A bipartisan group of House lawmakers on Tuesday introduced legislation that seeks to protect the U.S. telecommunication supply chain from foreign interference.

The Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act would prohibit any organization from using federal funds to procure communications products or services that  might pose a national security threat to domestic networks,  the House Energy and Commerce Committee said Tuesday.

The bill also calls for the Federal Communications Commission to create a reimbursement program meant to help smaller communications firms remove and replace banned equipment or services from networks.

Reps. Frank Pallone, D-N.J.; Doris Matsui, D-Calif.; Greg Walden, R-Ore.; and Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., are the bill’s sponsors.

“Our telecommunications companies rely heavily on equipment manufactured and provided by foreign companies that, in some cases, as with companies such as Huawei and its affiliates, can pose a significant threat to America’s commercial and security interests,” the four lawmakers said in a joint statement.

The panel’s communications and technology subcommittee is scheduled Friday to discuss the bill at a meeting about supply chain security and spectrum matters.

A U.S. Digital Service tool works to help contracting officers and specialists determine an organization’s readiness level in undergoing acquisitions as part of their digital transformation efforts, FCW reported Tuesday.

Florence Kasule, a digital services procurement expert at USDS, said the Digital Service Maturity Determination platform is designed to assess a workplace’s focus on end users, culture of delivery and transparency and seeks to help contracting professionals better understand the team they will work with. 

“Does that team track and measure feedback openly and honestly, are there intensive and frequent communications with the customer and/or end users of the system? So, when you go through [an] attribute, you’re trying to assess whether that group has all of those practices adopted into the organizational culture or not,” Kasule said at an event.

The tool is used to score organizations across nine attributes, including transparency and openness, craftsmanship, Agile development championship, user-centered design, acquisition and continuous integration. Workplaces are categorized as novice, intermediate and expert based on their scores in those attributes.

The General Services Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission have begun their information technology modernization partnership through the Centers of Excellence program, FedScoop reported Tuesday.

“We’re working with the GSA COE on the development of an enterprise data strategy and implementation plan to support ongoing work to support of the CPSC’s commitment to evidence-based decision making and the importance of data and analytics in agency operations,” a spokesperson for CPSC told the publication.

Anil Cheriyan, director of GSA’s Technology Transformation Service, mentioned the CoE-CPSC partnership at the White House AI summit. He also cited that the CoE team is in “active discussions” with the Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate deployed various tools based on internet of things and automated technology to help communities impacted by Hurricane Dorian. 

William Bryan, acting undersecratry for science and technology at DHS, wrote in a blog post published Monday that the hurricane warranted a “whole-of-government response” to support emergency response efforts in the Bahamas and prepare coastal communities such as those in Florida and North Carolina.

S&T-developed technologies used during recovery operations include a situational awareness tool for tracking first responders and a hurricane evacuation planning platform that runs on a web interface. The directorate also developed a forecasting tool for coastal flooding and storm surges, IoT-based flood sensors and the Single Automated Business Exchange for Reporting designed to provide real-time information on business disruptions and restoration efforts.

According to Bryan, the tools can be used for a range of future emergency response activities such as locating survivors, coordinating recovery teams and sharing information on hurricane behavior, dam failures and inland flooding.

Researchers from academia worked with the U.S. Army to create small robots that would join together to form larger structures. The 3D printed robots, known as smart active particles or smarticles, may serve as a stepping stone towards the development of shape-changing, multi-modal systems, the Army said Friday.

“For example, as envisioned by the Army Functional Concept for Maneuver, a robotic swarm may someday be capable of moving to a river and then autonomously forming a structure to span the gap,” said Sam Stanton, program manager for complex dynamics and systems at the Army Research Office.

The smarticle robots feature two flappable arms, motors, limited computing power and simple sensors, and are able to form a combined, moving structure when joined together in a circular confinement. The robots’ combined form, known as a supersmarticle, moves in response to light or sound stimuli via sensors.

“These are very rudimentary robots whose behavior is dominated by mechanics and the laws of physics,” said Dan Goldman, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the effort’s principal investigator.

Goldman’s team from Georgia Tech and Northwestern University published the project’s findings in the Science Robotics journal here.

The National Security Agency invites undergraduate and graduate students to join this year’s edition of an annual cybersecurity competition. The 2019 Codebreaker Challenge would allow participants to showcase software reverse-engineering, blockchain analysis and other cyber skills in scenarios that resemble real-world cyber terrorism, NSA said Friday.

Participating students would work to reverse-engineer and exploit TerrorTime, an Android messaging app that the challenge’s fictional terrorists use to communicate. Efforts under the challenge would aim to spoof and decrypt messages and enable user masquerades within the app. The challenge is ongoing and will continue to run through Jan. 10, 2020.

“The Codebreaker Challenge closely mirrors the real world scenarios we deal with every day at NSA,” said Eric Bryant, the challenge’s creator. “It gives students the opportunity to test their knowledge, build new skills and develop experience in areas typically not covered by course curricula in cybersecurity,” he added.

The Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and the National Security Innovation Network have partnered to administer a three-day challenge on predictive aircraft maintenance. Over 50 hackers from industry and academia gathered at the Into the Dataverse challenge to employ artificial intelligence in military aircraft maintenance, DoD said Monday.

The challenge took place at the University of Michigan’s School of Aeronautical Engineering. Participants exchanged ideas with DoD representatives to present AI systems that classify and measure maintenance activities, with respect to focus areas of data collection and user interface. A group of officials from government and academia served as judges to evaluate entries based on demonstration level, market viability, validation and potential impact.

“This hackathon brought together a diverse group of incredibly talented and innovative people who, in a very short time, developed and presented creative solutions to a challenging problem,” said Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, JAIC director, 2019 Wash100 Award winner and one of the judges.

Winners secured up to $15,000 in funds to continue development of their entries.