The White House has called on artificial intelligence professionals to come up with new data and text mining processes to help answer key scientific questions about the new coronavirus.

The call to action was made after researchers from Microsoft, Allen Institute for AI, Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative unveiled the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, the White House said Monday.

The CORD-19 dataset represents a machine-readable collection of over 29,000 articles related to COVID-19, including over 13K articles with full-text, available for data mining efforts.

“Decisive action from America’s science and technology enterprise is critical to prevent, detect, treat, and develop solutions to COVID-19,” said Michael Kratsios, U.S. chief technology officer and a 2020 Wash100 Award winner. “The White House will continue to be a strong partner in this all hands-on-deck approach. We thank each institution for voluntarily lending its expertise and innovation to this collaborative effort, and call on the United States research community to put artificial intelligence technologies to work in answering key scientific questions about the novel Coronavirus.”

Researchers planning to respond to the call can submit their data and text mining insights and tools through Google Cloud’s Kaggle platform.

Stakeholders will continue to update the CORD-19 resource on Allen Institute’s Semantic Scholar website as new research articles get published in peer-reviewed publications and archival services.

About The Wash100

The Wash100 Award, now in its seventh year, recognizes the most influential executives in the GovCon industry as selected by the Executive Mosaic team in tandem with online nominations from the GovCon community. Representing the best of the private and public sector, the winners demonstrate superior leadership, innovation, reliability, achievement and vision.

Visit the Wash100 site to learn about the other 99 winners of the 2020 Wash100 Award. On the site, you can submit your 10 votes for the GovCon executives of consequence that you believe will have the most significant impact in 2020.

The Department of Commerce plans to have a new advisory committee in place before the end of March to kick off the development of the Federal Data Service aimed at improving federal data privacy and access, FedScoop reported Monday.

The Advisory Committee on Data for Evidence Building will determine how the Federal Data Service will function and will have a year to design the service and submit its recommendations to the Office of Management and Budget.

The advisory panel will develop a service to pilot projects in an effort to improve data use and access, protect privacy, collect non-survey data and integrate data with administrative and survey data.

The report said the Federal Data Service will support the Federal Data Strategy and the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act.

The Department of Health and Human Services experienced a cyber attack as part of a disinformation campaign that seeks to disrupt response to the coronavirus pandemic, Bloomberg reported Monday.

John Ullyot, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a statement the federal government is conducting a thorough investigation of the cyber incident. “HHS and federal government cybersecurity professionals are continuously monitoring and taking appropriate actions to secure our federal networks,” he added.

The NSC posted a tweet Sunday warning citizens about fake text messages on a national quarantine in response to COVID-19. People familiar with the matter said the disinformation was linked to the HHS cyber attack, which overloaded the department’s servers and may be caused by a foreign state actor.

“On Sunday, we became aware of a significant increase in activity on HHS cyber infrastructure and are fully operational as we actively investigate the matter,” Caitlin Oakley, a spokeswoman for HHS, said in a statement.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued a guidance for organizations seeking to “improve their supply chain risk management or third-party risk programs.”

The draft publication, titled “Impact Analysis Tool for Interdependent Cyber Supply Chain Risks”, is aimed at helping federal agencies improve their identification and assessment of the potential cybersecurity risks in their interconnected supply-chain networks.

NIST said the C-SCRM Interdependency Tool serves as a prototype concept for measuring the impact of a supply chain-related cyber event. The tool also establishes metrics and identifies “nodes” to improve visibility across the supply chain network and specific suppliers, products and projects.

The guidance’s publication comes after NIST researchers found that impact was “frequently overlooked” in cybersecurity risk studies. According to NIST, the need for evaluating supply-chain cyber events becomes greater as federal agencies become more aware of cybersecurity risks at the supplier level.

“This can be a difficult activity, especially for those organizations with complex operational environments and supply chains,” NIST said in the guidance. “A publicly available solution to support supply chain risk analysis that specifically takes into account the potential impact of an event does not currently exist.”

The U.S. Space Force has declared operational capability of a new ground-based communications jammer designed to disrupt enemy satellite communications, Space News reported Sunday.

Space and Missile Systems Center tested the L3Harris-made Counter Communications System Block 10.2 over a year before achieving operational status.

Troops can portably use CCS to deter enemy satellite transmissions. The system's new Block 10.2 version follows a previous one made in 2014.

Air National Guard and Space Force members serve as the system's users.

Space and Missile Systems Center turned CCS Block 10.2 over to Peterson Air Force Base last Thursday.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency advises organizations to bolster network protection as they adopt telework approaches due to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.

Organizations must be aware of the increase of cyber vulnerabilities in using enterprise virtual private networks, a requirement for mass telework or work-from-home arrangements, CISA said Friday.

The use of VPN may open organizations to more phishing threats and reduce the availability of information technology security personnel, the agency noted.

CISA recommends organizations to increase phishing awareness among employees, ensure VPNs are updated, prepare IT personnel for cybersecurity tasks, employ multi-factor authentication for VPN access and report all concerns to the agency.