The General Services Administration plans to hold a governmentwide forum on robotic process automation on Jan. 19 to discuss with federal employees the advantages of using machine learning technology across agencies, Federal News Network reported Tuesday. 

The event will focus on “building, testing and deploying” RPA and addressing concerns that the technology might soon take jobs away from the federal workforce. RPA works to reduce or eliminate rote tasks from the daily workloads of employees, such as copying and pasting data on forms. GSA plans to introduce the new organizations and efforts that would help promote the use of automation across the government. 

The agency aims to establish a governmentwide RPA community, executive council and new public-private partnerships in 2019 to manage and speed up federal agencies’ adoption of emerging machine learning technologies. GSA is also working on a process improvement competition with Challenge.gov that it hopes to launch during the RPA forum.

John Edwards, chief information officer at the CIA, has said the agency should update its technology platforms and optimize its workforce to accelerate data collection and generate insights from gathered information, FedTech Magazine published Tuesday.

“Increasing the edge over our adversaries, our operational advantage will be determined by the speed at which we sense, collect, ingest, condition, analyze and characterize data of the representative threat,” he said in his speech at the FedScoop Public Sector Innovation Summit held Dec. 4 in Washington, D.C.

“Computing at the edge, the point of mission execution, is increasingly important,” he noted.

Edwards cited a platform of shared services delivered through a private cloud, dubbed Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise, and the IC’s effort to migrate ICITE to a common reference architecture.

He called on the IC to implement agile development models and the CIA to adopt agile procurement vehicles in order to keep pace with industry innovation.
 

The U.S. Navy has established a new squadron to handle the CMV-22B Osprey , a tiltrotor aircraft that provides logistics support across the service branch. The new Fleet Logistics Multi-Mission Squadron or VRM-30 would use the new aircraft designed for increased range, larger cargo, quicker loading/unloading, boosted communications and higher survivability compared to the previous C-2A model, the Navy said Monday.

VRM-30 will undergo Osprey training with the U.S. Marine Corps as the squadron waits for its first CMV-22B unit scheduled to arrive in fiscal year 2020. The service branch expects to fully transition into the CMV-22B by fiscal year 2024. The new aircraft is a Navy-tailored variant of the Osprey vertical takeoff and landing tilt-rotor aircraft.

A joint venture between Boeing and Bell is producing 39 CMV-22B units for the service branch as part of a $4.2B contract modification with the Department of Defense.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology extended the deadline to submit written comments on a new framework to help the government better identify, assess, manage and communicate privacy risks.

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NIST is accepting public input on the RFI until Jan. 14, extending the original deadline of Dec. 31 to close the document, according to a notice on Federal Register posted Monday. “NIST is taking this action to provide additional time to submit comments because multiple interested parties have expressed difficulty in submitting comments by the original deadline and have asked for an extension,” the agency said.

The project aims to develop a Privacy Framework to help agencies and organizations protect personal information stored and used in their products and services.

“It is a challenge to design, operate or use technologies in ways that are mindful of diverse privacy needs in an increasingly connected and complex environment,” NIST said in the RFI.

The agency hopes the framework to provide “prioritized, flexible, risk-based, outcome-based, and a cost-effective approach” compatible with existing legal and regulatory regimes for widespread adoption.

House lawmakers announced plans to improve the use of artificial intelligence and increase the government’s cyber workforce through new bills in 2019 that would provide funding and set standards in the public and private sectors, Federal News Network reported Monday. Reps. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Robin Kelly, D-Ill., said they want to increase coordination between the government and industry to explore and expand investments in AI technologies.

“Artificial intelligence matters because it will impact every single industry,” Hurd said. “We need to make sure we are aligning research in the federal government and the private sector, to make sure we are aligning the standards for the workforce, and we are training the workforce of the future. We need to make sure we are working with our international partners on this.”

The Texas representative said he’s working on a cyber national guard bill to increase the number cyber experts in the future. Hurd also aims to push the Senate to increase its budget for the Technology Modernization Fund in 2019 after the House agreed to provide $150M in the coming year.

Meanwhile, Kelly also plans to introduce a separate bill to improve the security of connected devices by requiring basic cybersecurity standards on government-purchased Internet of Things devices.

Kelly and Hurd serve in the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on IT.