The Internal Revenue Service will soon post a solicitation on Pilot IRS, a procurement vehicle that will be an avenue for the IRS to access technology which will improve its processes, Nextgov reported Monday. Scheduled to be issued in August, the program’s first solicitation will be regarding the automation of contract-related financial updates.

The three goals of Pilot IRS are to upgrade the data of the IRS, to put a ceiling on the work performed by government employees on data improvement projects and to be able to enhance IRS’ data in the near future, optimistically by the end of September.

“The quality of the data is inconsistent because different contracting activities use different approaches, use different systems and, frankly, as we in the IRS have experienced firsthand, the bulk of the obligations come in the fourth quarter and in September,” said Harrison Smith, deputy chief procurement officer at the IRS.

Procurement through Pilot IRS will have four phases. Projects, which require approval at the end of each stage, will cycle through a $25K proof-of-concept phase, a $75K prototyping phase, a limited deployment phase, and a $3M scaled deployment phase. The IRS intends to issue awards for the first phase by the end of fiscal year 2019. Interested parties may submit their questions until Aug. 9.

The Air Force Research Laboratory has collaborated with academic and corporate institutions to study polymides, a type of heat-resistant material used in the spacecraft and spacecraft component production, in order to enhance the defenses and operational capabilities of current and future space vessels. When Kapton, a polymide film, is exposed to space-like radiation, only certain, but not all, chemical bonds are changed through a process called irradiation, according to a U.S. Air Force statement published Monday.

Afterwards, when the polymide has been given time to ‘recover,’ the investigation team, through a modeling method that emulated real-world conditions, discovered that Kapton “forms a new material with the pieces left behind after the damage.” For their modeling system, the team used Reactive Force Field molecular dynamics, also known as Reaxff.

By using this model, scientists can investigate different chemical bonds and potentially learn how to develop better radiation-hardened materials. The partnership included the AFRL, Assurance Technology Corporation, Johns Hopkins University, Pennsylvania State University and Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Angela Bailey, chief human capital officer of the Department of Homeland Security, said during a Senate hearing that the agency intends to clarify its hiring regulations by spring 2020, Fedscoop reported Wednesday.

Bailey told the Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management Subcommittee that DHS is working with experts to identify the technical and leadership skills it needs and will invest up to $40K for training following the establishment of the DHS Cyber Talent Management System. She added that DHS will use the system to assess returning personnel’s private sector experience in order to clarify payment matters.

“We need to look at ways to make hiring or rehiring federal staff more flexible, so long as the agency has thought about the policies that they need to do it,” noted Yvonne Jones, director of the Government Accountability Office’s strategic issues team.

The Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories is developing an artificial neural network that uses dragonflies’ hunting capacity as a basis for enabling missiles to intercept targets such as hypersonic platforms, C4ISRnet reported Tuesday.

Sandia’s Frances Chance is leading the yearlong effort to develop and test algorithms based on dragonflies’ cognitive functions, which include the ability to react to maneuvers within 50 milliseconds. If successful, findings from the project which will be passed on to scientists for weapons development.

“The challenge then is: Is there anything that we can learn from how dragonflies do this that we can then bring to the next generation of missiles, or maybe even the next-next generation of missiles?” she said. The project is funded by Sandia’s Autonomy for Hypersonics Mission Campaign and is slated to conclude in September.

The General Services Administration has found that most contractors agree that the agency’s proposed consolidation of multiple award schedules has a clear format and will benefit industry. In November 2018, GSA announced that its plans to unify 24 contract vehicles into a single government-wide vehicle to simplify agencies’ procurement procedures.

The agency issued two requests for information on the initiative in June and received 586 responses on the RFI on the MAS vehicle’s format. GSA received 480 responses to its RFI on the vehicle’s categories and special item numbers and found that 84 percent of current contractors agree on the clarity of the vehicle’s category, subcategory and SIN mapping reforms. GSA expects to issue the final MAS solicitation on Oct. 1.

A council of Freedom of Information Act officers has called for the inclusion of records management and commercial off-the-shelf FOIA software in the General Services Administration’s schedules program to facilitate the procurement process for government agencies, Federal News Network reported Monday.

“A lot of agencies have difficultly starting from ground zero. It’s really hard to get started on making technological improvements and embracing some of these things. The variety of systems out there is overwhelming … They can’t make that argument to leadership that we need this if we’re going to be an effective FOIA program here in 2019,” said Michael Sarich, FOIA director at the Veterans Health Administration and co-chair of the Chief FOIA Officers Council’s technology subcommittee.

Sarich added that he believes the adoption of artificial intelligence platforms could become a “force multiplier” for FOIA personnel as they work to reduce the backlog requests. Agencies saw FOIA requests climb 5.6 percent to 863,729 in fiscal 2018, according to the report.