Navy Secretary Richard Spencer released a new report assessing the service’s cybersecurity posture.

Spencer wrote in a letter published Tuesday that the Cybersecurity Readiness Review highlights the need to change the service’s data hygiene and business processes to protect data. The review assesses the role of people, culture, resources, processes and governance in cybersecurity and offers recommendations to address resources, policy and procedures needed to enforce cyber resilience and defense, he noted.

“Leadership has already initiated this process as part of a broader review of how best to organize the department to address the overall challenges of information management; to include not only cybersecurity, but also data strategy and readiness, business system rationalization, and artificial intelligence,” wrote Spencer, a 2019 Wash100 Award winner. “We will be working with the Congress to determine what legislative authorities may be required to implement any significant changes,” he added.

The review also examines the best practices the government and the private sector implement with regard to cybersecurity and the ability of the defense industrial base’s cyber measures to protect the Navy’s critical information.

The Wash100 award, now in its sixth year, recognizes the most influential executives in the GovCon industry as selected by the Executive Mosaic team in tandem with online nominations from the GovCon community. Representing the best of the private and public sector, the winners demonstrate superior leadership, innovation, reliability, achievement and vision.

Visit the Wash100 site to learn about the other 99 winners of the 2019 Wash100 Award. On the site, you can submit your 10 votes for the GovCon executives of consequence that you believe will have the most significant impact in 2019.

The Department of Homeland Security released binding operational directives to direct agencies to implement cybersecurity measures against potential threats, but agencies failed to meet the deadlines outlined in the BoDs, FCW reported Tuesday.

“I think stakeholders were worried about what we would do with the authority,” Gabriel Taran, assistant general counsel for cybersecurity law at DHS, said at an event Monday. “They didn’t trust DHS necessarily to do this, or didn’t think it was the right approach for one entity to direct others.”

Jeanette Manfra, assistant director for cybersecurity at DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told FCW in an interview that, “One [principle] we tried to stick with religiously was the ability to independently measure compliance. That was very important to us,” said Manfra regarding the department’s efforts to ensure agencies’ compliance with cyber requirements.

The Government Accountability Office told the publication it will release a report to assess DHS’ process for BoD development, implementation and the metrics the department uses to evaluate agencies’ compliance with the directives. The GAO report is set for completion by this fall.

The U.S. Marine Corps secured $45.9 billion from President Trump’s proposed 2020 budget a figure that will support the acquisition of the service’s first fleet of MQ-9 Reaper drones, National Defense Magazine reported Tuesday.

The Marines’ budget for the next fiscal year is $2.7 billion higher than its 2019 level and includes $3.1 billion for acquisition of new technologies. Trump allocated $77 million for the procurement of three new MQ-9 drones.

Rear Adm. Randy Crites, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for budget, said the drone can “fulfill an urgent operational need for the marines as we intend to transition this as a program of record once we complete the program evaluation process.”

Aside from the drones Trump’s budget provides funding for other new military systems for the marines including F-35 joint strike fighters, CH-53K King Stallion helicopters, amphibious combat vehicles, joint light tactical vehicles and ground/air task oriented radars. The Marines also hope to secure funding to increase personnel to 186,200 in 2020.

The Department of Transportation established a deliberative body that seeks to address regulatory and jurisdictional concerns.

The Non-Traditional and Emerging Transportation Technology Council was established to provide potential sponsors an avenue to discuss plans and mitigate interference in the development   of transportation technology, the DOT said Tuesday.

“New technologies increasingly straddle more than one mode of transportation, so I’ve signed an order creating a new internal department council to better coordinate the review of innovation that have multi-modal applications,” said Elaine Chao, secretary of DOT.

Department officials conducted interactive demonstrations during the ongoing South by Southwest conference to highlight the agency’s support for transportation platforms. The agency also plans to hold a meeting to discuss approvals for tunneling technologies in the U.S.

A team working on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Lifelong Learning Machines program developed a new algorithm that allows machine learning systems the ability to continuously obtain new information and  automatically adapt a task without requiring system resets.

DARPA announced Tuesday that researchers from the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering in Los Angeles enabled an artificial intelligence-controlled robotic limb to teach itself how to walk and automatically recover after encountering an obstacle by using an artificial intelligence algorithm. The system was able to learn the task independently after five minutes of training.

Existing AI technologies require operators to overwrite their training set to learn new tasks. Such processes involve turning the technology offline and conducting another set of training.

“Current fixed methods underlying today’s smart systems will quickly give way to systems capable of learning in the field,” said Hava Siegelmann, a program manager at the DARPA Information Innovation Office. “We’re at a major moment of transition in the field of AI.”

She added the abilities to learn while in operation and apply learning to new circumstances would make AI systems safer than cars driven by people.

DARPA launched the L2M program for lifelong learning machines in 2017 to explore new ways to build next generation AI systems and replicate biological organisms to give the technologies new learning capability. The program supports 30 groups through grants and contracts.