The Department of Transportation has established a new advisory committee tasked with providing insights and recommendations — as well as approaches to improve — transportation innovation to the department’s leadership.

The Transforming Transportation Advisory Committee, also known as TTAC, will hold its first meeting on Jan. 18 to discuss matters related to pathways to safe and secure deployments of emerging transportation technologies, DOT said Friday.

TTAC will also explore approaches to promote greater cross-modal integration of emerging technologies, new frameworks to encourage the secure exchange of transformative transportation data, methods to identify cybersecurity and privacy tools to protect transportation systems and policies to grow and support the U.S. workforce.

Members of the new advisory committee include experts from government, industry, academia and labor unions and will serve two-year terms with the possibility of reappointment.

“The deep expertise and diverse perspectives of this impressive group will provide advice to ensure the future of transportation is safe, efficient, sustainable, equitable, and transformative,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has expanded the leadership team of its Division of Data, or DOD, with the appointment of Ted Kaouk as chief data officer and director of DOD and John Coughlan as chief data scientist.

CFTC said Kaouk will oversee the DOD’s data integration efforts and facilitate collaboration among offices and divisions to help the CFTC leadership make informed policy decisions.

He was chief data officer at the Office of Personnel Management and oversaw the development of OPM’s inaugural human capital data strategy.

Kaouk also held the same position at the Department of Agriculture and served as the first chair of the Federal Chief Data Officers Council.

Meanwhile, Coughlan has held data science and analytical roles at CFTC for eight years. Before joining the DOD, he was a market analyst within the Division of Market Oversight’s Market Intelligence Branch.

In his new role, Coughlan will help advance the DOD’s data science capabilities and drive the adoption of artificial intelligence-powered tools across the agency.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s CHIPS Program Office has finalized the definition of material expansion in a rule aimed at preventing the improper use of federal funding for semiconductor manufacturing.

The final rule clarifies the scope of material expansion to include existing as well as new semiconductor production facilities with a capacity increase of more than 5 percent, according to the CHIPS Program Office’s notice on Federal Register.

The agency initially issued a request for comment in March about the definition of terms in the Preventing the Improper Use of CHIPS Act Funding. The rule has a provision on expansion clawback, which prohibits significant manufacturing capacity material expansion by U.S. entities in foreign countries.

In the polished definition, material expansion was clarified to cover newly constructed chip facilities. The agency reiterated the term as the “increase of the semiconductor manufacturing capacity of an existing facility by more than five percent of the capacity memorialized in the required agreement due to the addition of a cleanroom, production line or other physical space, or a series of such additions.”

Federal agencies are taking different approaches to align with the Department of Defense and intelligence community’s zero trust cybersecurity goals, Federal News Network reported.

Donald Coulter, cybersecurity science advisor for the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, and Monica Montgomery, deputy chief information security officer and deputy director of the cybersecurity office at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, were among the panelists sharing their zero trust strategies at the 930Gov conference.

DHS S&T is approaching zero trust from a supply chain risk management angle, prioritizing systems engineering standard creation and finding ways to help developers and consumers adopt zero trust throughout the software life cycle.

DHS S&T’s work “includes looking at how to expand contextual awareness and expand all the metadata associated with all the systems and resources that we have to be able to communicate those across systems and system boundaries and organizational boundaries,” Coulter said.

Meanwhile, NGA developed seven pilot programs or minimal viable products specifically addressing all zero trust pillars for all of the agency’s 1,300 systems and applications, Montgomery explained. “As systems come through that, business management systems, they are producing those requests for changes (RFCs), each one of those is getting bounced across our solution epic. So we don’t have to go to all the programs,” she stated.