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Radha Plumb to Succeed Craig Martell as DOD Chief Digital & AI Officer; Lloyd Austin Quoted
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Radha Plumb to Succeed Craig Martell as DOD Chief Digital & AI Officer; Lloyd Austin Quoted

Radha Plumb, currently deputy under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, will take on the role of chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at the Department of Defense on April 8.

She will succeed 2024 Wash100 awardee Craig Martell, who has served as the inaugural CDAO since 2022.

“Plumb’s technical expertise and strategic acumen will enhance the CDAO’s innovative efforts, and help accelerate the DoD’s adoption of data, analytics, and AI to generate decision advantage from the boardroom to the battlefield,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement published Thursday.

Austin, a three-time Wash100 awardee, commended Martell for his contributions advancing data and AI at DOD.

“Craig and the entire CDAO team had a monumental task of bringing together the diverse talents and cultures of four organizations to advance data, AI, and analytics for our national security, and deliver tangible results in a short time,” the secretary said. “Dr. Martell and the CDAO team have delivered on those goals and his work will have a lasting impact on how the Department approaches every data and AI driven task.”

In April 2023, Plumb received Senate confirmation to serve as deputy under secretary for acquisition and sustainment at the Pentagon.

Plumb previously served as chief of staff to the deputy secretary of defense.

Prior to DOD, she was director of research and insights for trust and safety at Google with oversight of teams responsible for technical research, data science and business analytics.

She held senior staff positions at the White House National Security Council, DOD and the Department of Energy and was a senior economist at RAND Corp. and global head of policy analysis at Facebook.

POC - 5th Annual Artificial Intelligence Summit

Register here to attend the Potomac Officers Club’s 5th Annual Artificial Intelligence Summit on March 21 and hear federal leaders and industry experts discuss the latest developments in the field.

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DHA’s Brian Lein on Importance of Standardization to Military Health System
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DHA’s Brian Lein on Importance of Standardization to Military Health System

Brian Lein, assistant director for health care administration at the Defense Health Agency, said standardization is needed to help stabilize the Military Health System’s core, Health.mil reported.

“Standardization is the key to getting there quickly. Without standardization, you’re never going to get optimization,” he said during an event in February.

Lein noted that organizational advancement marks the maturation of an agency and that the Defense Health Support Activity has done a great job collaborating with operations leads and establishing relationships with the three services and within DHA headquarters.

“Prior to this organizational change, there was no standard process to communicate and task; work was being done in silos,” said Lein.

“Now, everything that needs to leave the headquarters—every requirement, task, question—gets filtered through the DHSA. And the same is true for information coming from military hospitals and clinics, and networks. It comes to the headquarters … and they determine who should receive the information,” he added.

The DHA assistant director cited operating room optimization, staffing models and MHS Genesis as the areas where standardization plans are being implemented.

“We did a great job of fielding MHS GENESIS and now we have the largest and the most robust electronic health record system anywhere in the U.S.,” said Lein.

“Now we will prioritize optimization of the workflow within MHS GENESIS. We should standardize the process and then adopt it across the enterprise,” he stated.

Col. Michelle Idle on New Space Force Personnel Management Structure
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Col. Michelle Idle on New Space Force Personnel Management Structure

Col. Michelle Idle, deputy commander of Space Systems Command, said she looks forward to the implementation of the Space Force Personnel Management Act, which will offer both full-time and part-time active-duty service options to Guardians and Air Force reservists.

“Looking at what skills our people have who have chosen to go part-time and making sure that we’re leveraging those talents and expertise. That’s a huge soapbox for me – to make that work,” Idle said.

“There are a lot of part-time members with good ideas, and the fact that we are trying to do something different with the Space Force is really motivating,” she added.

As SSC celebrates its upcoming third year of inception, Idle highlighted changes that enabled SSC to transition from a center into a field command, including the establishment of individual program executive officers, which is “the right way to get after the threat” from China and other adversaries.

