Catherine Marsh, director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), said IARPA’s cloud infrastructure enabled the agency to support employees who have transitioned to telework during the COVID-19 pandemic, SIGNAL Magazine reported Tuesday.

“One of the major accomplishments at IARPA has really been our seamless transition to a remote working environment in the cloud,” Marsh said. “That’s because, unlike most of the intelligence community, most of our work is not classified, and we were really prepared ahead of time with an approved, secure, cloud-based virtual environment, and we were able to pivot quickly at having everybody work safely in isolation away from the office.”

Marsh offered updates on IARPA’s work on the Little Horned Owl unmanned aerial vehicle program and mentioned the agency’s efforts to hire new office directors, who will help recruit program managers, develop research programs and link program managers to intelligence agencies.

“We look for experts to challenge the status quo and to help shape and structure new programs with metrics and milestones and rigorous testing and evaluation to demonstrate that the proposed solutions will meet intelligence community needs,” she added.

The U.S. Army is working on a prototype of a mid-range missile that can home in on moving ground and maritime targets, Defense News reported Wednesday.

Robyn Mack, a command spokeswoman, told the publication the service’s decision to advance the mid-range missile is meant to meet a near-term need aimed at complement other critical platforms in its portfolio of long-range precision fires (LRPF) to support multidomain operations.

The Army’s LRPF portfolio includes hypersonic weapons and the Precision Strike Missile. The service’s move to advance the mid-range capability stemmed from a strategic fires study completed by Army Futures Command’s Research and Analysis Center earlier this year.

Mack said the study sought to “examine future strategic fires capabilities and provide emerging insights to inform procurement options and future materiel capability requirements.”

The Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) plans to come up in the next six months a document that will serve as a guide for the implementation of five ethical principles in the use of AI, FedScoop reported Friday. A small team within JAIC is now working on pilot programs focused on ethics training.

Alka Patel, head of AI ethics policy at JAIC, told the publication she intends to make “ethics a natural part of the way we all think” and believes testing and evaluation could be one of the approaches DoD could use to advance the ethical application of AI.

“We have tried to build ethics into every piece of the test and evaluation process,” said Jane Pinelis, head of testing and evaluation at JAIC.

The report said the center’s testing strategy has several angles, including the assessment of AI against preset requirements and analysis of direct operational testing and human-machine relationship.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded $72 million in funds to 27 projects for the development of carbon capture technologies meant to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Eighteen projects will receive $21 million to build materials and technologies designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, DOE said Tuesday.

The department has earmarked $51 million to nine projects for the provision of initial engineering studies for approaches that will capture carbon dioxide from industrial sites.

"The primary mission of our office is to ensure that the United States can continue to rely on its fossil fuel resources for clean and secure energy," said Steven Winberg, assistant secretary for fossil energy at DOE.

Winberg added the department seeks to mature and commercialize the technologies to the market.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released a joint advisory on incident response and threat mitigation to help federal agencies in cyber incident investigations.

CISA said Tuesday the “Technical Approaches to Uncovering and Remediating Malicious Activity” guidance collates data from a research effort that the agency launched along with partner entities in the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

According to the notice, incident response guidelines detailed in the playbook encompass a "variety of technical approaches to uncover malicious activity. When hunting and/or investigating a network, it is important to review a broad variety of artifacts to identify any suspicious activity that may be related to the incident,” the guidance states.

The international team also provided information on specific procedures such as searching indicators of compromise (IOC), frequency analysis, pattern analysis and anomaly detection as part of the research effort.

Michael Kanaan, director of operations at the U.S. Air Force’s artificial intelligence accelerator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said the service must prioritize generating “quality” data for training AI models, FedScoop reported Tuesday.

Kanaan told attendees at the AFCEA AI and ML Technology Summit that the Air Force should leverage the Joint AI Center’s (JAIC) Joint Common Foundation platform to collect high-quality data instead of using lower-quality data sets.

“You should try to set policies for those words ‘training’ and ‘quality data’ in your contracts,” he noted.

Dave Spirk, chief data officer of the Department of Defense (DoD), also said at the event that his office is working to establish a data strategy for the whole department by the month’s end.

The Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have signed an agreement to maintain the delivery of health services to rural areas in the U.S. amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The partnership will create an interagency task force and conduct regular meetings to brainstorm and explore recommendations and future guidelines for the Rural Telehealth Initiative, USDA said Tuesday.

The Rural Telehealth Initiative aims to market broadband services and address health and service provider gaps through collaboration and information sharing efforts.

Ajit Pai, chairman at FCC, said the agency adopted the $200M COVID-19 telehealth effort and approved 539 funding applications from various healthcare providers.

"USDA’s Rural Broadband ReConnect program is delivering nearly $650 million in loans, grants, and loan-grant combinations to deploy high-speed broadband internet to rural communities who do not have access," said Sonny Perdue, USDA secretary.

Google Cloud has been selected by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to prototype an AI-enabled digital pathology solution at Department of Defense (DoD) facilities, including the delivery of augmented reality microscopes to DoD's medical facilities and access to artificial intelligence (AI) models, the company reported on Monday. 

"To effectively treat cancer, speed and accuracy are critical," said Mike Daniels, vice president of Global Public Sector for Google Cloud. "We are partnering with DIU to provide our machine learning and artificial intelligence technology to help frontline healthcare practitioners learn about capabilities that can improve the lives of our military men and women and their families."

Google Cloud’s technology will enable doctors to more effectively treat and diagnose cancer. The early access to the digital pathology platform is for research use only. DIU is the organization exclusively focused within the DoD on scaling commercial technology across the department.

The DIU-Google Cloud partnership will improve the accuracy of diagnoses, assist physicians make diagnostic and treatment decisions and to help lower overall healthcare costs. Google Cloud will prototype the delivery of an augmented reality microscope that overlays AI-based information for doctors, providing pathology-based cancer detection tools at the point-of-care. 

Google will leverage TensorFlow, an open-source framework to help deliver machine-learning models as well as the Google Cloud Healthcare API for data ingestion and de-identification to maximize patient privacy. The AI-based models used to assist doctors as part of the prototype were developed from public and private datasets. 

The partnership will be the second contract that Google has been awarded by DIU in the past three months. In May, Google and DIU collaborated to detect, protect against, and respond to cyberthreats globally. Carahsoft serves as Google Cloud's government distributor and facilitated the contract. The Joint AI Center (JAIC) will fund the project and technical expertise. 

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Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., and Bobby Rush, D-Ill., have presented a legislation package that aims to sustain technological advancement in the U.S. economy.

The American Competitiveness on More Productive Emerging Tech Economy (COMPETE) bill would reduce barriers that hinder emerging technology development, McMorris Rodgers' office said Monday.

“To maintain our global competitive edge, win the future and beat China, it’s crucial that the U.S. lead on artificial intelligence, quantum computing, the internet of things and other emerging technologies,” McMorris Rodgers said.

The legislation package features bills, including ones that have already been introduced, that focus on various emerging technologies such as blockchain, unmanned delivery services, AI network security and 3D printing.

These bills include the SMART IoT Act, the Countering Online Harms Act and the Advancing IoT Manufacturing Act.

 Potomac Officers Club (POC) hosted its latest virtual event, Secure IT Modernization in Today’s Environment, featuring a keynote address from Michael Mestrovich, principal deputy chief information officer (CIO) for the U.S. Department of State, and a full expert panel to discuss how federal agencies can adapt and evolve quickly in a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic and ensure global accessibility and connectivity of our information technology capabilities are available.

If you missed the event, you can still register to watch the footage in Potomac Officers Club’s Event Archive.

Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, has said the agency is preparing for budget uncertainties ahead of the new fiscal year which would begin on Oct. 1st, SpaceNews reported Tuesday.

Reuter told attendees at a NASA Advisory Council meeting that the House’s appropriations bill for fiscal year 2021 includes $227 million for on-orbit satellite servicing, assembly and manufacturing operations. The House’s version of the bill also allocates $110 million to support nuclear thermal propulsion development efforts.

NASA’s FY 2021 budget request earmarks $1.58 billion for space technology, including $100 million to support the development of a nuclear technology program that covers projects such as a fission reactor for lunar missions.

According to Reuter, the increase in allocations for space technology in the FY 2021 request reflects additional spending for the Artemis moon mission. He added that NASA has met virtually with House and Senate committees to “try to ask for a little relief in the congressional direction to give us a little bit of flexibility.”