The General Services Administration has partnered with the office of public information and education within the U.S. Library of Congress’ copyright office to help PIO modernize its contact center through GSA’s Centers of Excellence program.

“The modernization of the federal government’s IT infrastructure and applications is an important priority for GSA,” said FAS commissioner Julie Dunne. “The Centers of Excellence are a cornerstone in our IT modernization work at the Federal Acquisition Service.”

The copyright office and GSA will identify gaps in contact center technology and service delivery at PIO, which answers the public’s inquiries about registration policies and other processes related to copyright, GSA said Friday.

“This Contact Center modernization effort reflects our partner’s commitment to their customers as the Contact Center CoE prioritizes access to consistent and accurate information in a timely manner,” said Bob De Luca, acting deputy commissioner at FAS and director of GSA’s Technology Transformation Services.

Other agencies partnering with GSA to advance IT modernization efforts through the CoE initiative are the departments of Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development, the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and the Department of Labor.

Jeff Kleck, director of the cyber portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), said DIU is working with the U.S. Air Force under an other transaction agreement (OTA) to develop software that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help speed up cyber threat detection, Federal News Network reported Friday.

“The Air Force came to us seeking an innovative commercial solution that could harness the power of AI and machine learning to drastically reduce the time it takes for their cyber operators to address malicious activity in the DoD network. Their ask was to give them a capability that could act as a virtual tier one operator. That means the analytical, the triage, the investigative work that make up the bulk of the analysts’ work in looking at these threats. They needed a system to address that,” Kleck said. 

DIU is testing out three commercial cyber tools that provide the AI and automation under the OTA through the summer of 2021.

“To be able to sift through that quickly so threats can be racked, stacked and divided up based on priority is what the system is designed to do,” he added.

Kleck said the service has developed the test environment and will work with DIU and vendors in the next six months to evaluate the cyber platform against real-time data.

The U.S. Army has created a tool that addresses cyber and physical challenges affecting private data sharing between fielded soldiers.

The service branch said Thursday its Army Research Laboratory worked with partners to develop the DoppelGANger tool that models and assesses time series data based on network and system datasets.

Carnegie Mellon University and IBM worked with ARL to study how generative adversarial networks can support data sharing through a generic framework where synthetic datasets can be shared with minimal technical skill.

“We identify key challenges of existing GAN approaches for such workloads with respect to fidelity, such as long-term dependencies, complex multidimensional relationships and mode collapse and privacy, as existing guarantees are poorly understood and can sacrifice fidelity,” said Zinan Lin, a doctoral student at CMU.

The National Science Foundation, Google, JP Morgan Chase and Siemens compose ARL's partners to support the effort.

The effort's researchers will go on to further identify and expand DoppelGANger's applications. The study has so far found the tool's potential for use with medical, financial, speech, music and text data.

The U.S. Air Force is launching a software development program to refine the technical skills of personnel through “low-code, no-code” or minimal training activities.

The CyberWorx program is aimed at establishing partnerships with academia and industry to help train airmen on executing software development tasks on an expert level, C4ISRnet reported Thursday.

Col. William Waynick, director of the CyberWorx initiative, said at a C4ISRnet event that the Air Force and Army are collaborating with five vendors to establish tracking capabilities for monitoring equipment and other training-related matters for the program.

He noted that CyberWorx team is currently working on an application to streamline the pitching process for both government and industry entities. The team will submit a progress report to Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh, commander of the 16th Air Force, in March 2021, according to Waynick.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has allotted $125 million for the development of mid-scale facilities where researchers may perform quantum, biogeochemistry and energy grid studies. 

NSF said Thursday that it will use these funds to finance three projects, each valued between $20 million and $70 million, that will consist of research expertise, equipment and instrumentation for pursued research topics, community engagement and education.

The first facility, titled the High Magnetic Field Beamline, will explore the quantum properties of materials via X-ray technologies. The Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source will host and develop this facility in partnership with the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

Second, the Global Ocean Biogeochemistry Array will deliver 500 robotic floats designed to gather data on chemistry and biology in the ocean. Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute will work with institutional and industrial partners to develop the array's robotic floats. The array will also support monitoring of the ocean's physical and biological health.

Lastly, the Grid-Connected Testing Infrastructure for Networked Control of Distributed Energy Resources will openly offer research assets and leverage data analytics to support energy grid studies and education. The University of California in San Diego will host this facility.

"U.S. researchers need cutting-edge tools to stay at the forefront of science and technology," said Sethuraman Panchanathan, director at NSF.