A top official at the General Services Administration said the Department of Agriculture is moving forward with its modernization efforts to consolidate data and call centers, FedTech Magazine reported Monday. The progress comes after USDA received the federal Center of Excellence designation from the White House. 

The agency reduced its data centers from 38 facilities to two, while its call centers will be consolidated into one by end of July, according to Anil Cheriyan, director of GSA’s Technology Transformation Services and head of Centers of Excellence program.

“That’s progress, and that’s something we’re hoping to achieve,” he said at the 2019 GITEC Emerging Technology Conference in Annapolis, Md. “That whole client experience is about to change.”

USDA also intends to accelerate the process of grant farm loans from 12 months to less than a day. Cheriyan said GSA hopes to replicate the modernization success of USDA as well as the other CoE agency the Department of Housing and Urban Development across the government. He hopes to name another CoE agency in 2019. 

The Small Business Administration and Visa will hold a three-day hackathon to encourage entrepreneurs and designers to develop applications and other platforms to help small businesses recover from natural disasters, FedScoop reported Monday. SBA will give $60,000 in total prizes, including $25,000 for the first place winner.

Participants will have access to the Visa Developer Platform and the U.S. government’s application programming interfaces to develop their apps as part of the Small Business Week hackathon that will kick off Friday, May 3, in Washington, D.C.

The event seeks apps to help small companies restore revenue stream, secure funds for short and long-term recovery, pay employees, find suppliers and deal with service disruptions following a natural disaster. Maria Roat, chief information officer of SBA, will serve as a judge and Chris Pilkerton, acting SBA administrator, will announce the winners Sunday.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency hosted the SubT Integration Exercise that gathered local and international teams to test autonomous air and ground systems for navigating underground areas. DARPA said Monday that the event in Idaho Springs, Colo., marked the initial phase of its Subterranean Challenge intended to provide service members and first responders with new technologies to map, navigate and search underground environments. 

STIX involved nine teams of universities and companies from Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, South Korea, Switzerland and the U.S. Each team demonstrated how their technologies could locate objects within tunnels during complex scenarios that a warfighter or first responder would experience. DARPA plans to conduct three other tests that will focus on tunnels, underground urban environments and natural cave networks. Tests at the first tunnel circuit will begin in August. Interested parties can still submit proposals to join the competition. 

The U.S. Air Force is developing a platform that enables government and private sector information technology teams to access software tools certified for and compatible with Department of Defense networks, FCW reported Monday. 

The Air Force Cognitive Engine is intended to be a “software ecosystem” of algorithms, data, personnel and computational resources necessary for developing artificial intelligence technology, according to Maj. Michael Seal, director of the Air Force’s autonomy capability team 3. Seal noted that the military branch seeks to promote the sharing of code-based tools across industry and in-house IT teams. 

“If you find your preferred AI business, their team has a toolbox they prefer to work with that can’t get through the door to our network system because most of it hasn’t been approved or cleared for our activities,” he added.

The recently created Joint AI Center will work on addressing ACE’s predictive maintenance issues over the next six months ahead of the platform’s scheduled release in summer 2020.

The Defense Information Systems Agency unveiled a commercial off-the-shelf technology to track and map potential attacks on the internet. The platform is designed to search for critical gaps, confirm remediation results, provide alerts to any public network changes and address compliance requirements, DISA said Monday.

The system also functions to manage misconfigured cloud and internet assets as well as validate potential system behavior risks between the public internet and the network attack surface. In addition, DISA utilizes the system to secure the Department of Defense’s information network. DISA noted that misconfigurations occur in unregistered internet protocol space due to attempts to enable core operations and support mission needs.

The Government Accountability Office discovered that nine agencies successfully implemented provisions of a 2014 law requiring changes to governmentwide information technology management. GAO released a report on Monday highlighting the 12 practices that helped agencies implement the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act. 

Agency officials working on FITARA relied on senior leadership support, performance measures, an executive to manage the implementation, implementation policies, centralized software licenses management and a risk rating process for IT investments. The other practices were application rationalization, data center visits, utilizing the cloud, incentivizing agencies and using full capacity of data centers. 

The implemented FITARA provisions focused on CIO authority enhancements, enhanced transparency and improved risk management, portfolio review, data center consolidation and software purchasing. The agencies mentioned in the report are the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Justice and Veterans Affairs, the Agency for International Development, NASA and the General Services Administration.