A bipartisan group of senators that includes Brian Schatz, Deb Fischer, Cory Booker and Kelly Ayotte has introduced a bill that seeks to build on a U.S. Senate resolution passed in March 2015 that sought a national strategy on the Internet of Things.

The proposed Developing Innovation and Growing the Internet of Things Act will tasks the Federal Communications Commission to assess the spectrum requirements for IoT, according to a statement issued Tuesday by Fischer’s office.

The statement further noted that the DIGIT Act aims to form a group of government and private stakeholders that could give recommendations to Congress on ways to plan and drive the development of IoT.

“With more and more devices connecting to the Internet every day, we have a unique opportunity to continue leading this technological revolution,” Schatz said.

“Our bill recognizes the enormous potential the Internet of Things holds and will give us the tools to make sure our policies help promote its growth.”

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has announced the Defense Department‘s plan to establish an advisory board to help craft technological strategies for DoD to address organizational culture and project management issues.

DoD said Wednesday the Defense Innovation Advisory Board will work to identify best practices for iterative product development, data-based decision-making, enterprise information sharing and utilization of mobile and cloud computing applications.

Carter has appointed Eric Schmidt, executive chairman at Google parent company Alphabet, to serve as chair of the advisory board.

The group will comprise up to 12 members who have government and industry leadership experiences and draw on management and technical expertise from Silicon Valley and other technology communities.

The initiative is part of Carter’s efforts to strengthen collaboration between DoD and private sector.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has posted eight new coding projects for the open-source community on the GitHub website as part of NGA’s GEOINT Pathfinder initiative.

NGA said Feb. 22 two of the open-source projects center on a machine learning-based image exploration tool that works to cluster similar social media pictures while others feature automatic object recognition technology.

“Taking an accounting view of open source can often drown out less quantitative measures such as bringing on new partners that traditionally haven’t done business with the government,” said Chris Rasmussen, head of public software development and the GEOINT Pathfinder initiative at NGA.

He added that code resulting from the initiative will also be released back to the public.

The agency introduced GEOINT Pathfinder last year with the intent to address four research queries through the use of unclassified information, technology and services from the commercial sector.

The Defense Department plans to enlist ethical hackers for a pilot cyber “bug bounty” program that aims to uncover security vulnerabilities on DoD’s public-facing websites.

The Hack the Pentagon initiative will use private-sector crowdsourcing to allow participants to identify and analyze bugs in non-mission-critical Web applications for the department, DoD said Wednesday.

“I am confident this innovative initiative will strengthen our digital defenses and ultimately enhance our national security,” noted Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.

The initiative, led by the Defense Digital Service organization, will offer monetary and non-financial rewards to participants.

DoD derived the program from competitions that some companies hold in a bid to strengthen the security of their networks, products and service offerings.

The department noted it will provide information on program requirements and rules prior to the program’s official launch in April.

Researchers at the General Services Administration’s 18F organization have outlined some findings from a study on how U.S. citizens interact with federal government.

Carolyn Dew, Colin MacArthur and Michelle Chronister write in a blog post published Tuesday that they conducted the study for the “federal front door” project through interviews with individuals who transact with federal agencies from October 2015 to November 2015.

The project aims to identify trends through public interviews in order to improve government digital services.

Researchers cited shortages of public officials and lack of cross-agency digital systems as some of the barriers to public’s interactions with the federal government, according to the report.

The respondents also mentioned language fluency, access and digital literacy as challenges when they do business with federal agencies and that they seek help from family members and friends when they use government websites.

Chronister, MacArthur and Dew co-wrote the report with John Yuda and Brad Nunnally.

Carl Preston Jones, a former engineering directorate’s deputy director at NASA, has been promoted to engineering director of the space agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

The 35-year agency veteran will lead more than 3,000 civil service and support contractor personnel to design, test and analyze flight hardware and software at Marshall, NASA said Tuesday.

Marshall supports programs such as the Space Launch System, a rocket being designed to carry astronauts into space in the Orion spacecraft.

“We are fortunate to have in Preston a leader intimately familiar with our programs and goals as we continue developing the hardware and the knowledge we will need for the human exploration of deep space and Mars,” said Marshall Director Todd May.

“Over his nearly 35 years with NASA, Preston has been in the forefront of efforts to infuse new technologies into space systems to promote sustainability and affordability.”

Chris Singer, who has led Marshall’s engineering directorate since May 2011, will transition into a new role at NASA’s Washington headquarters as deputy chief engineer for engineering integration.

A new SolarWinds survey has found that 48 percent of federal information technology professionals see increased information technology security challenges as a result of upgrades and consolidation programs for IT systems.

Federal IT leaders associated such security challenges with complex enterprise management systems and incomplete transitions, SolarWinds said Tuesday.

“When completed, consolidation and modernization projects will provide more efficient and secure environments, but this isn’t going to happen overnight, so additional attention must be given to securing environments against threats no matter where they originate,” said Mav Turner, director of product strategy at SolarWinds.

The company commissioned research firm Market Connections to poll 200 federal IT security executives from December 2015 to January 2016.

According to the survey, nearly 50 percent of respondents said they consider untrained insiders and international government agencies as a major threat to IT security.

SolarWinds also noted that 62 percent of the respondents stated their agencies adopt configuration and patch management software and at least 45 percent of them indicated that the use of such tools has helped their agencies expedite response to cyber attacks.