The U.S. Army and Northrop Grumman Corporation have deployed enhanced Joint Tactical Ground Station (JTAGS) capabilities in South Korea to increase battlespace awareness and missile defense in the region, the company reported on Monday.

“This is a tremendous milestone in our decades-long mission of delivering missile warning and defense capabilities to protect our joint warfighters and allies,” said Kenn Todorov, vice president and general manager, combat systems and mission readiness, Northrop Grumman.

With the deployment, Northrop Grumman has completed phase one of the JTAGS modernization program. Phase one included the installation of JTAGS Block II in permanent facilities in Japan, Qatar, Italy and the Republic of Korea.

The modernization covered updates to hardware, software and communication systems, as well as enhancements to cybersecurity and the soldier-machine interface. The deployments included soldier training and exercise support capabilities.

JTAGS receives and processes data directly down-linked from the Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) constellation of satellites, including Defense Support Program and Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) sensors and other infrared satellite sensors.

After the data is received and processed, JTAGS will distribute near-real-time warning, alerting and cueing information on ballistic missile launches and other tactical events of interest throughout the theater, leveraging multiple communications networks.

Northrop Grumman has entered phase two of the JTAGS Pre-planned Product improvement (P3I) modernization program. In this phase, the company will deliver additional sensor processing capabilities and update software architecture.

“JTAGS is vital to warfighters and of growing importance as we create true Joint All-Domain Command and Control systems, especially as we find new ways to integrate and leverage space-based assets,” Todorov added.

About Northrop Grumman

Northrop Grumman solves the toughest problems in space, aeronautics, defense and cyberspace to meet the ever-evolving needs of our customers worldwide. Our 90,000 employees define possible every day using science, technology and engineering to create and deliver advanced systems, products and services.

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.