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Douglas Loverro Resigns as NASA Human Spaceflight Directorate Chief
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Douglas Loverro Resigns as NASA Human Spaceflight Directorate Chief
Douglas Loverro
Douglas Loverro

Douglas Loverro, associate administrator of NASA's Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) directorate, has stepped down from his role to be replaced by Ken Bowersox on an acting basis, SpaceNews reported Tuesday. Loverro’s resignation took effect last week, according to a statement from NASA obtained by the publication.

NASA’s HEO directorate oversees the Artemis lunar exploration mission slated for 2024. In October, NASA announced that Loverro will succeed Bill Gerstenmaier as HEO head in an effort to meet the Trump administration’s deadline.

NASA also announced plans to reorganize the HEO directorate last month following Loverro's appointment.

Loverro, formerly the deputy assistant secretary for space policy at the Department of Defense (DoD), assumed his role at NASA in December and was previously expected to review key parts of the Artemis program including the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System.

He was also slated to head a flight readiness assessment for the Demo-2 commercial cargo delivery mission with SpaceX ahead of its launch on May 27, according to the report.

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Eileen Vidrine, Air Force Chief Data Officer, to Keynote Potomac Officers Club’s The Power of Data 2020 Forum on June 10th
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Eileen Vidrine, Air Force Chief Data Officer, to Keynote Potomac Officers Club’s The Power of Data 2020 Forum on June 10th
Eileen Vidrine
Eileen Vidrine

Eileen Vidrine, chief data officer of the U.S. Air Force, will serve as a keynote speaker at Potomac Officers Club’s The Power of Data Virtual Forum on Wednesday, June 10th.

Register here for POC’s The Power of Data Virtual Forum.

In her current role, Vidrine develops and implements strategies for enterprise data management, analytics, and digital transformation to optimize performance and drive out innovation in and across all missions and operations. 

Effective integrated data systems help public servants identify gaps in services and pinpoint where they should target outreach and work to increase access for specific groups of citizens. However, as federal agencies begin to work toward an ideal world of data integration, the combination of large volumes, velocities and varieties pose a threat to both public and private sectors as they work toward a seamless solution.

At the Power of Data Virtual Event, notable Vidrine will discuss the priorities and challenges to integrate data systems that provide public servants information about their collective impact and help them identify ways they can improve outcomes together.

In addition to Vidrine, Deepinder Uppal, vice president of Public Sector Technology Innovation Information Builders, will speak at the event. He will discuss how the public and private sectors can prepare for the rapid evolution of AI, ML, IoT, and prescriptive analytics starting with data. 

As the federal government continues to break down its own barriers and create systems for data integration and information sharing that can be adopted at scale, one thing is clear: it is a shared process that federal and industry leaders must develop together for a more powerful future. 

Join Potomac Officers Club for The Power of Data Virtual Forum on June 10th  to learn about the impact data has on federal and industry practices, security and other aspects of the marketplace.

Register here for Potomac Officers Club’s The Power of Data Virtual Forum on Wednesday June, 10th.

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Honeywell Improves Building Health Environments Amid COVID-19; Vimal Kapur Quoted
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Honeywell Improves Building Health Environments Amid COVID-19; Vimal Kapur Quoted
Vimal Kapur
Vimal Kapur

Honeywell has launched an integrated set of solutions to help building owners improve the health of their building environments, the company reported on Wednesday. 

"Honeywell has developed outcome-based solutions that allow building owners to transparently address how they limit exposure to and the spread of viruses while supporting their business continuity needs in an uncertain environment. We're giving them the data they need to confidently reassure their employees to accelerate their business operations," said Vimal Kapur, president and CEO of Honeywell Building Technologies. 

Honeywell has integrated air quality, safety and security technologies along with advanced analytics to help building owners minimize potential risks of contamination and ensure business continuity. The company’s offerings will monitor both the building environment and building occupants' behaviors.

The company’s solutions will provide building owners with more control over critical health, safety and security factors to encourage sustained compliance with changing building standards, safety guidelines, government-issued regulations and a company's risk management policies. 

"The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the culture of how buildings are managed by making apparent the need to ensure health and well-being in all aspects of our lives," added Kapur.  

Honeywell's Healthy Buildings solutions are part of a comprehensive effort among Honeywell's businesses to come together to quickly develop solutions that are helping important sectors of the global economy recover. 

The company’s Healthy Buildings solutions provide a holistic view of a building's health based on key factors such as indoor air quality, occupant flow, personal protection equipment (PPE) analytics, thermal screening, social distancing and sanitation efficacy.

