The Department of Homeland Security held a large-scale experiment in Texas to see how emergency responders can utilize new government-developed and commercial technologies integrated into existing public safety systems. The Next Generation First Responder Program– Harris County Operational Experiment at the Port of Houston gathered Houston-based public safety agencies, industry partners, DHS components and the U.S. Coast Guard, DHS said Tuesday.

First responders and partners used new on-body sensors and situational awareness screens to respond to a simulated release of a volatile chemical on the Houston Ship Channel.

“In this experiment the key data points are how to get multi-jurisdictions responding to an event to share information and situational awareness through sensors and communication systems,” said Sridhar Kowdley, program manager and OpEx director at DHS Science and Technology Directorate. “We’re now looking at integrating and fusing these technologies and incident command on various situational awareness platforms or dashboards,” he added. 

DHS plans to release case studies, guides and an after action report on the lessons from the experiment in late summer. The agency will conduct the last NGFR experiment, Birmingham Shaken Fury OpEx, in August. 

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.