Cindy Daniell, director of research at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, said NGA plans to use machines and other technologies to enable analysts to automate routine tasks to focus on the decision-making process, C4ISRNET reported Wednesday.

“This is, the way we see it, a true human-machine partnership. It’s harnessing the scale, the speed, the power of the computer processing and the human cognition both doing the best at their particular capabilities,” Daniell said Monday at a panel during the GEOINT 2019 symposium.

She said the agency plans to advance the human-machine partnership through handheld devices designed to process geospatial intelligence data for warfighters on the battlefield and carry out their missions.

“They all need to be able to have geospatial intelligence to interact with their world. At Research, we see the future that the NGA will deliver persistent, real time, on demand, secure GEOINT to the field for tactical and strategic missions,” said Daniell.

Daniell said NGA is developing an analytic tool that could help troops identify and locate adversaries.

The Department of Energy teamed up with researchers from the Idaho National Laboratory to create a cybersecurity technology to secure an electric power grid through the visualization of intelligence data. The Structured Threat Intelligence Graph is intended to allow utility operators and owners to share, build and edit cyberattack information, INL said Wednesday. 

“This software helps analysts process new threat information rapidly and makes it easier for them to find or create relationships between pieces of information,” said Jed Haile, cybersecurity researcher and tool developer at INL. 

The team has also collaborated with Southern California Edison to test the application on Southern California’s 50,000-square mile electricity grid. INL released the platform’s open-source code on GitHub to encourage other developers to update the technology and help secure U.S. critical infrastructure systems.

NASA plans to address the digging limitation of the InSight Mars robot’s heat probe that results from structures blocking the lander’s cameras. The heat probe is a hammering spike originally geared to dig up to 16 feet under Martian ground. However, misplaced support structures have limited the probe to no more than 12 inches of digging, the space agency said Wednesday.

A team of scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have analyzed the problem for months and are hypothesizing the cause to be a lack in soil friction around the InSight lander. JPL is working to address the problem with the German Aerospace Center, provider of the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package that the probe is part of.

NASA personnel plan to use the lander’s robotic arm to move the structures out of the camera’s field of view. The space agency may push through with the plan in late June. Tilman Spohn, HP3 principal investigator at the German Aerospace Center, said using the robotic arm would address the lack of soil friction, based on calculations.

Information technology professionals are calling on the government to invest in blockchain and take steps to better understand the technology, Federal Times reported Thursday.

Alan McQuinn, senior policy analyst for the IT and Innovation Foundation, said that the U.S. needs to be more competitive and promote the use of blockchain, which can help simplify auditing and supply chain operations for large agencies like the departments of Defense and State during the ACT-IAC Emerging Technology Forum in Washington, D.C.

“You have a network where people often have to submit paper files that can be faked and then it’s up to the government agency to decipher whether something is real or not,” said McQuinn. 

According to Cointelegraph, China has launched efforts to establish a city centered around blockchain technology.

Anil Cheriyan, director of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service, said GSA considers forming new core areas related to robotic process automation and identity management as part of the Centers of Excellence program to better facilitate operations, FCW reported Wednesday.

“We’re building new capabilities with robotics process automation. RPA with [artificial intelligence] looped into it is something that in my experience has worked in the private sector, particularly in the financial sector,” he said at an event Wednesday.

Cheriyan said the agency also plans to combine contact center and customer experience areas to form an “omnichannel experience” area as well as merge data center modernization with cloud adoption area. “You can’t do one without the other,” he added.