An office within the General Services Administration is building an artificial intelligence-based tool that could scan federal solicitations online to find those not accessible for people with disabilities, Federal News Network reported Friday.

GSA is working on the Solicitation Review Tool designed to ensure proposal requests from agencies are compliant with the accessibility standards under Section 508. Marina Fox, head of DotGov Domain Services at GSA’s Office of Governmentwide Policy, said the AI technology could review tens of thousands of RFPs on FedBizOpps.gov and other federal contracting sites. The office transfers data from SRT to a web portal where subject matter experts and agency users can see information about their files. 

Fox said GSA is preparing the tool for production using the cloud.gov platform. In previous tests, she noted the SRT has a 95 percent accurate prediction rate.

“The entire application is built using open source technology so we are scalable, agile and can always add more use cases,” Fox said. 

The agency plans to add a prediction and recommendation engine to the tool in the future to alert agencies about their Section 508 compliance before an RFP is issued online.

Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, said artificial intelligence, helping federal agencies address critical technology issues and a new cybersecurity scholarship program would be among his priorities in Congress this year to help modernize and secure the government, Federal News Network reported Friday.

He aims to promote the FITARA scorecard across the government to ensure all 24 large agencies and departments “are following efforts to have good digital hygiene.” Hurd highlighted the challenges facing the Department of Veterans Affairs in updating its technologies. He said VA needs system standardization and configuration to manage more than 100 different versions of its legacy systems. 
 
“Nobody knows all of the different kinds of versions,” Hurd said. “What makes data transformation projects so difficult is you’re potentially dealing with tens of thousands of different versions of the software and nobody knows the changes from one application to another.”

Another priority of the lawmaker is to create a national plan on the use of AI-based technologies. Hurd said the document would help link the research efforts of the public and the private sectors as well as the training for future AI researchers and workforce. He also plans to launch the Cyber National Guard initiative that would fund students to study cybersecurity and to enter the federal government. 

Hurd said he hopes to see more bipartisan support in 2019 for major issues like cybersecurity and transportation.

Christopher Krebs, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has explained the reason behind CISA’s move to release its first emergency directive about Domain Name System tampering activities.

Reports from FireEye and Cisco Talos revealed that malicious actors gained access to accounts that regulated DNS records and “made them resolve to their own infrastructure before relaying it to the real address,” Krebs wrote in a blog post published Thursday.

“Because they could control an organization’s DNS, they could obtain legitimate digital certificates and decrypt the data they intercepted – all while everything looked normal to users.”

Krebs, a 2019 Wash100 winner, noted that CISA’s directive is an urgent response to the risk posed by an active attacker that homes in on government organizations and compromises legitimate traffic to obtain data, cause delay or disrupt services.

“We know that this type of attack isn’t something many organizations monitor for or have tight controls around,” he said of the DNS hijacking campaign.
 

The U.S. Navy has completed shipboard integration testing for two unmanned systems on a littoral combat ship in an effort to enhance the vessel’s mine countermeasures capabilities. The service said Thursday that it tested the Knifefish unmanned undersea vehicle and the Unmanned Influence Sweep System aboard the USS Independence. 

The two systems are part of a Mine Countermeasures Mission Package built to provide LCS with system-to-system communications supporting the MCM detect-to-engage sequence.

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During the test, Knifefish and UISS verified communication links between Independence and other unmanned systems and enabled the ship to make multiple launch and recovery operations. Following the test, the Navy certified all aviation modules for the MCM MP for deployment on Independence-variant ships. The technologies work to detect and neutralize mines in the water.

The Navy plans to begin initial operational test and evaluation of the mine countermeasures drones by 2021.

The Department of Energy is investing $40M in fiscal 2019 funds supporting the efforts to modernize the nation’s energy grid. Funds under the Grid Modernization Initiative would finance government and industry development projects for applications designed to measure, analyze, forecast on, secure and manage the grid, DOE said Thursday.

The initiative would leverage national laboratory expertise and industry-based support to develop prospective competencies under a commitment to the Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium. Topics for the future lab call will include resilience modeling, energy storage, advanced sensors, cybersecurity and institutional support.

Mark Menezes, undersecretary of energy, announced the GMI funds at the Innovation XLab Grid Modernization Summit in Seattle, Wash., an event intended to foster grid-focused collaboration between industry and national laboratories.