The fully integrated air quality, health, safety and security controls are backed by expert services and remote monitoring support. Customers can also leverage their existing infrastructure, including third-party solutions, to affordably enhance air quality and security outcomes.

Other businesses within Honeywell are introducing innovative new technologies to provide a healthier environment for customers and end users. The company has also developed an Environment Control System Health check that allows airlines to quickly use aircraft data and advanced analytics to monitor for and ensure healthy air quality in the cabin.

"Returning to work after a pandemic will not be returning to business as usual. Occupants will want credible information and increased visibility into how building technology is protecting their health and what has been done to ensure that the buildings they enter are safe,” Kapur concluded. 

About Honeywell Building Technologies

Honeywell Building Technologies (HBT) is a global business with more than 23,000 employees. HBT creates products, software and technologies found in more than 10 million buildings worldwide. Commercial building owners and occupants use our technologies to ensure their facilities are safe, energy efficient, sustainable and productive. 

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ManTech Creates FEDSIM CoE, Appoints FEDSIM experts to Lead New Initiatives; Yvonne Vervaet Quoted
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ManTech Creates FEDSIM CoE, Appoints FEDSIM experts to Lead New Initiatives; Yvonne Vervaet Quoted
Yvonne Vervaet
Yvonne Vervaet

ManTech has announced the creation of a FEDSIM Center of Excellence (CoE), and the appointment of key FEDSIM experts, Chip Taylor and Steve Lipson, to lead the company’s new proposal, knowledge management and competitive intelligence initiatives, the company reported on Wednesday.

“FEDSIM acquisitions are driving significant business growth, as evidenced by ManTech’s recent $920 million contract with Naval Surface Warfare Center-Crane,” said Yvonne Vervaet, Chief Growth Officer of ManTech. “The increase in billion-dollar FEDSIM awards necessitates investing in our new Center of Excellence and the industry-leading talent to run it.”

ManTech’s FEDSIM CoE has been designed to support GSA’s FEDSIM customers with cost-effective technology solutions at speed. The FEDSIM CoE will provide new strategies and processes to create best practices for the company’s FEDSIM opportunities.

In lieu of the CoE, ManTech has appointed Taylor as vice president of the Government-Wide Procurement Advisory Center, and Lipson as executive director of the FEDSIM Center of Excellence.

The new executives will lead the CoE, bringing over five decades of combined experience in federal procurement. Taylor will be responsible for driving sales across ManTech’s portfolio of Government-Wide IDIQ contracts.

He will also lead enterprise-wide competitive intelligence and knowledge management functions, as well as manage business development for ManTech’s FEDSIM CoE. Prior to joining ManTech, Taylor held a variety of senior positions in operations and business development at Perspecta, Vencore, Engility, Harris and EDS, and has direct experience in working with FEDSIM.

Lipson will bring more than 20 years of experience with government contractors (GovCon) to ManTech. Throughout his career, he served at multiple GovCon organizations, where he gained experience in FEDSIM.

He served at Leidos, Perspecta, GDIT and CGI. In the roles, he has coached, managed and developed oral presentations and proposals for opportunities ranging in value from $20 million to $2.5 billion.

Lipson, a notable FEDSIM expert, has deep experience in delivering critical oral presentations. Prior to joining ManTech he consulted on the orals presentations that helped lead to ManTech’s $920 million FEDSIM award with NSWC-Crane.

“Chip and Steve have well-earned reputations for putting the missions of customers first,” said Vervaet. “Like ManTech, they are trusted partners of government, and recognized for their ability to accelerate mission performance and efficiency.”

About ManTech

ManTech provides mission-focused technology solutions and services for U.S. defense, intelligence community and federal civilian agencies. In business more than 50 years, we excel in full-spectrum cyber, data collection & analytics, enterprise IT, systems engineering and software application development solutions that support national and homeland security.

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Pivot3 Integrates Lenovo ThinkSystem Servers, AMD EPYC Processors to Improve Mission Critical Video Surveillance; Ben Bolles Quoted
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Pivot3 Integrates Lenovo ThinkSystem Servers, AMD EPYC Processors to Improve Mission Critical Video Surveillance; Ben Bolles Quoted
Ben Bolles
Ben Bolles

Pivot3 has launched a new platform for video surveillance solutions that will enable organizations to better support mission-critical security operations with Lenovo ThinkSystem servers and AMD EPYC processors, the company announced on Tuesday. 

