David Shahady, director of the Air Force Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs, told SpaceNews in an interview published Thursday about the SBIR program and some of the changes to the initiative.

“The financial and the contracting community have knocked down lots of barriers, everything from shortened contracts to paying with a government credit card to giving people their initial money upfront,” Shahady said. “For the companies getting awards, we’re depositing $50,000 off a credit card in their bank account right here, today. … They’re now working on our dime instead of their own, which is the proposition that we want to see.”

Shahady talked about the service’s Space Pitch Day and the three SBIR phases. He said the first phase deals with the development of a concept. Phase two focuses on prototype development and demonstration, while the third phase is the “graduation” from the SBIR program and involves the practice of matching funds or co-investing.

He said the Air Force allows companies to get matching funding from various sources under the third phase of the SBIR program. “If they can find outside money from state and local governments, other services, venture capital investors, large primes or even commercial sales, those are all great propositions because all of those things build up the industrial base. That’s a huge part of competing in a global market,” Shahady added.

Ryan Vega, executive director of the Veterans Health Administration Innovation Ecosystem, said the Department of Veterans Affairs harnessed artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies in 2019 to improve the delivery of health services to military retirees, Nextgov reported Thursday.

One of the AI-focused efforts of VA this year was the appointment of Gil Alterovitz, a biomedical informatics professor at Harvard Medical School, as the department’s first AI director in July. “The importance of [hiring Alterovitz] and what having a director means is that it’s the recognition that the organization is going to embrace this—and not run away from it,” Vega said. 

Other AI initiatives VA launched in 2019 are the establishment of the National Artificial Intelligence Institute and introduction of an AI-based mobile application with IBM to help veterans easily navigate the internet to access the department’s resources.

Vega cited VA’s involvement in partnerships to advance innovations. “I think what’s really important about innovation is that it’s a team sport and what hackathons do is bring people together with a common purpose to solve a problem,” he said. VA also collaborated with Walmart, Philips, the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars on the Accessing Telehealth through Local Area Stations project.

Vega said he expects VA to leverage advancements in other emerging tech areas in 2020, such as bioprinting and 5G-enabled tech.

The U.S. Air Force held a workshop earlier this month to foster collaboration with the use of modeling-based development methods.

The Weapons Digital Enterprise Workshop commenced Dec. 9 at Eglin Air Force Base and aimed to fortify the relationship between the service branch and digital defense organizations, USAF said Monday.

Experts from the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center and the Air Force Research Laboratory formed the Eglin AFB Modeling and Simulation Consortium, a group that advocates for the use of digital twins in systems testing.

Digital twins are virtual representations of weapon systems. Operators model digital twins to virtually test the performance and outcomes of systems.

Consortium members highlighted strategies to apply digital engineering to weapons development, with a focus on autonomous technologies.

“This was a very productive forum, and I look forward to reviewing the team’s detailed plans and recommendations as we move to transform the future of weapons acquisitions and further integrate our Team Eglin enterprise,” said Col. Garry Haase, who leads AFRL’s Munitions Directorate.

The U.S. Army plans to field-test new technologies as part of an effort to update the service’s network of tactical communications systems, National Defense Magazine reported Friday.

Col. Rob Ryan, deputy director of the service’s network cross-functional team, said the effort will deliver on a phased, frequentative process over time. The Army will add new technologies every two years.

“There’s no shot clock in how we do this because what is your iPhone going to look like in 2030? You don’t know how [you are] going to communicate in 2030,” he told defense news.

The network CFT leads this modernization effort, which according to another official, aims to field technologies across six brigade combat teams yearly starting fiscal 2023.

Col. Garth Winterle, who manages projects on tactical radios and integrated tactical network, said the Army will begin with four BCTs in fiscal 2021 and add one team per year until fiscal 2023.

Winterle added that the effort would use indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts to pursue the initial fielding phase.

Soldiers have submitted input to help leadership determine and shape communications systems of the future.

The Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is working to leverage AI for immediate applications such as emergency response and health-related activities, C4ISRnet reported Tuesday.

Nathaniel Bastian, an AI engineer and senior data scientist at JAIC, said at an Association of the U.S. Army event that the center plans to integrate full-motion video features to drones that will predict the spread of fire and help firefighter teams detect their personnel.

JAIC is also developing AI-driven medical imaging technology that will predict impacts to the overall wellness of soldiers, according to Bastian. The tool will be used to support pre-disability and disability evaluation and assess the medical readiness of users.

“It’s one thing to talk about upskilling our current workforce with the skills needed to build AI tools and to use them,” said Bastian. “We’re also looking ahead 10 and 15 years from now, when we reached and achieved our vision of a DoD transformed by AI, what does that look like? What do we need? Are there going to be AI crew chiefs that maintain and deploy it?”