatial intelligence architecture with commercial imagery offerings and inform future procurement efforts.

Muend noted that his office is working with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to define a set of requirements and develop a new licensing model for commercial imagery acquisition.

Maxar will continue to provide NRO data from the company's fleet of Earth observation satellites through August 2023 under the EnhancedView Follow-On agreement awarded in 2018 and valued at $300 million each year.

The U.S. Army has approved a document to facilitate the rapid prototyping and fielding of the Tactical Space Layer, the Signal Magazine reported Monday.

The TSL abbreviated capability development document approved by the service’s assured positioning, navigation and timing/space cross-functional team will help advance the rapid experimentation and prototyping of tactical space-based sensors with ground-based systems and other platforms to speed up the sensor-to-shooter timeline needed for multidomain operations.

“The TSL will provide deep area sensing, rapid targeting and unmatched battlefield situational awareness,” said Lt. Col. Travis Tallman, director of the cross-functional team’s Tactical Space Signature Effort. “Leveraging the TSL will further enable long-range precision fires and ground maneuvers in GPS-challenged environments.”

The Army plans to integrate TSL with its ground station called the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node or TITAN.

The APNT/Space cross-functional team will conduct live fire exercises in U.S. Army Pacific and U.S. Army Europe and Africa to evaluate the TSL prototypes later this year. It will also test TSL prototypes during Project Convergence at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona and White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Seventeen Impact Level 5 tenant owners have made security configuration changes to a Microsoft 365 cloud environment being developed for use by the Department of Defense, according to Danielle Metz, deputy chief information officer for the Information Enterprise at the Pentagon.

Metz said in an interview with Nextgov that the Microsoft team, IL5 tenant owners and engineers from the Defense Information Systems Agency, military services and department components collaborated to implement standard configuration guides in the DOD 365 environment.

The implementation moved the Pentagon closer to providing the environment with direct internet access for web browsers. According to Metz, they aim to have the whole DOD 365 environment offering the capability by early June. 

She added that the team will then move to bring-your-own-approved devices and desktops. The Pentagon applies zero-trust approach to ensure that the DOD 365 environment tenants comply with cybersecurity requirements. IL5 covers controlled unclassified information.

The Defense Enterprise Office Solutions contract provides for the work on the environment. General Dynamics' information technology (GDIT) business is the integrator for the initiative.