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Commerce Department Names Dominique Duval-Diop as Deputy Chief Data Officer
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Commerce Department Names Dominique Duval-Diop as Deputy Chief Data Officer

Dominique Duval-Diop, most recently U.S. chief data scientist at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, has joined the Department of Commerce’s Office of the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs as deputy chief data officer.

Oliver Wise, chief data officer and acting under secretary for economic affairs at the department, announced Duval-Diop’s appointment in a LinkedIn post published Wednesday.

“In her new role, Dominique will work across DOC to accelerate the value of data in meeting the Department’s mission to create the conditions for economic growth and opportunity for all communities,” Wise wrote.

The DOC chief data officer welcomed Duval-Diop to the department and commended her efforts in helping federal agencies advance the use of technology and data to foster equity in federal funding programs and infrastructure investments during her time as the country’s chief data scientist.

Duval-Diop previously served as deputy chief data scientist at OSTP, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Before joining the White House, she was a member of Derute Consulting Cooperative, where she provided data analytics support to local governments and nonprofit organizations.

She served as associate director of gender and social inclusion at Millennium Challenge Corp. and as a fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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CISA, International Counterparts Issue Guidance on Secure by Design Considerations for Digital Product Procurement
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CISA, International Counterparts Issue Guidance on Secure by Design Considerations for Digital Product Procurement

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its counterparts in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.K. have released new guidance on secure by design considerations that manufacturers and organizations could use to inform their decisions when purchasing digital products and services.

The document outlines external and internal procurement considerations and presents lists of questions that purchasing organizations could use at each phase of the procurement process.

The section for external procurement considerations, for instance, offers questions that organizations could ask to evaluate a manufacturer’s transparency and reporting, validate secure by default, review a manufacturer’s supply chain risk management and assess open-source software usage.

The procuring organization should also evaluate itself by conducting an assessment across the pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase stages.

Under the pre-purchase phase, the guidance offers questions that should be asked of senior management, policy area, product owner and infrastructure and security areas.

The document also lists several standards that could assist manufacturers in the development of secure and verifiable technology platforms.

POC - 2024 Cyber Summit

Join the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Cyber Summit on June 6 and hear cyber experts, government and industry leaders discuss the latest trends and cyber’s dynamic role in the public sector. Register here.

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DOD Inspector General Audit Finds Noncompetitive Army Contracts Supporting Ukraine in Line With Regulations
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DOD Inspector General Audit Finds Noncompetitive Army Contracts Supporting Ukraine in Line With Regulations

A new report by the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General has found that the noncompetitive contracts the U.S. Army has awarded in support of Ukraine are generally aligned with relevant federal, DOD and Army regulations and are therefore justified.

The report nevertheless flagged four areas that need improvement: the citation of specific authorities justifying the award of noncompetitive contracts; the publication of the justification; the timing for justification approvals; and documentation for follow-on acquisitions, the DOD OIG website said Thursday.

In order to address these weaknesses, it was recommended that a quality control tool be rolled out and relevant training processes be implemented.

The latest report covered 13 contracts worth $1.3 billion in total. A second report is expected to be released, which will cover the administration of the noncompetitive contracts.

DOD Inspector General Audit Finds Noncompetitive Army Contracts Supporting Ukraine in Line With Regulations

Army officials, government leaders and industry executives will share their priorities, strategies and solutions to tough challenges at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Army Summit, which will take place on June 13. Register now to attend this important event!

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Noble Supply & Logistics Awarded $90M DLA Contract for Facility Support Services
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Noble Supply & Logistics Awarded $90M DLA Contract for Facility Support Services

Noble Supply and Logistics has secured a potential $90 million firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract to provide U.S. service branches with facility support services.

The Defense Logistics Agency awarded the 458-day bridge contract, which covers facilities maintenance, repair and operations supplies and runs through Aug. 15, 2025, the Department of Defense said Thursday.

Contract work will be performed in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi, and will support the U.S. Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps and Navy.

The award is a sole-source acquisition and includes no option periods. It will be funded by fiscal year 2024 and 2025 defense working capital allocations.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based DLA Troop Support serves as the contracting activity.

Noble is a Boston, Massachusetts-headquartered contractor that offers integrated supply chain management, including logistics and technical support, procurement, inventory and distribution management, to help customers cut logistics pipelines and streamline the procurement process.

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DIU Solicits Quantum Sensing Proposals for New Emerging Technology Portfolio
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DIU Solicits Quantum Sensing Proposals for New Emerging Technology Portfolio

The Defense Innovation Unit has released a commercial solutions opening solicitation seeking proposals for a new emerging technology portfolio to transition quantum sensors to military applications.

DIU said Thursday the Transition of Quantum Sensors, or TQS, portfolio aims to demonstrate commercial technology prototypes that can be used for defense applications such as anomaly detection and positioning, navigation and timing.

The new portfolio will also focus on DIU’s existing and future hypersonics efforts, including the High-cadence Airborne Testing Capabilities, a.k.a. HyCAT, program and will launch prototyping efforts on additive manufacturing, photonics, advanced materials and propulsion microelectronics and quantum information science.

Air Force Lt. Col. Nicholas Estep, a veteran technical program manager within DIU, has been tapped to lead TQS as a portfolio manager.

“I am excited to lead DIU’s newest portfolio with a focus on Emerging Technology,  maintain momentum on the hypersonics front, and to rapidly mature quantum-derived applications with our DoD stakeholders,” Estep said. “This portfolio will create important connections across the DoD and commercial community to address capability gaps across the services.”