“Having program executive offices each with one leader who is responsible for a specific range of capabilities, making the right business decisions: exploit what we have, buy what we can – either commercially or partnering with another agency – and build what we must,” Idle said.

The organization started under the leadership of Gen. Michael Guetlein, who served as the first commander of SSC, to improve leadership decision-making speed, reduce bureaucracy and build a system-of-systems integration.

Idle said that handing down certain decision-making authorities to individual PEOs has enabled the roles of the commander and deputy commander to focus more on organizing, training and equipping the PEOs, directors and the overall SSC workforce to ensure successful mission execution.

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VA Names Finalists in AI Tech Sprint for Clinician Burnout Reduction
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VA Names Finalists in AI Tech Sprint for Clinician Burnout Reduction

The Department of Veterans Affairs has named the 25 finalists to move forward with the Artificial Intelligence Tech Sprint competition that aims to develop AI-powered tools designed to reduce burnout among healthcare workers.

The finalists will present AI designs for the Ambient Dictation for Clinical Encounters track, which focuses on speech-to-text tools for medical appointments, and the Community Care Document Processing track, which looks to create document processing systems to integrate non-VA medical records into VA records.

Track 1 finalists are Abridge; Althea Health; ARETUM; Cognosante Military and Veterans Health; Commure; Contrast AI; Credence Management Solutions; DeepScribe; TranscribeMD AI; Knowtex; Nuance; QuantumTechIT; Sourceree; Tali AI; and Veterans EZ Info.

Finalists for track 2 are Abstractive Health; Booz Allen Hamilton; Commure; Healow and eClinicalWorks; Instabase; Joint Venture iCatalyst and Semiring; TranscribeMD AI; Palantir Technologies; Wellovate; and Wired Informatics.

The finalists were downselected from over 200 submissions received for the AI Tech Sprint after VA tested their AI programs.

POC - 5th Annual Artificial Intelligence Summit

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US Army xTech Program Launches xTechScalable AI 2 to support Project Linchpin
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US Army xTech Program Launches xTechScalable AI 2 to support Project Linchpin

The U.S. Army xTech Program is bringing back the xTechScalable AI competition for artificial intelligence innovations.

The contest’s second iteration is centered on Project Linchpin, which is the service branch’s strategy to integrate AI and machine learning into its intelligence, cyber and electronic warfare operations, xTech announced Tuesday.

xTechScalable AI 2 is seeking scalable tools and techniques for AI risk management, testing and evaluation and algorithmic analysis.

Chosen vendors will have an opportunity to bid for Phase I or Direct to Phase II Army Small Business Innovation Research contracts. The Phase I projects are valued at up to $250,000, while Direct to Phase II SBIR could be worth up to $2 million.

The competition, which also includes $603,000 in cash prizes for eligible vendors, has three elimination stages, an accelerator program and a final demonstration event in October.

Interested parties may submit their proposals until May 17.

The 5th Annual Artificial Intelligence Summit is taking place on March 21 and registration is still open. Join this event hosted by the Potomac Officers Club. Register now!

POC - 5th Annual Artificial Intelligence Summit
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Barbara Jackson Joins NASA as Goddard Space Flight Center’s Deputy CIO
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Barbara Jackson Joins NASA as Goddard Space Flight Center’s Deputy CIO

Barbara Jackson, a government information technology leader, has taken on the role of deputy chief information officer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

She announced the move in a LinkedIn post published Wednesday.

In addition to her role as deputy CIO, Jackson will also serve as deputy director of IT and communications at Goddard.

Prior to NASA, she was deputy CIO for IT strategy, policy and governance at the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, where she also served as chief technology officer and head of certification and engineering.

Her government career included time as chief information security officer within the DC Army National Guard and senior communications planning officer within the U.S. Army.

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Mitre Survey: Public Worried About Critical Infrastructure Security, With Cybersecurity a Leading Cause of Concern
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Mitre Survey: Public Worried About Critical Infrastructure Security, With Cybersecurity a Leading Cause of Concern

Nearly all the respondents of a recent survey conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of Mitre agreed that ensuring the security of critical infrastructure is key to national security and maintaining daily life activities.