"Lenovo is collaborating with Pivot3 to deliver innovative solutions that empower customers  with the performance they need to handle today's fast-paced environments while eliminating their challenges,” said Kamran Amini, vice president and general manager of server, storage and software defined infrastructure, Lenovo Data Center Group. 

Pivot3’s solution will be powered by the next generation Lenovo ThinkSystem SR655 server platform with 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor to deliver 10 percent lower cost per terabyte, 14 percent better capacity density and 100 percent more bandwidth than similar solutions. The solution will improve camera density at a lower overall TCO for customers who consider their video mission critical.

"More and more customers are juggling how to enable better business decisions through technology, including capturing, storing and analyzing massive amounts of video data to enable real-time decision making with tight budgets," added Amini.  

Pivot3’s integration of Lenovo ThinkSystem SR655 server into Pivot3 Surveillance Series appliances will provide the performance of a dual-socket server.  The single-socket configuration also offers the potential of up to 50 percent savings on software licensing compared to the dual socket x86 alternative without sacrificing any performance. 

In addition, the Pivot3 video solutions will support PCIe 4 to deliver 100 percent bandwidth increases compared to PCIe 3. The update will enable customers to receive more bandwidth for video recording and 150 percent increase in networking speed, with 25GbE support to enable faster video transfer from the edge.

Pivot3 will capture growth of video to capture, store and analyze massive amounts of video data while controlling infrastructure investments. The solutions will combine the power of the AMD EPYC processors along with Pivot3's software optimized for video workloads to help ensure video loss and degradation never occur and video is always accessible and available.

"AMD EPYC processors provide an additional layer of value to the new Pivot3 platforms, empowering customers to make the most of their budgets upfront while increasing cost-effectiveness over time, critical for businesses that seek to expand their video deployments as needs evolve," said Greg Gibby, senior product marketing manager, data center products, AMD.

The company’s solution will also provide non-disruptive scalability and intelligent monitoring and analytics capabilities for real-time system health monitoring to maximize system uptime and reduce time to repair.

Lenovo ThinkSystem SR655 will allow servers to be configured to support the massive processing requirements of new video analytics applications. Customers can deploy one modular, flexible software-defined platform to meet all their mixed security-workload requirements to reduce complexity and cost of ownership over traditional 3-tier proprietary systems or bare-metal servers.

"While video data output is growing, budgets have remained the same and this leaves security and IT professionals challenged on how to deliver on security and safety imperatives," said Ben Bolles, vice president of product, Pivot3. "Building on more than a decade of experience creating solutions purpose-built for video and leveraging the latest in processing technologies, Pivot3 delivers the performance and economics that today's security decision-makers require."

About Pivot3

Pivot3 is the leading provider of intelligent hyperconverged infrastructure solutions for video surveillance, video analytics, VDI, and mixed workloads. Pivot3's solutions provide security, resilience, and management simplicity at scale for customers' mission-critical environments.

With thousands of customers in 64 countries, and deployments in education, hospitality, transportation, government, defense, healthcare, gaming, financial services, and retail, Pivot3 allows IT to manage complexity at scale through intelligence and automation.

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Lyell Immunopharma Selects AWS as Cloud Provider to Accelerate Cell-Based Immunotherapies Research for Cancer; Mike Clayville, Rick Klausner Quoted
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Lyell Immunopharma Selects AWS as Cloud Provider to Accelerate Cell-Based Immunotherapies Research for Cancer; Mike Clayville, Rick Klausner Quoted
Mike Clayville
Mike Clayville

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that Lyell Immunopharma will transport its cloud infrastructure to AWS as the company’s standard for machine learning (ML) workloads, AWS reported on Wednesday. 

“Lyell runs on AWS because we enable them to build and test applications quickly, and gain insights into vast amounts of data, with the goal of enabling them to bring new therapies to market, which is so important in a world where we are all touched by someone who has been afflicted with cancer,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. 

Lyell will leverage AWS’s scalable infrastructure to run its secure data and analytics platform and support its high-performance computing workloads to accelerate the research of new cell therapies as it searches for cures for cancer.

AWS’s services will help Lyell analyze insights in scientific data on how the immune system can fight cancer, as well as expedite the company’s research. One of Lyell's recent initiatives will  develop immunotherapies with high performance computing (HPC) clusters. The project will help scientists design new protein structures to engineer immune cells that are more capable of fighting cancer. 

