The U.S. Army kicked off discussions with the Space Development Agency to help provide ground forces access to satellites in the low-Earth orbit, SpaceNews reported Sunday. Ferrari, who most recently served as director of program analysis and evaluation at the Army, said that the SDA will play a lead role in serving as a space systems architect and establishing standards to facilitate the delivery of broadband communications and other LEO-based services to all service branches.

“What’s interesting to the Army about SDA is that they’re talking about building a satellite from the ground up,” John Ferrari, a retired Army major general, told the publication. “For the Army that’s important.” He also noted that the Army requires higher capacity communications platforms. “We’re not betting the farm on LEO. Maybe the business case doesn’t close, but we’re excited because it does offer a missing piece of the puzzle: assured connectivity at lower cost.”

On July 23, the SDA held its first industry day and informed contractors on a plan to come up with a “national security space architecture” using cloud computing, commercial sensors and LEO satellites.

The departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs are looking to fill director and deputy director positions to manage a $10 billion joint effort to migrate electronic health records to a cloud environment, Fedscoop reported Friday.

The two senior officials will oversee the Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization Program Office responsible for the 10-year effort to transfer the medical data of service members and veterans to the Cerner-developed Millennium platform.

The director and deputy will report to DoD and VA officials and be based in Roslyn, Va. Previously, VA announced that it has transferred over 78 billion records to the Cerner cloud.

The Department of Homeland Security has announced that a total of $1.7B in fiscal 2019 funds will be distributed to government agencies, private institutions and nonprofit organizations to support preparedness programs nationwide. From that amount, $2.1B will be divided between six DHS competitive preparedness grant programs, the DHS said Friday.

Meanwhile, as previously announced in May, over $1.3B will be assigned to non-competitive grants. The grants are intended to support high-risk areas in the country.

A portion of the funds will be allocated to preparedness programs connected to 31 heavily-populated urban areas through the Urban Area Security Initiative. Preparedness programs enable citizens to handle both natural disasters and terrorist attacks. The DHS has provided over $51B in funding to preparedness programs since 2002.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology released a draft guide for incorporating cybersecurity into an internet-of-things network. NIST said Thursday that the “Core Cybersecurity Feature Baseline for Securable IoT Devices” guide provides recommendations on security features that organizations may implement for network-capable devices used in a range of applications such as manufacturing, health care and home use. 

“It is aimed at a technical audience, but we hope to help consumers as well as manufacturers,” said Mike Fagan, a computer scientist at NIST and the guide’s co-author. 

The draft guide includes security recommendations covering device identification and configuration, data protection, interface access, software and firmware updates and cybersecurity event logging. NIST will conduct a workshop on Aug. 13 and accept public feedback on the guide until Sept. 30. 

The Federal Communications Commission unveiled an optional authorization process for small commercial satellite systems with certain characteristics. Operators of satellites that have a wet mass of not more than 396.8 pounds and are built to remain in orbit for a short time period will be eligible to skip the licesing process, FCC said Thursday.

The optional process, which falls under Part 25 of agency regulations, will also apply to smallsats designed to have low space debris and spectrum interference risks. FCC also introduced an application fee category for companies that want to obtain a license or enter the smallsat market in the U.S.

The commission said such systems work to support research, communications, remote sensing and scientific missions.

The Government Accountability Office released a report stating that the Defense Intelligence Agency failed to properly oversee the Intelligence Community Centers for Academic Excellence program aiming to diversify the pool of applicants for IC positions.

GAO assessed DIA’s oversight of CAE from 2011 to 2019 and found that the agency failed to create results-oriented program goals and provided insufficient data for evaluating the program’s success. In addition, DIA wasn’t able to establish monitoring procedures for IC elements’ participation in events supporting the program including college recruitment activities.

The watchdog noted that DIA’s failure in program management will result in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence being unable to properly determine the program’s success as the organization assumes CAE oversight in fiscal 2020. CAE issued 46 grants totaling $69M to 29 colleges from 2005 to 2018 and has been under DIA’s management since 2011.

Gil Alterovitz, director of artificial intelligence at the Department of Veterans Affairs, discussed his plans to apply AI to VA’s problem solving efforts, Nextgov reported Thursday. He told Nextgov about his ongoing efforts and long-term goals to help veterans and support veteran care via AI and VA’s plethora of data. 

“We really want to be the go-to place for veterans through AI research and development—so instead of reacting, we can really anticipate their needs,” Alterovitz said.

The AI director said the technology can help researchers quickly detect cases of acute kidney injury, an illness that doctors usually notice when chances of treatment have reduced. A VA-supported research team used machine learning with veteran patient data to forecast on kidney failure, the report noted.

“When you think about how we are preparing ourselves, what we want to do is set a vision for the future and leverage all the strengths that we have,” stated Alterovitz, a former Harvard professor.