The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced a competition that will offer up to $1.65M for artificial intelligence-driven initiatives to forecast unplanned admissions and other adverse events in hospitals or nursing facilities.

CMS said Wednesday the year long AI Health Outcomes Challenge provides an opportunity for innovators to develop   deep learning and neural network mechanisms to help clinicians manage the quality of care. The CMS Innovation Center might use innovations from the competition to evaluate provider payment and delivery models.

The agency could select up to 20 participants via an online application process during the launch stage, which runs through June. The winners will then design and test their proposed AI platforms using Medicare claims data as part of stage one. stage two. The winner will receive a $1M prize, and the runner-up will receive $250K.

A U.S. Air Force-led team concluded tests on a drone refueling system designed to work with F-35 aircraft systems. The F-35 Lightning II program team launched an F-35B aircraft to the Edwards Air Force Base along with the KC-135 Stratotanker system to highlight the tanker’s capability to refuel at night operations, USAF said Friday.

The KC-135 works to attach to an aircraft’s lighting assembly through the use of a refueling probe. The ground team used amber and warm white lighting under varying brightness levels and determined that the latter tone will work for the tanker’s operators and the pilots.

“An issue with the current probe light was that it was too bright, blinding the KC-135 aerial refueling boom operators,” said Michael McGee, 418th Flight Test Squadron aerial refueling project manager at Edwards AFB. “The new light was designed to be less bright, but still bright enough for the F-35 pilot to see clearly.”

The Air Refueling Certification Agency will evaluate the tanker’s design and integrate the results into an updated flight clearance for the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy.

Ron Ross, a computer scientist and a National Institute of Standards and Technology fellow, told Fifth Domain in an interview published on Friday that the potential role of artificial intelligence in improving cybersecurity depends on the development of a trusted platform. 

“Any AI program that you’re running at the application level is totally going to be bogus information,” he said. “Now, if you can build a trusted platform and take advantage of artificial intelligence, machine learning, you’ve got a great brave new world there. That’s awesome and we should be doing all of that.”

Ross also offered updates on NIST’s revised standards meant to require contractors to protect government data and cited the need for companies to ensure information security. 

“Information that’s critical doesn’t lose value because it goes from the federal government to a prime contractor and that value stays just as high when it goes to the sub. I think the ultimate solution is you have to protect the information no matter where it is, and somebody is going to have to pay for that,” Ross added.

The Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy is working to implement emerging technology to streamline acquisition procedures, FedScoop reported Friday.

Joanie Newhart, associate administrator of acquisition workforce programs at the OFPP, said the office is collaborating with the Chief Acquisition Officer Council to deploy new technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence to handle the workload and repetitive functions during the recent 2019 FedScoop IT Modernization Summit.

“We think it’s going to explode this year, so we want to get in front of it and use it wisely,” she noted.

Agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services are leading the efforts to utilize technologies like AI and blockchain to automate contracting processes, according to Newhart. She added that OFPP will partner with Congress to develop strategies for using emerging technology to accelerate procurement procedures as part of the former’s Acquisition Modernization Plan.