Paul Olexa, a 1st class airman from the U.S. Air Force, used his past experience as a factory manager to create a floor mat designed to reduce foreign object debris that threatens aircraft safety. Olexa pitched his “Mag Rug” idea as an entry to the Spark Tank competition that took place in October at Whiteman Air Force Base, Air Force Global Strike Command said Friday.

The polymer floor mat detects objects via sensors and produces data that helps maintainers locate metallic and non-metallic FOD across various tasks. The Air Force expects the technology to reduce FOD-related maintenance costs, which are at about $4 billion annually.

Students at Texas A&M University are further developing the prototype in partnership with experts from the private sector.

Mike Wetklow and Stephen Kunze, both members of the Chief Financial Officers Council, told Government Matters in an interview posted Sunday about the initial draft of a plan for the future of the federal government’s financial management called the “CFO of the Future Now 2030 Plan.”

Wetklow, deputy CFO at the National Science Foundation (NSF), said the creation of the first draft was driven by the 30th anniversary of the CFO Act of 1990 that sought to transform financial management in the government.

Kunze, deputy CFO at the Department of Commerce, told Government Matters host Francis Rose about the creation of a working group within the CFO Council to identify areas of focus for the initial draft. He also cited the “need for data in order to make data-driven decision making to inform policy on the mission side.”

Wetklow also noted that the future finance workforce will need to be ready to "translate technology and data into innovation into our financial management processes” and that means “getting comfortable with computer science, statistics, coding … to be able to interact with the technology.”

When asked about how the CFO Council will take and evaluate feedback on the draft plan, Kunze said the council will take an “agile approach” to assess and integrate insights.

“We recognize that technology and data requirements are going to change as we move forward. We are going to do this on an iterative basis. We are committed to doing this on an annual review to make sure that the direction that we chose has not gone off the rails,” Kunze added.

If you’re interested in federal data management efforts, then check out GovCon Wire’s Data Innovation Forum coming up on June 15. To register for this virtual forum and view other upcoming events, visit the GovConWire Events page.

Stefanie Tompkins, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said DARPA’s Computational Cultural Understanding (CCU) program is seeking artificial intelligence-based technology to automate the analysis interpretation of military insights, the National Defense Magazine reported Friday.

She told attendees at a recent McAleese & Associates-hosted event that the effort will focus on developing natural language processing tools designed “not just to read language, but to understand and interpret cultural cues.”

DARPA said the program’s first research area will center on addressing technical challenges related to sociocultural norm discovery, emotion recognition and impactful change detection.

The second area will explore the potential of a dialogue assistance service to automate sociocultural context recognition and apply initial research outputs to prevent cross-cultural miscommunications.

Interested parties can submit proposals for the CCU program through June 16th, according to a broad agency announcement posted on SAM.gov.

If you’re interested in emerging technology, check out GovCon Wire’s AI: Innovation in National Security Forum coming up on June 3. Click here to learn more.

Stacy Cummings, who is performing the duties of the undersecretary of defense for Acquisition and Sustainment at the Department of Defense (DOD) and a 2021 Wash100 Award winner, said DOD has made progress in the past year to reform the acquisition process, DOD News reported Friday.

“Our goal was to deliver a defense acquisition system that is flexible, that allows for tailoring, and empowers critical thinking and common sense decision making, with the outcome being an acceleration of delivery and timelines," Cummings said Thursday at the McAleese FY2022 Defense Programs conference. 

She said the department published 13 acquisition policies in 2020. She noted that those policies can be classified into six pathways that could be used together or individually: urgent capability acquisition; middle tier of acquisition; major capability acquisition; software acquisition; defense business systems; and acquisition of services.

"What I was really looking for is that it would be interactive, and you would use the policy to help inform decision making exactly when you need it,” Cummings said of the policy documents.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced that 61 federal employees graduated from its data science upskilling program after undergoing training between Sept. 2020 and Jan. 2021, Federal News Network reported Friday.

The Federal Data Science program provides agencies an opportunity to address gaps in critical skills by hiring and onboarding new talent, meet the Federal Data Strategy’s goals and fill in-demand jobs by establishing professional development opportunities for the existing workforce.

From July through August 2020, 20 agencies nominated names for the upskilling program. The coursework exposed the first cohort of federal participants to 21 different job series. An official with OMB said graduates are “returning to their regular duties with a deeper understanding of, and competencies with, data science tools and techniques.” 

“They will be able to use those to address current and future challenges, unique to each of their agencies. They have been challenged to share what they have learned with their leaders and peers, increasing awareness of the value data science acumen brings to their organization and the federal government,” the OMB official added.

OMB used the lessons learned from its Federal Cyber Reskilling Academy and the Census Bureau’s training initiative to help come with the data science upskilling program in August 2020.

The Government Accountability Office has called on the Federal Aviation Administration to implement a quantitative approach to assess skill gaps among FAA employees who perform mission-critical work to help them prepare for emerging aviation technology trends.

GAO said Thursday its recommendation to the FAA's human resource management office follows a review of workforce planning methods at the U.S. regulatory agency for civil aviation activities.

The audit agency found that FAA personnel response rates to the Department of Transportation's 2020 workforce assessment study ranged only from 12 percent to 25 percent, which may not offer a complete picture to determine what essential skills agency employees need to keep up with technological changes.

FAA launched its Strategic Workforce Planning Initiative in 2018 to analyze data analytics, project management and cybersecurity skills and the agency conducted qualitative interviews of managers and staff members in 2019 to gather insight on skill gaps, but GAO says the discussions lacked measurable data to identify what needs to be addressed.

The office noted that FAA should determine competencies that are necessary for agency personnel to adapt to innovations such as the potential integration of unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system.

The Defense Information Systems Agency has unveiled the Pentagon’s first zero trust reference architecture that seeks to protect critical assets from threat actors by embedding security throughout the network. 

DISA said Thursday it worked on the reference architecture in collaboration with the DOD chief information officer, National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command.

“The intent and focus of zero-trust frameworks is to design architectures and systems to assume breach, thus limiting the blast radius and exposure of malicious activity,” said Brandon Iske, security enablers portfolio chief engineer at DISA.

Joe Brinker, Security Enablers Portfolio manager at DISA, said Joint Interoperability Test Command and DISA’s Architecture and Standards Engineering Office also helped develop the reference architecture.

“Moving forward, DISA will continue to partner with DoD components in planning the implementation of ZT across the department and the development of ZT-aligned enterprise capabilities,” Brinker added.

To register for this virtual forum, visit the Potomac Officers Club Events page.