The Department of Energy has chosen a public-private partnership led by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to manage a research and development facility that will focus on desalineation technology platforms. DOE said Monday that the National Alliance for Water Innovation will aim to address water security gaps and explore approaches to treat certain water sources for multiple applications via the Energy-Water Desalination Hub. 

Under the initiative, NAWI will build treatment systems for produced, brackish and sea-based waters in an effort to help water desalination system suppliers build critical components and large-scale platforms. The alliance also seeks to minimize the environmental impact for 90 percent of non-traditional water sources over the next decade.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the National Energy Technology Laboratory helped form NAWI, which has more than 35 members and 180 partner organizations. Congress has allocated $40 million for the hub since fiscal 2017 and DOE expects stakeholders to provide $34 million in cost-share funds.

The department added it plans to award research grants to solar desalination and wastewater resource recovery projects through the Water Security Grand Challenge.

The General Services Administration has asked nine contractors for advice on how to offer software-defined wide-area network services to agencies through the $50B Enterprise Infrastructure Services telecommunications contract, FCW reported Monday.

“SD-WAN services are being requested and proposed under EIS using existing contract services such as Managed Network Services, Transport Services and Service-Related Equipment,” a spokesperson for GSA told the publication in a statement Friday.

The spokesperson added that the EIS team has sought and received feedback from all prime contractors and a subcontractor with regard to the SD-WAN broadband services and is in the process of reviewing the comments.

Jim Russo, telecommunications manager for EIS solutions development at GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, sent a letter to EIS suppliers to ask specific questions about SD-WAN, including standard pricing models for the capabilities and the services’ effect on overall client spending compared with conventional WAN services.

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA, said the space agency plans to build a space-based telescope to identify and track near-Earth objects that could pose potential threats to the planet, GeekWire reported Monday. Zurbuchen said at a meeting of NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee Monday the proposed infrared telescope for the NEO Surveillance Mission will use the technologies created for the NEOCam telescope.

He noted that the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will play a key role in the development of the NEO Surveillance Mission, which will function as a planetary defense mission. The proposed telescope is expected to take off by 2025 to detect 65 percent of 140-meter-wide near-Earth asteroids within five years following the launch, according to the report.

Lt. Gen. John Thompson, commander of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, said the service branch is in the process of assessing plans that were submitted in response to a solicitation for the second phase of the National Security Space Launch program, Bloomberg reported Monday.

Thompson said the vendors competing for NSSL phase 2 have proposed rockets with “viable technologies” and are “on track to meet our requirements.”

Northrop Grumman, SpaceX, United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin are the four companies vying for a program to launch national security payloads through 2027. The service branch plans to select two launch service providers by mid-June.

Thompson stated that the military branch is examining the use of reusable rocket boosters. “So reusabilility is just one way to change the return-on-investment for the vendor and be able to price a little bit differently in a competition,” he said.

Deloitte announced on Monday that the company has launched Smart Factory Fabric, a pre-configured suite of cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) applications powered by Amazon Web Services, to accelerate smart factory transformations for companies with manufacturing operations.

The Smart Factory Fabric suite of services helps companies improve their operational performance and reduce costs by increasing visibility, optimizing production, improving quality, and minimizing unplanned downtime associated with running a smart factory.

Smart Factory Fabric is designed for companies with manufacturing operations; sample industry sectors include: aerospace and defense; industrial products; pharmaceutical and medical devices; automotive; government; high tech; oil, gas and chemicals; and power and utilities. 

“For companies with complex manufacturing operations, implementing a smart factory solution at industrial scale can be daunting, but imperative for those who wish to remain competitive today. That’s why we’ve worked with AWS on a smart factory offering,” said Andy Daecher, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and Deloitte Digital IoT U.S. practice lead. “Smart Factory Fabric pairs Deloitte’s experience in business strategy, operations, industrial products, and technology engineering with AWS cloud and IoT services, including its global reach, to deliver a scalable, configurable smart factory that’s tailored to a manufacturer’s unique needs.”

