NASA expects to perform a series of small unmanned aircraft system demonstrations in Texas and Las Vegas to validate a traffic management tool’s operational capacity. The agency said Tuesday it will deploy unmanned aircraft units within Corpus Christi, Texas and Reno, Nevada to showcase the UAS Traffic Management platform’s drone traffic management functions in urban areas.

In addition, NASA will demonstrate a vehicle-to-vehicle communication and collision avoidance tool, an automated safe landing platform, a UAS service supplier interface and a flight information system.

Efforts under the demonstrations are part of NASA’s Airspace Operations and Safety Program that intends to help the commercial drone market confirm potential urban flight concerns and assist in the creation of policies, rules and traffic management processes for safe UAS operations.

The agency has tapped the Lone Star UAS Center for Excellence and Innovation and the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems to assist with the demonstrations.

Kelvin Droegemeier, the Trump administration’s new science adviser, said during the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting that fostering artificial intelligence research will drive progress in the field, Geek Wire reported Friday.

Droegemeier, newly appointed director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, added that AI research must assess future demands and capabilities that can “supercharge progress” in the field.

“Getting a handle on this as a portfolio is a real challenge, but in my view, if we’re able to do that; it will really help us think about how to strategically invest and move forward,” he noted.

Droegemeier has called for a periodic assessments of U.S. research and development efforts including those done by the government, academe, industry and non-profit sectors. He also proposed addressing harassment issues faced by research entities and intends to create a network of “Alpha Institutes” to work on issues such as space exploration, climate change and disease eradication.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Office of the Inspector General has identified the agency’s weaknesses in the areas of security, technological modernization and management.

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Jay Lerner, FDIC inspector general, said Thursday in a report the agency needs to focus on cybersecurity risk oversight, financial technology innovation, information security management, crisis preparation and enterprise risk management. Other areas of improvement include threat information sharing with banks, human capital management, acquisitions process and regulatory cost measurement.

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FDIC OIG intends for the report to inform decision makers and other stakeholders on the agency’s needs.

The departments of Agriculture and Homeland Security as well as the Small Business Administration are expanding their use of enterprise mobility ­management to provide federal workers better security and mobility with their smartphones, FedTech reported Monday. 

Recently, DHS launched a pilot program to integrate the Lookout Mobile Security with EMM technology, AirWatch, to detect and blacklist potentially malicious third-party apps on employee phones. The agency uses EMM tools to handle and secure ­credentials for more than 100,000 mobile devices.

Several agencies and offices within DHS use different EMMs, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Coast Guard that rely on MobileIron, while the Transportation Security Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement use BlackBerry’s Enterprise Mobility Suite. 

Meanwhile, SBA utilizes the technology to provide mobile security for over 2,000 dispersed workforce across 128 locations. In 2018, the agency expanded its mobile network with iOS and Samsung Galaxy devices. The move allowed SBA to maximize coverage in remote areas and increase its internal apps for employees.  

USDA also made some updates in its EMM use to secure its mixed mobile environment that includes 32,000 government-issued mobile devices that use iOS. The effort focused on blocking application-based threats, such as malware and vulnerabilities. The agency is blacklisting and whitelisting capabilities to maintain third-party apps approved for business use.