Nand Mulchandani, chief technology officer of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), said JAIC plans to fund AI projects by implementing a venture capital model that involves mission teams and product managers, Defense One reported Thursday.

He said the mission team will be composed of client representatives to identify the type of agency data that might prove useful in addressing a problem and the product manager will oversee the actual development of a product and “gather customer needs, make those into product features, work with the program manager, ask, ‘What does the product do? How is it priced?’” He said the product manager and the mission team will bring a small portion of agency data to software vendors who can help address the problem.

“We’re going to have a Series A, a seed amount of money. You [the vendor] get a half a million bucks to curate the data, which tends to be the problem. Do the problem x in a very tiny way, taking sample data, seeing if an algorithm applies to it, and then scale it,” Mulchandani said Wednesday during an Intelligence and National Security Alliance-hosted event.

Paul Cunningham, chief information security officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said VA wants to learn from the Department of Defense’s experience and challenges when it comes to the deployment of electronic health records system in order to facilitate its own EHR rollout, Nextgov reported Thursday.

Cunningham told the publication he expects the department’s partnership with the Pentagon to move into the digital domain and provide VA access to the “full force of DOD protecting our network as well.”

Recruiting tech talent is a major concern facing VA and Cunningham said strengthening collaboration with the private sector could help address the problem.

“We’ve got to look at where we can partner with the private sector, for them to train people who can feed our machine and our people can feed back out in a more porous manner, so people don’t feel like they’re taking a big hit,” Cunningham said.

Cunningham shared his views on risk management and cited the need to provide employees with role-based cyber training.

NASA has approved its new infrared telescope to undergo hardware development and testing, marking a new technical milestone in the program. The space agency said Monday that its Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope or WFIRST will undergo finalization with efforts to design engineering test units.

These test units would help NASA verify the telescope's ability to operate in austere space conditions. The telescope is designed to detect infrared signals in space to study dark energy and also remotely explore planets beyond the solar system.

NASA expects to spend $3.2 billion on WFIRST's development, with a maximum potential cost of $3.93 billion. The telescope will continue to receive funds under the Fiscal Year 2020 Consolidated Appropriations Act through September. The WFIRST program may not receive funds in FY 2021 due to a proposal to focus on the James Webb Space Telescope.

The U.S. Navy works to prepare USS Gerald R. Ford or CVN 78 for flight deck certification this month, following the ship's recent operational turnover. The service branch said Tuesday that it granted the ship's operational control to Carrier Strike Group Twelve led by Rear Adm. Michael Boyle.

The group formerly operated on USS Abraham Lincoln and is now preparing Ford for future activities under a Post Delivery Test and Trials period. The ship is now in the fourth month of the phase that will last for 14 more months.

Thomas Modly, acting Navy secretary, gathered experts during the CVN 78's second summit to support the ship's operational transition. The event took place Feb. 26. Engineers are also working to complete the carrier's advanced weapons elevators before full ship shock trials in fiscal year 2021.

“NNS [Newport News Shipbuilding] is working as hard as they can to deliver the remaining elevators in the most efficient timeline possible,” said, Capt. John J. Cummings, who commands USS Gerald R. Ford.

Huntington Ingalls Industries' NNS division built the ship.