About Deloitte

Deloitte provides industry-leading audit, consulting, tax and advisory services to many of the world’s most admired brands, including nearly 90% of the Fortune 500 and more than 5,000 private and middle market companies. Our people work across the industry sectors that drive and shape today’s marketplace — delivering measurable and lasting results that help reinforce public trust in our capital markets, inspire clients to see challenges as opportunities to transform and thrive, and help lead the way toward a stronger economy and a healthy society.

The National Security Agency is leveraging artificial intelligence to analyze telemetry data and identify anomalies in small satellites’ behavior to ensure that they are not under the control of adversaries, Defense One reported Friday.

Aaron Ferguson, technical director of the NSA Capabilities Directorate’s encryption solutions office, told attendees at a Defense One event that the experiment will help inform modifications for future smallsats which will be deployed in low-Earth orbit.

“It’s no longer good enough to have a satellite that can survive launch, begin to operate, and survive initial operations,” said Gen. John Raymond, commander of the recently created U.S. Space Command. “You have to have a satellite that is defendable, and so Space Command will put a sharp focus on that.”

Bill Malik, vice president of infrastructure systems at Trend Micro, added that issues in satellite security will significantly impact other efforts such as the planned 5G rollout. In a prior conference held in May, Malik noted in a presentation that there have been six known cases of NASA satellite hacking before 2011.

David Spirk, chief data officer of the U.S. Special Operations Command, said the command is seeking artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to support the development of Hyper Enabled Operator technology, C4ISRnet reported Saturday. The HEO effort is slated to succeed SOCOM’s Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit program which will run for five years.

“The only way we have HEO in the future is if we can reduce the cognitive load of that operator and his ability to command his resources at his disposal through automation and applied AI,” Spirk said.

He added that ML and AI technologies can improve automation at operation centers, support mission-specific forecasting and help operators leverage and disseminate intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data in the field.

SOCOM intends to hold an AI symposium this month to discuss plans for establishing a sustainable AI portfolio.

Twenty-five agency program offices have detailed their plans for digital transformation and customer service improvement in line with President Trump’s Management Agenda, Federal News Network reported Friday.

The program offices, named by the Office of Management and Budget as high-impact service providers, issued their annual strategies on Performance.gov. As part of its strategy, the Internal Revenue Service intends to reduce cases of fraudulent payments by 2 percent through 2024.

The State Department is also planning to launch workforce re-skilling efforts to improve customer service by fiscal 2022. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, plans to deploy self-service tools and digitize its forms before fiscal 2022.

Plans issued on the website include performance metrics for agencies’ self-evaluation purposes and largely focus on call center consolidation, improving digital services and retraining personnel for better customer service.

Kevin McAleenan, acting secretary of homeland security, has announced his department’s new strategic framework to address terrorism and targeted violence. The Department of Homeland Security said Friday that its new strategic framework aims to understand the changing terrorism environment, prevent terrorists from U.S. entry and boost defenses of the country’s infrastructure.

“Today, the United States faces an evolving threat environment and a threat of terrorism and targeted violence within our borders that is more diverse than at any time since the 9/11 attacks,” he said.

McAleenan announced the new framework during an event at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C. The country’s awareness of growing threats has encouraged the department to also cover adversaries at U.S. borders, in addition to terrorists overseas, McAleenan added.

The U.S. Navy has laid the keel of LCS 28 or the future USS Savannah, formally marking the start of the littoral combat ship’s construction. The service branch said Friday that it laid and authenticated the ship’s keel during a ceremony the same day at Austal USA’s shipyard in Mobile, Ala.

Dianne Isakson, spouse of Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., performed the keel’s authentication as the ship’s sponsor. LCS units are designed to address enemy mines, small seacraft and submarines near coasts and shores.

Savannah is among five Independence-variant LCS vessels under construction at Austal USA’s shipyard.