Mitre said Wednesday that the survey on public perceptions about securing critical infrastructure was conducted online using the Harris On Demand omnibus product from Feb. 13 through 15, with a sample size of 2,046.

The same survey showed that 81 percent of respondents were worried about critical infrastructure security, even though 64 percent considered U.S. critical infrastructure to be one of the safest in the world.

Of the various kinds of threats that critical infrastructure faces, cyberattacks ranked highest among the respondents in terms of cause for concern. Terrorism ranked second while aging infrastructure ranked third.

As to who should be responsible for securing critical infrastructure from threats, 29 percent of respondents said the federal government is fully responsible, 12 percent said state or local governments while 9 percent said the owners and operators of CI.

Meanwhile, 49 percent said all three groups should be responsible.

Mitre Survey: Public Worried About Critical Infrastructure Security, With Cybersecurity a Leading Cause of Concern

Cyber experts, government leaders and industry visionaries will speak about the dynamic and evolving role of cyber in the public sector at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Cyber Summit, which will take place in June. Register now to attend this important event!

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NOAA Office of Space Commerce Invites SSA User Interface Demos for TraCSS Program
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NOAA Office of Space Commerce Invites SSA User Interface Demos for TraCSS Program

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is calling on companies with existing space situational awareness, or SSA, capabilities to demonstrate their technology’s viability for the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, program.

NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce on Wednesday published a call for demonstrations, which will take place on April 9 and 10 at the 2024 National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

OSC is looking for SSA technologies that are compliant with requirements for graphic user interfaces and RESTful web application programming interfaces. The chosen platform will enhance the ability of TraCSS to manage space flight traffic, safety, sustainability and international coordination.

Interested companies that will not attend the symposium may get a chance to show their SSA products during virtual 30-minute sessions to be arranged by OSC in mid-April.

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OMB Initiates Action to Strengthen US Critical Supply Chains
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OMB Initiates Action to Strengthen US Critical Supply Chains

The Office of Management and Budget is launching a pilot to bolster domestic sourcing of critical products and strengthen U.S. critical supply chains by helping agencies leverage federal procurement dollars.

OMB’s Made in America Office is collaborating with the Office of Federal Procurement Policy on the effort to help manage supply chain risks and promote competition, the White House said Wednesday.

The departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Energy and Health and Human Services and NASA have expressed their commitment to exploring enhanced price preference — or EPP — pilots to support the domestic production of critical products.

According to OMB, agencies should issue public notices of their planned use of EPP on the MadeinAmerica.gov site and solicit public comments on their plans.

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David McKeown Looks for AI Applications in Cybersecurity
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David McKeown Looks for AI Applications in Cybersecurity

David McKeown, senior information security officer and deputy chief information officer for cybersecurity at the Department of Defense, is looking for potential applications of artificial intelligence in the cybersecurity domain in support of DOD’s zero trust strategy, Breaking Defense reported Wednesday.

Speaking at an AFCEA TechNet Emergence panel, McKeown said he is “in search of ways we can leverage AI that are on the cybersecurity front” and called on industry members to present “any products out there that are leveraging AI to do cybersecurity things.”

McKeown said that inside the Pentagon, the Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Office oversees DOD’s data and AI future, but it is mainly focused on integrating AI into warfighter missions, such as optimizing aircraft maintenance activities.

The previous Wash100 awardee said that it is imperative to provide cyber defenders the capabilities to identify anomalous behavior rapidly as cyber actors are increasingly using sophisticated techniques to evade detection.

“They’re going to get on your networks, and in a lot of cases when they arrive there, they’re going to look like a legitimate user. Oftentimes they’re not uploading any payloads that have signatures that our tools will see,” McKeown warned. “[So] we’ve got to get really good at knowing what anomalous looks like. … What’s in the realm of the possible for anomalous behavior detection?”

David McKeown Looks for AI Applications in Cybersecurity

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