The General Services Administration‘s 18F has identified opportunities for the digital services group to help spur citizen-government interaction and improve access to government services after it conducted research under the Federal Front Door project.

Colin MacArthur, Carolyn Dew, Michelle Chronister and John Yuda write in a blog entry posted Monday that 18F found during the six-week study in five cities that personnel capacity, digital infrastructure and bottleneck issues prevent the public from interacting with agencies.

They said the group will consider expanding a draft guidance on government web design standards to include strategies for agencies to increase transparency in online service delivery process and reinforce user trust in government systems.

18F also seeks to help streamline multiple cross-agency services as well as identify technology-based methods for information dissemination.

McArthur, Dew, Chronister and Yuda added the organization eyes development of new digital tools for agencies to facilitate and secure exchange of confidential data.

Jody Singer, a former flight programs and partnerships office manager for NASA, has been promoted to deputy director of the space agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

The 30-year agency veteran will work with Director Todd May to manage a field installation with nearly 6,000 civil and contractor personnel and a budget of $2.5 billion per year, NASA said Monday.

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

Singer previously led Marshall’s flight programs and partnerships office for almost three years and was responsible for the center’s work with human exploration projects, flight mission programs and International Space Station hardware integration and operations functions plus partnerships with other government agencies and international organizations.

She is also a former deputy program manager of SLS and has also served as deputy manager of Marshall’s Space Shuttle propulsion office.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has said the U.S. Cyber Command has launched a cyber military campaign in an effort to disrupt the Islamic State militant organization’s communications systems and command-and-control platforms, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Damian Paletta and Felicia Schwartz write Carter and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed reporters Monday about the Defense Department’s cyber attacks against the group.

Carter said the U.S.-led cyber attacks launched in Syria aim “to interrupt ISIL’s command and control, to cause them to lose confidence in their networks [and] to overload their networks so that they can’t function.”

Lolita Baldor reports for the Associated Press the defense chief also noted that the cyber attacks against the militant group’s communications systems might drive the organization to adopt older platforms.

“As we disrupt the ISIL communications via cyber or other methods, sometimes we do drive them to other means,” Carter said, according to the report.

“Sometimes, those other means are easier for us to listen to.”

Scientists at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency have started to develop a cloud-based tool that aims to help epidemiologists identify and analyze human and animal disease anomalies and issue warnings on pandemics, DoD News reported Monday.

Cheryl Pellerin writes the Biosurveillance Ecosystem is designed to provide visualized results and analyses on emerging infectious diseases through applications that work to collect and analyze data from various sources.

DTRA scientists Christopher Kiley and John Hannan told DoD News in an interview that the BSVE system is based on an open-source software and uses machine learning algorithms to identify variations in disease signals.

“The BSVE is designed to foster collaboration and data sharing but it uses a security model that provides for individual data sets and applications to be restricted to specific users, if necessary,” Kiley said.

DTRA’s joint science and technology office for chemical and biological defense partnered with biomedical software firm Digital Infuzion to develop a system prototype, Pellerin reports.

The BSVE tool is a joint program of DTRA’s JSTO-CBD office and the Department of Homeland Security’s national biosurveillance integration center.

A team of National Institute of Standards and Technology researchers has developed a nondestructive process for the detection of cracks on multilayer ceramic capacitors that are widely used in spacecraft and implantable medical technology.

NIST said Monday it tested the nonlinear crack-detection method with other researchers from the University of Maryland, NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Colorado State University.

The approach, which involves high-frequency acoustic measurements, helped the NIST-led research team identify visible cracks in more than 90 percent of sample ceramic capacitors during a study.

The agency added it believes the technique holds potential to prevent electrical failures in cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators, satellites and space vehicles.

NIST has partnered with a capacitor manufacturer to conduct further studies to quantify crack-detection levels using the agency’s nonlinear acoustic method.