Amy Hess, executive assistant director of the FBI‘s science and technology branch, has said tools at the bureau’s Biometrics Technology Center have helped agents investigate criminal cases faster, FCW reported Tuesday.

Mark Rockwell writes the FBI and the Defense Department opened the facility at the bureau’s Clarksburg, West Virginia-based campus in August last year.

The center houses the Next Generation Identification platform and other systems designed to examine fingerprints, DNA information, facial traits, body characteristics and voice patterns.

Hess told her audience at the Biometrics for Government and Law Enforcement conference held Tuesday in Virginia that the NGI system works to process up to 167,000 fingerprint sets a day and generates an accuracy rate of 99.6 percent.

She added that the biometric facility has developed technology designed to process DNA samples in just two hours without human intervention, FCW reports.

Curtis Dukes, head of the National Security Agency’s information assurance directorate, has said IAD personnel have been tapped to analyze data breaches in both public and private sectors over the past 18 months, FCW reported Tuesday.

Dukes told FCW reporter Sean Lyngaas in an interview that IAD has trained staff of the U.S. Cyber Command in order to help the command conduct its own training and address “resource pressures” linked to cyber attacks.

IAD specialists have started to address vulnerabilities in supervisory control and data acquisition platforms and other industrial control systems that work to support the power grid through the implementation of encryption layers called “wrappers,” he noted.

Dukes, also a computer scientist, tackled his involvement in the zero-day disclosure program that Michael Daniel, top cybersecurity adviser to President Barack Obama, currently leads.

“It’s a thoughtful discussion, trying to understand offensive capability but also understand the risk to the government in not disclosing that vulnerability,” he said.

The IAD chief also discussed his plan for the directorate to automate the review process of the Defense Department’s weapons systems for cyber vulnerabilities, Lyngaas reports.

Steve Harris, vice president and general manager of Dell‘s federal systems unit, has said he believes the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act will create momentum in agencies’ efforts to update their information technology systems, Fedscoop reported Wednesday.

“FITARA provides for the oversight and but more importantly, it provides the fundamental changes that can lead to the desired outcome,” Harris was quoted as saying.

Greg Otto reports that federal agencies have started to launch programs to replace legacy IT systems with modern technology intended to help agencies deliver public services.

Some government technology analysts believe 2016 will see agencies build on those initiatives to meet the Obama administration’s IT goals, Otto added.

Lt. Gen. Steven Kwast, commander at the Air University, has told Defense News in an interview published Monday the university aims to harness information age technology for training of future airmen, support the U.S. Air Force‘s research efforts and promulgate the value of air power.

He noted in the interview that the Air Force has established a Cyber College as part of a strategy to “collaborate with the rest of society like we never have before so that we can ride the leading edge of innovation out there and then bring it in to the national security business.”

Kwast also said he believes adopting a proactive approach can help the Defense Department to address cybersecurity issues.

He added Air University also works to infuse the concept of affordability into its education process and partners with technology companies in a bid to drive innovation at the Air Force.