The U.S. Air Force’s innovation hub has streamlined contracting processes that allowed the service to award more than 100 contracts in 40 hours to small businesses.

Officials at the AFWERX Innovation Hub in Austin, Texas, released the contracts through the Small Business Innovation Research Program, the service said Wednesday.

To speed up the contracting process, the innovation team used data analysis tools and a Special Topics solicitation to collect and auto-generate necessary proposals from the small business community. 

Through the solicitation, the Air Force received proposals from 279 companies.

“We traditionally get about 10 to 20 companies, so that far exceeded the maximum seen before,” said Ryan Helbach, chief intrapreneur at the Air Force Research Laboratory. “We’re definitely attracting a lot of non-traditional companies using this broad, open topic approach.”

He also noted that the Air Force commonly takes up to six months to complete evaluations and awards.

AFWERX plans to use the same contracting process to acquire virtual reality technologies for training, an adaptive virtual maintenance trainer, a ruggedized, mobile telemedicine system, small unmanned aircraft systems and an integrated digital health platform.

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology have carried out an experiment with atomic clocks, whose results have set records in terms of timekeeping precision and consistency.

A team of NIST researchers led by Andrew Ludlow performed the experiment using a pair of ytterbium optical lattice clocks, where atoms of the chemical element ytterbium are enclosed within a gridwork of lasers.

Atomic clocks tell time by detecting the frequency at which an atom switches between energy levels. This switching, which is equivalent to the “ticking” of a regular clock, happens when an atom is bombarded with radiation.

During the experiment, Ludlow and his team were able to achieve switching rates that very closely matched the natural frequency of the ytterbium atoms. Consequently, their clocks were able to keep time more consistently within the course of a given period.

Most significantly, the frequency measurements between the two atomic clocks used in the experiment agreed with one another. The researchers compared the readings on their clocks 10 times and found the differences to be exceedingly miniscule.

These results, which the researchers described as “unprecedented,” indicate a level of timekeeping accuracy that would make it possible to use atomic clocks to investigate phenomena like gravity waves and dark matter, or even test Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

The researchers discuss the study in detail in a paper published by the science journal Nature.

The Department of Health and Human Services is seeking public comment on a draft strategy to reduce regulations and reporting requirements for clinicians when using health information technology, such as electronic health records.

HHS said Wednesday it aims to make the use of health systems less complicated and time-consuming. 

The agency said that based on initial feedback from clinicians there is a need to improve the functionality and intuitiveness of EHRs, and to reduce the effort and time required to record health information and to meet regulatory reporting requirements. 

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology issued the draft document in partnership with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. 

Clinicians said spending more time entering data into the EHR and complying with documentation guidelines often led to less time with their patients. They also had difficulty finding patient information across health IT systems.

“Health IT tools need to be intuitive and functional so that clinicians can focus on their patients and not documentation,” said Don Rucker, HHS national coordinator for health information technology. “This draft strategy identifies ways the government and private sector can alleviate burden.”

HHS will accept comments on the draft strategy until Jan. 28, 2019.

The U.S. Navy will commission the future USS Thomas Hudner during a ceremony on Saturday at the Flynn Cruiseport in Boston, Mass., the service branch said Wednesday.

The guided-missile destroyer, built by General Dynamics’ Bath Iron Works business, will be designated as DDG 116. It will participate in peacetime presence, crisis management, sea control and power projection missions.

The Hudner will contain offensive and defensive weapons designed for maritime warfare as well as air, surface and subsurface battles.

General Dynamics BIW delivered the vessel to the Navy in June.

DDG 116 was named after Capt. Thomas Hudner Jr., who received the Medal of Honor in 1951 for his service during the Korean War.

The ship will be the Navy’s 66th Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.

The FBI is looking at the cloud, artificial intelligence and machine learning to help its investigators and analysts speed up review of large volumes of data collected in terrorism investigations, FedScoop reported Wednesday.

Christine Halvorsen, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, said the agency has been obtaining more data than it can handle manually.

Speaking at Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, she suggested that adopting cloud technology and integrating AI and machine learning tools could help analyze vast data quickly, such as identifying subjects in various video footage. 

Halvorsen noted that the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division already utilized the cloud by moving its data and services to AWS, which helped reduce manual work for analysts by 98 percent and costs by 70 percent. She aims to expand the use of cloud for information sharing with the intelligence community, state and local authorities and the private sector to expand counterterrorism efforts.  

“It’s all there, but we don’t have the ability to put the pieces of the puzzle together right now because it’s all being held separately,” Halvorsen said. 

The U.S. Secret Service has launched a facial recognition pilot at the White House to see how the technology could help confirm the identity of people in and around the building. 

For the test, the agency integrated a facial recognition system with the Crown CCTV system used inside and outside the White House complex, according to a notice posted by the Department of Homeland Security. 

The pilot aims to help the Secret Service understand how facial recognition technologies can help identify individuals that may pose threats to individuals under the agency’s protection at the presidential building.

Federal agents serve as test subjects for the pilot. But DHS noted that civilians “who do not wish to be captured by White House Complex CCTV and cameras involved in this pilot may choose to avoid the area,” FCW reported Wednesday. 

The program runs from Nov. 19 to Aug. 30, 2019.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection also launched a separate facial recognition test to monitor international travelers as part of its biometric entry and exit screening plan. 

The co-chairmen of a commission that reviews the National Defense Strategy have said the lack of stable funding and concept of operations would make it difficult for the strategy to address the threats posed by China and Russia, USNI News reported Wednesday.

Gary Roughead, a retired Navy admiral, and diplomat Eric Edelman of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy appeared Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee to discuss the commission’s recommendations.

Roughead and Edelman said they consider a $733B defense budget a “baseline” to upgrade nuclear forces and maintain military readiness.

Edelman told the Senate panel about the commission’s concerns over “flat budgets” and the strategy’s failure to consider the possible emergence of two simultaneous conflicts.

The report said the commission suggested that defense budget levels should increase 3 to 5 percent on an annual basis to advance modernization and ensure readiness.
 

The Defense Department will establish a new center to help the agency leverage artificial intelligence to better understand signals collected in the electromagnetic spectrum, C4ISRnet reported Monday.

Dana Deasy, the DoD’s chief information officer, will oversee the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.  

The DoD hopes the JAIC will help speed up and organize processes to apply AI in military operations, mainly streamlining the process to analyze vast data in electronic warfare. 

“AI no doubt will play a key role of sorting through all that data,” Deasy said. “It will do analysis and fusion of that data, which is overwhelming currently to our planners and operators.”

To provide industry with more information on the JAIC, Deasy noted the DoD will host an industry day on Nov. 28 in Silver Spring, Va., and release an unclassified version of the agency’s AI strategy in the coming weeks.

The agency plans to provide $1.7B in funding to establish the AI center over the next five years.