Battelle is expanding its long-standing commitment to increasing diversity and fostering inclusion within Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) careers by investing $200,000 over two years to provide students from Bowie State University and Morgan State University research opportunities as they progress from the classroom to employment. It is the first phase of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) Consortium, a Battelle program established to build meaningful, long-term collaborative relationships with the country’s leading HBCUs.

“Battelle recognizes the critical importance of representation in STEM,” said Battelle Vice President of Philanthropy and Education Wes Hall. “With the creation of the Consortium, we seek to equip students with the workplace experiences and personal networks that they need to successfully pursue employment in scientific fields.”

The HBCU Consortium initially will be seeded by student externship opportunities that will evolve to include joint seminars, mentorship opportunities, participation on thesis committees and research collaborations and employment at Battelle. Students from Bowie State in Bowie, Maryland and Morgan State in Baltimore, Maryland will be the first to work with Battelle scientists and engineers and within the government programs Battelle supports. The intention is to expand the program to other HBCUs in the future.

Adm. Charles Richard, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), has assured members of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) that the U.S. nuclear command, control and communications (NC3) network is secured and resilient but added that cybersecurity must be part of its priority investments to ensure its defense against cyberattacks in the long-term, Breaking Defense reported Tuesday.

He said during a SASC hearing that the command is currently enhancing the NC3 system as part of larger U.S. nuclear force structure modernization plans.

"I have to get it out of legacy modes of operation in order to pace this threat going in the future," added Richard. The STRATCOM head and other officials consider cybersecurity as an NC3 network modernization requirement. In support of the effort, the NC3 Next initiative has four focus areas to ensure that technologies being integrated into the network are up-to-date.

"The first focuses on programs of record encompassing budget and acquisition lifecycle processes… The second assesses demonstrations, experiments and tests aimed at enhancing discovery and development of innovative technology approaches to transform existing NC3 programs and operations," he said.

The third focus aims to streamline enterprise guidance by reviewing and revising tactics, techniques and procedures as well as policies and postures.

"The fourth expands the use of critical technology enablers such as artificial intelligence, digital engineering, and modeling and simulation,” Richard said.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has recommended that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) initiate steps to come up with reliable cost and schedule estimates for the Financial Management Business Transformation (FMBT) program using best practices outlined in GAO’s cost estimating and schedule assessment guides.

GAO made the recommendations after it found that VA did not fully meet certain best practices for the development and management of schedule and cost estimates for the FMBT program, according to a report publicly released Tuesday.

The FMBT initiative seeks to replace VA’s aging financial and acquisition systems with a single integrated platform. The congressional watchdog said its assessment showed that the department has met IT management best practices for Agile project management, program governance, defect management and testing.

“Reliable cost and schedule estimates provide a road map for project execution and are critical elements to delivering large-scale IT systems. Without reliable estimates, VA management may not have the information necessary for informed decision-making,” the GAO report reads.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released an alert stating that a cyber threat actor has compromised a number of government agencies, critical infrastructure and organizations in the private sector since “June 2020 or earlier” using vulnerabilities in Ivanti’s Pulse Connect Secure virtual private network products.

CISA said Tuesday it has assisted several entities affected by the cyber breach since end of March and found that the threat actor uses multiple vulnerabilities to install webshells on the affected products to gain further access.

“The known webshells allow for a variety of functions, including authentication bypass, multi-factor authentication bypass, password logging, and persistence through patching,” the CISA alert reads.

The agency said Ivanti is working on a patch and has come up with a tool to help users ensure the integrity of their Pulse Connect Secure software.

CISA has called on organizations using the compromised VPN products to run the new integrity tool, check for malicious activity and update their VPN to the latest software version.

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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.