DIU also has emerging technology portfolios in artificial intelligence and machine learning, autonomy, cyber and telecommunications, energy, human systems and space.

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Unanet Announces New Lineup of AI-Driven Financial Automation Platforms; Assad Jarrahian Quoted
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Unanet Announces New Lineup of AI-Driven Financial Automation Platforms; Assad Jarrahian Quoted

Unanet has introduced a new family of artificial intelligence-based financial automation platforms.

These tools are built to help customers automate accounts payable and receivable processes and improve the management and tracking of spending, Unanet announced on Thursday.

“These are capabilities that growing GovCon and AE businesses must have to optimize their finance operations, make smarter strategic decisions, and operate more efficiently and profitably,” said Unanet Chief Product Officer Assad Jarrahian.

He noted that the three platforms are compatible with Unanet’s established enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management software.

The first of these products, Accounts Payable Automation, is designed to handle invoices, evaluate data and enhance accounting workflows to minimize errors in these areas. The second, Accounts Receivable Automation, is embedded into Unanet’s ERP offerings. It is meant to consolidate end-to-end workflows to accelerate the speed at which businesses receive payments.

Spend Management, the final member of the family, was developed in collaboration with Mesh Payments, a travel and spend management platform. This software will provide Unanet ERP clients with Mesh Payments’ enterprise-wide financial management technologies once it is released later this year.

With these platforms, users can reduce the need for tedious finance and accounting tasks, Jarrahian said.

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DISA Launches Cloud Management Platform for Defense Agencies
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DISA Launches Cloud Management Platform for Defense Agencies

The Defense Information Systems Agency has launched a new cloud service management platform called Olympus to help defense agencies develop and mature their cloud environments, DefenseOne reported Thursday.

Korie Seville, deputy chief technology officer for compute at DISA, said Olympus will support organizations across the Department of Defense to launch and deploy cloud applications and services “without having to deal with all of the getting enterprise network connectivity.”

According to Seville, the new platform provides common services necessary for network servers to operate, enabling defense agencies to focus on their mission.

In addition to common services, Olympus is integrated with other technology capabilities, including DISA’s Vulcan DevSecOps software development platform.

“So a customer could theoretically use that service, use Vulcan together with Olympus to create the DevSecOps pipeline from end-to-end, from code development all the way to environment instantiation, and create their own DevSecOps platform right then and there. But it’s not required,” Seville said.

Olympus will provide services from the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability multi-vendor contract vehicle.

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NASA Seeks to Ensure Lunar Activity Deconfliction With Help From Public
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NASA Seeks to Ensure Lunar Activity Deconfliction With Help From Public

NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy is calling on the lunar community to help formulate a framework that will guide efforts to ensure deconfliction of government and private sector activities on the moon’s surface.

NASA said Wednesday that deconfliction, which the Artemis Accords consider to be an area for further work, is likely to grow in importance over the coming years as more commercial and international actors operate on the moon.

Interested parties are invited to answer the Lunar Non-Interference Questionnaire, which tackles a variety of issues, including the possible definitions of the terms “interference,” “contamination” and “deconfliction.”

Another issue that the questionnaire seeks to address involves the attributes that make a site valuable for scientific inquiry and the kinds of activities that would negatively impact that value.

Responses to the questionnaire must be submitted via email by June 7.

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Assessment in Progress to Determine Changes Needed to Meet Military TacISR Needs, Says NSpC’s Chirag Parikh
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Assessment in Progress to Determine Changes Needed to Meet Military TacISR Needs, Says NSpC’s Chirag Parikh

According to National Space Council Executive Secretary Chirag Parikh, officials are in the process of analyzing the issues surrounding the tactical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance requirements of combatant commands, how such requirements are not being met and how to best address such shortcomings, Breaking Defense reported Wednesday.

Department of the Air Force and U.S. Space Force officials said in 2023 that the need of field commanders for the speedy delivery of tactical ISR remained unfulfilled and so argued for the establishment of a budget that would allow USSF to procure commercial satellite products, including TacISR.

The Space Force’s push for commercial ISR procurement powers has been seen by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as a potential encroachment into its role. The ongoing needs analysis, which Parikh described as an “analytically driven process,” is part of broader efforts to resolve the Space Force-NGA dispute.

Commenting on the assessment, Parikh said during the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s annual GEOINT conference on May 8 that there is a need to “better quantify the anecdotes and the challenges” being put forward by combatant commands and the Space Force while noting that the NGA may very well need to make changes to keep up with the modern battlespace.

And while it remains unclear what changes have to be made, Parikh expressed confidence that “something is going to change along the way.”

DOE to Invest $160M in Microelectronics Research & Development Projects
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DOE to Invest $160M in Microelectronics Research & Development Projects

The Department of Energy will invest $160 million over four years in research projects led by national laboratories to advance microelectronics development to support energy innovation in the U.S.

DOE said Wednesday the research investment initiative will implement the Microelectronics Research for Energy Innovation Act and support the establishment of Microelectronics Science Research Centers focused on energy efficiency and extreme environments.

The department is seeking research proposals in four research areas: new or improved materials, surface processing and control, chemistry, synthesis and fabrication; advanced computing paradigms and architectures; integrated sensing, edge computing and communication; and processing in extreme environments, radiation, radiation transport and materials interaction.

The funding opportunity is open to DOE’s national laboratories and other institutions to act as subcontractors.

“This funding will ensure our labs are all in on the Biden-Harris Administration’s whole of government effort to drive the future of innovation in chips and deliver the highly efficient computing capabilities we need to power frontier AI for many years to come,” said Geraldine Richmond, undersecretary for science and innovation in DOE.

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