The U.S. Army canceled its plans to further a technology demonstrator program focusing on designing, building and flying next-generation unmanned aerial system capabilities, Defense News reported Friday. 

The service branch is set to conclude the program’s first phase, revolving around producing UAS technology concepts, and shift the focus on future vertical lift operations to support the procurement of advanced manned helicopters.

Layne Merritt, director of the Aviation Development Directorate under the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Aviation and Missile Center, said the military branch will concentrate on wargaming activities to develop collaborative operations between manned and unmanned aircraft.

He noted the effort will help the Army model tools identify potential issues and performance requirements. According to Merritt, another major acquisition under the demonstrator program is “probably too much for the Army at one time.”

The Department of Energy plans to invest $24 million in projects aiming to study dark matter in theoretical and technological aspects. DOE said Thursday that it will let grant recipients leverage DOE-supported facilities and technologies to pursue projects. Such technologies include particle accelerators and detectors at national laboratories.

“With new developments in the field over the past few years and the game-changing research being done in the American science community, the time is right for innovative efforts to tackle the problem of dark matter,” said Paul Dabbar, the department’s undersecretary for science.

DOE expects to allot $3 million in fiscal year 2019 as the first part of a potential four-year program. Interested parties may submit letters of intent through April 30, with final applications due May 30.

Gordon Bitko, chief information officer of the FBI, said at a recent AFCEA event that the agency seeks to improve data management through automation and personnel data literacy efforts, Federal News Network reported Friday.

As part of its overall data strategy, the FBI has several programs to assess new information technology capabilities and “understand what fits into our portfolio best, smartest and quickest,” Bitko said.

Bitko wants to migrate more of the agency’s tools and systems to a cloud environment to help investigators conduct operations with greater efficiency. Bitko cited other FBI data modernization initiatives including workforce training and recruitment, personnel aptitude testing on data analysis skills and the transition of the agency’s next generation identification biometrics platform to the cloud in line with the Justice Department’s IT strategy.

The USS Fitzgerald naval destroyer, also known as DDG 62, launched pier-side following a series of repairs and modifications at Huntington Ingalls Industries‘ Ingalls Shipbuilding shipyard facility on April 16. The company began restoration and maintenance in Jan. 2018 to reinforce the integrity of the vessel’s topside and hull structures after a collision incident in 2017, the U.S. Navy said Tuesday. 

The service branch noted that HII updated and repaired the ship’s combat system, command, control, communications, computers and intelligence platforms as well as its hull, mechanical and electrical components to bring the vessel back to warfighting capacity.

“This undocking is a step forward and brings us that much closer to getting Fitzgerald back out to sea – where the ship belongs,” said Cmdr. Garrett Miller, commanding officer of USS Fitzgerald.

The General Services Administration made several changes to three software-related special item numbers under the agency’s IT schedule 70 in an effort to keep up with marketplace demands.

Bill Zielinski, acting assistant commissioner of the GSA Office of Information Technology Category, noted in a blog post that the agency implemented the updates to better align IT schedule offerings with commercial software procurement procedures and streamline legal operations such as license transfers.

GSA revised SIN 132-32 to include software license definitions and differentiate software from software-as-a-service, which is covered by cloud SIN 132-40. The agency also renamed the software maintenance SIN 132-34 and added software identification and transferability terms to SIN 132-33 perpetual software licenses.

Other changes include revising commercial supplier agreements and including utilization limitations to SIN 132-32, -33 and -34 to cover ownership-related matters. Zielinski noted in his post that the SIN updates came as the federal acquisition community was leveraging legislation such as the 2015 Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act, the 2016 MEGABYTE Act and the Office of Management and Budget’s software licensing acquisition memo issued in the same year.