The General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service office launched a four-phase program to solicit, fund and test ideas from federal employees seeking to improve government services through the use of technology, Nextgov reported Monday.

The 10x program “is designed to find, fund, grow and sustain new technology products and services,” Nico Papafil, acting lead director of the initiative, told Nextgov. “In other words, we incubate and accelerate great proposals to help move government IT forward.”

Will Cahoe, 10x project coordinator, said the agency asks its employees to provide two or three sentences on a problem they want to address through the use of a Google Form as part of the “10x Mad Libs” process. The agency’s 10x program has four phases – investigation, discovery, development and scale – and allocates funds ranging from $20,000 to $1.28 million as the project progresses into each phase. GSA supports the 10x program, focusing on cross-agency initiatives with broader impact, through the Digital Services Fund.

“One of our goals in the next few months is that we really want to publish and make public a lot of the research that comes out of these projects,” Cahoe said.

The Air Force Research Laboratory is implementing a new feature to support the development of semiconductor materials for lighter and smaller electronics. The emerging Oxide Molecular Beam Epitaxy laboratory will house a new MBE chamber to create gallium oxide semiconductors for use in aircraft electronics, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base said Friday.

Don Dorsey, materials research engineer at AFRL, said that gallium oxide still holds a lot of unexplored potential as a semiconductor material. Gallium oxide has also displayed the capacity to withstand higher voltages than common silicon-based semiconductors, and allow for aircraft electronic components to be made in smaller sizes.

“We are able to produce extremely pure samples and have the assurance that our material formulations are exactly as we intend them,” he said.

The MBE technology also fosters collaboration with other AFRL directorates, industry firms and centers of excellence at universities.

“The capability to produce up to four-inch wafers enables us to work with university centers of excellence as well as industrial research organizations to advance the material capabilities and open new doors for this technology,” said Shin Mou, materials researcher at AFRL.

The First Responder Network Authority launched new initiatives to partner with the public and industry in planning public safety investments and creating a new roadmap to enhance the FirstNet network.

The FirstNet Authority Board announced the plans at a meeting on Wednesday in Jackson, Miss. The event focused on how the public can help improve critical communications and safety.

“This is the only nationwide broadband network that public safety has a voice in,” said FirstNet Board Chair Edward Horowitz. “From the earliest consultation days through the launch of the network, public safety has been and will continue to be at the center of everything we do.”

The FirstNet roadmap will use information from the private sector, academia and industry association to follow trends in the tech market.

“We will continue to engage with public safety to learn and understand their needs and collaborate with them so they can maximize the benefits of FirstNet for their life-saving mission,” said FirstNet Authority Acting CEO Ed Parkinson.

The FirstNet Authority is currently developing a new experience program that would help first responders leverage existing and future technologies through hands-on educational experiences. It also completed an agreement with the University of Mississippi Medical Center to promote innovation in emergency medical care and response in rural areas.

Federal technology officials called on the government to implement changes that would speed up the hiring process and make it easier for job seekers to navigate government agency web sites, Federal News Network reported Friday.

The call comes as the Federal Cyber Reskilling Academy is set to begin its first classes with 25 students in April, according to Jason Gray, chief information officer at the Department of Education. The program will focus on training for federal employees outside of IT to handle  cyber defense analyst positions in the future.

Gray spoke at a recent AFFIRM cybersecurity conference in Arlington, Va. Several panelists suggested agencies should accelerate the hiring process. The Office of Personnel Management should overhaul the usajobs.gov site to make it easier for job seekers to

The Department of Energy is utilizing partnerships with academia to recruit the right talent. The agency launched the CyberForce competition in 2018 that gathered students to defend servers and virtual machines from cyber attacks. The goal was to introduce cybersecurity to students, said Adrienne Lotto, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for infrastructure security and energy restoration.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency completed a demonstration of its new collaborative operations in denied environment system which enables drones to perform tasks in areas without communications systems and GPS.

DARPA said Friday it tested the CODE with six RQ-23 Tigershark unmanned aerial vehicles at the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground.

Aside from working in a denied environment, the new system also enabled Uthe AVs to be controlled by a single person compared to traditional systems that require at least one operator per drone, according to Scott Wierzbanowski, program manager for CODE at the DARPA Tactical Technology Office.

The system allowed the Tigersharks to autonomously share information and collaborate even after operators lost communications with the UAVs.

“CODE can port into existing UAV systems and conduct collaborative operations,” Wierzbanowski said.

The demonstration used software and algorithms built by Raytheon and the White Force Network from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to create a live, virtual test environment. DARPA said it will transfer ownership of the system to the Naval Air Systems Command by late 2019.