“We chose AWS because its unmatched portfolio of cloud services provides us with the environment and resources we need to research, design, and develop immunotherapies, all of which wouldn’t be possible at the speed and scale we are looking for, without the elasticity of the cloud,” said Rick Klausner, M.D., Founder and Chief Executive Officer. 

AWS’s secure and elastic compute capacity will enable Lyell to design and test potential new cell therapy constructs at a faster rate. Lyell will be able to conduct 30 simulations in 10 hours as opposed to a single simulation in four weeks, before joining AWS. 

Lyell will build a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and leverage AWS analytics services like Amazon Athena and Amazon EMR to analyze petabytes of research, clinical and manufacturing data to gain insights into immune cell functionality faster than before. 

Lyell will also incorporate Amazon SageMaker to enable scientists to build, train and deploy ML models. The models enable automated image analysis and optimization of protein structures, which will facilitate Lyell’s mission to cure cancer.

“By adopting cloud-first strategies on AWS and leveraging the most comprehensive set of cloud services in the industry, innovators like Lyell are able to build and scale their businesses, disrupting longstanding business models and inventing new ones,” added Clayville. 

About Amazon Web Services

For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. 

AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 76 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. 

Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs.

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Mark Lewis: DoD Working on Standards, Best Practices for AI Initiatives
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Mark Lewis: DoD Working on Standards, Best Practices for AI Initiatives
Mark Lewis: DoD Working on Standards, Best Practices for AI Initiatives

Mark Lewis, director of research and engineering for modernization at the Department of Defense (DoD), said DoD’s R&E office is working on a series of best practices and technical standards for its artificial intelligence initiatives amid a rising number of AI efforts spread across the Pentagon, C4ISRNET reported Tuesday.

He said Tuesday at an AFCEA-hosted event that the department aims to remove stovepipes to facilitate sharing of databases and applications in order to identify AI applications that would have the biggest impact on troops.

“In some cases that means getting [the technologies] in the hands of the war fighter and having them play with them, experiment with them, and figure out what makes their job more effective, what makes your job easier. And frankly, to enable them to discard the things that don’t buy their way into the war fight,” he added.

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Mark Lewis on Pentagon’s Zero Trust Approach to Microelectronics Procurement
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Mark Lewis on Pentagon’s Zero Trust Approach to Microelectronics Procurement
Mark Lewis
Mark Lewis

Mark Lewis, director of research and engineering for modernization at the Department of Defense (DoD), said DoD is shifting from the "trusted foundry" model toward a “zero trust” approach when it comes to procuring microelectronics due to risks of insider threats, DoD News reported Tuesday.

"You depend on data, you depend on validation and verification, you depend on standards that will make sure that what you have has no surprises, doesn't have back doors that are going to injure you or damage you, and doesn't act in a malicious way," Lewis said of the zero trust approach. "We're actually extremely comfortable now — we believe that the technologies already exist for us to be able to do that."

He said he believes the adoption of zero trust will help the department gain access to modern technology platforms and keep pace with strategic competitors. "Our goal is to allow the Department of Defense to purchase on the commercial curves, from state-of-the-art," he added.

In addition to microelectronics, Lewis also discussed the Pentagon's other 10 tech priorities, including 5G, cyber, autonomy, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and hypersonics.

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Sen. Marco Rubio Named Acting Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman
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Sen. Marco Rubio Named Acting Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman
Sen. Marco Rubio
Sen. Marco Rubio

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has been named chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee on an interim basis, Federal Times reported Tuesday.

Rubio’s “care for our nation’s security, advocacy for our values and interests, and vigilance toward threats have earned a national reputation,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said. “On subjects ranging from China and Russia to Iran and North Korea to tyranny and unrest in our own hemisphere, Senator Rubio has been on the case for years.”

Rubio is a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chairman of the Senate Small Business panel.

He will replace Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who temporarily stepped down as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee amid a federal investigation regarding his recent stock sales.

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DOE Unveils Water Security Grand Challenge
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DOE Unveils Water Security Grand Challenge
DOE Unveils Water Security Grand Challenge

The Department of Energy has posted a request for information to obtain information on novel equipment designs that could help mitigate the water intensity of thermoelectric power plants by 2030.

DOE said Monday it invites manufacturers, utility companies, engineering and design firms to build approaches that will lower water usage in future power facilities as part of the Water Security Grand Challenge.

Mark Menezes, DOE undersecretary, said the program aims to optimize thermoelectric cooling through the employment of new technologies.

Interested vendors have until June 9 to submit their responses to the notice. The department seeks to address the need for secure and affordable water by conducting competitions and research and development initiatives.

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