Col. Stoney Trent, chief of operations at the Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, said that commercial entities are “poorly incentivized” to conduct AI development and testing during a recent C4ISRNET conference, C4ISRNET reported Sunday. Trent noted that the DoD needs to encourage private sector partners to develop better AI testing tools and methods that can be used in potential activities relevant to national security.

“Hopefully, the nation will be at peace long enough to not have a high bandwidth of experiences with weapons implementations, but when that happens, we need them to absolutely work. That’s a quality of commercial technology development,” he said.

Kara Frederick, associate fellow for the Center for a New American Security’s technology and national security program, said the Pentagon can also spur industry participation by providing a conducive environment for AI development. She cited better information technology environments, common data processing standards and uniform industry interaction procedures as factors to support this effort.

Federal Chief Information Officer Suzette Kent said government agencies are showing progress around cloud efforts for collaboration and email tools, Federal News Network reported Friday. Kent, a 2019 Wash100 winner, said on the network’s Ask the CIO that application rationalization is vital since it goes in concert with data center-related initiatives.

“By understanding what our technical environment and application environment needs are, that will help us get that last mile on the data centers both from a closure perspective as well as optimizing the ones we believe there is a reason to keep them there,” she said. “All of these things are part of our effort around re-skilling on the workforce side. We will over the summer and going into the fall complete the execution of a lot of these pilot programs and then we will turn our attention on how to scale them.”

Kent noted that the Office of Management and Budget will issue new data on cloud and other IT modernization metrics later this month and that her office is collaborating with the Government Accountability Office and lawmakers to update the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act scorecard. She also provided updates on the quality service management office and the Trusted Internet Connections policy.

Cindy Daniell, director of research at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, told C4ISRNET in an interview published Tuesday that artificial intelligence could help NGA analysts address the “nothing significant to report” issue in image triage.

“We are looking to AI to filter that, to perform video triage for us and tell us where there’s something significant and meanwhile they can just cull out all of the NSTRs,” Daniell said. “We’re looking to AI to perform those mundane processes and to help us allow the analysts then to focus on the real problems of complexity. The problems that take spatial analysis, that take correlating patterns of activity together and take more of a strategic reasoning; the AI can process out all of these simple robotics.”

She noted that NGA is intent to address other challenges including source strategies, image understanding beyond automatic target recognition and automated feature extraction.

The National Archives and Records Administration is looking at blockchain technology to change how it authenticates images and videos amid the rise of deepfake, Federal News Network reported Monday. 

The move follows the launch of machine learning algorithms designed to manipulate images and audio to make realistic videos of people talking about something or performing activities. Eric Douglas, a records management policy and program support specialist for NARA’s chief records officer, said integrating blockchain into the authentication process would help the agency and the public independently verify digital content. 

“A shift to blockchain could provide the validity and trust that records management systems have traditionally performed and this shift may impact how records are organized, arranged and maintained over time,” he said. 

However, Douglas noted NARA hasn’t determined resources to store information on the blockchain and train personnel to manage the technology. A report on federal adoption of blockchain previously issued by the Data Foundation and Booz Allen Hamilton called on the government to consider further exploration and adoption of blockchain as part of the Federal Data Strategy.

The U.S. Air Force launched an initiative to address the military service’s concerns through the presentation of various concepts. Three groups of students from Air University’s squadron officer school were tasked to pitch their ideas in updating the service branch’s set of processes to senior officials as part of the Think Tank initiative, the Air Force said Monday. The concepts are intended to cover select areas of research including machine learning and advanced algorithms.

The participants were given ten minutes each to present and explain their concepts to Air Force captains. Col. Jason Trew, commander at the 30th Student Squadron, said the participants will receive training on design fundamentals derived from military, academic and industry practices worldwide.

“What they learn and practice are directly applicable to the strategic thinking skills that are highly valuable to leaders at all levels,” Trew added.