5 AFWERX Government Contracts Awarded by the U.S. Air Force
Published on
Top government contracts of the U.S. Air Force; AFWERX Government Contracts
Photo by zieusin on Shutterstock

The Air Force Work Project (AFWERX) is a part of the U.S. Air Force (USAF) that focuses on innovation based at the Air Force Research Laboratory. It partners with small businesses and defense contractors to quickly and affordably bring new technology. AFWERX has experienced recent growth, increasing its contract team members by 80% and nonmilitary staff by 50%.

With rampant steps toward innovation, the USAF launched AFWERX to expeditiously issue SBIR and STTR contracts valued at least $7.5 million.

Top AFWERX government contracts awarded the U.S. Air Force

 

Xage Security’s Military Cybersecurity and Digital Transformation

Xage Security Military Cybersecurity and Digital Transformation
Vector by HNK on Shutterstock
  • Contract date: December 2019
  • Company Awardee: Xage Security

In December 2019, the United States Air Force (USAF) awarded a Phase-1 SBIR contract to Xage Security. Xage Security creates trusted networks in intricate systems using blockchain technology. This technology stores information about which nodes can join the network, identity and privilege details and a record of activities.

The blockchain cybersecurity contract was a part of AFWERX’s program, which allows Xage Security to supply the Air Force and the Department of Defense’s computer security and data management needs.

About Xage Security

Xage Security is a security company renowned for its unique zero-trust approach. Its cutting-edge solution is based on blockchain technology and covers dynamic data security, cybersecurity, access management, etc. Xage’s services cater to energy, utilities, mining, transportation, and manufacturing industries. 

Exosonic’s Fifth-Generation Supersonic Targets Development

Exosonic Fifth-Generation Supersonic Targets Development
Photo by Miguel Lagoa on Shutterstock
  • Contract date: May 2023
  • Contract value: $1.25 million
  • Company Awardee: Exosonic

In May 2023, Exosonic received an estimated $1.25 million SBIR Phase 2 contract from AFWERX. Under the contract, Exosonic develops a digital design and trade study for a fifth-generation supersonic target. This allows the Air Force to maintain its edge in aerial combat. Exosonic’s Direct-to-Phase II SBIR analyzes propulsion, avionics, and landing gear options, which can lead to a viable design and potential aircraft prototyping.

The project also addresses the need for supersonic targets for missile training, which expands capabilities beyond previous proposals by other companies.

About Exosonic

Exosonic is an early-stage aerospace start-up that develops supersonic UAVs for many military and commercial use cases, including air combat training, aerial targets, and collaborative combat aircraft.

VivSoft’s MLOps and DevSecOps Automation Security

VivSoft MLOps and DevSecOps Automation Security
Vector by Garinblack on Shutterstock
  • Contract date: January 2020
  • Company Awardee: VivSoft

In January 2020, VivSoft won a contract from the U.S. Air Force through its SBIR AFWERX technology innovation program to support the Air Force Cyber Systems and Process.

VivSoft’s patent-pending blockchain technology, ENCHOC, will enhance USAF’s security for MLOps and DevSecOps automation pipelines. This safeguards software artifacts and AI/ML data sets within the federal government and encourages collaboration across agencies.

ENCHOC integrates with DevSecOps and MLOps guidelines, which provides visibility into creating and deploying code and data sets. 

About VivSoft

VivSoft uses innovative technologies to solve the public sector’s complex problems. It partners with federal, state, and local government leaders to accelerate innovation using DevSecOps, cloud, AI/ML, and blockchain technology. The company thrives on ongoing contracts and partnerships with the Department of Defense accelerators like AFWERX and DIU.

SCOUT Space’s Space Domain Awareness Enhancement

SCOUT Space's Space Domain Awareness Enhancement
Photo by Dmitriy Rybin on Shutterstock
  • Contract date: July 2022
  • Company awardee: SCOUT Space

In July 2022, the U.S. Air Force AFWERX program awarded SCOUT Space a Phase II SBIR contract to enhance space domain awareness. Under the agreement, SCOUT collaborates with Air Force Research Lab Intelligence Systems Division (AFRL/RIE) and Space Operations Command (spOC) Delta 2 to advance Space Development Agency metric observation tasking and catalog augmentation using space-based sensing. SCOUT also developed an orbital-distributed sensor network for spacecraft to understand their surroundings better.

About SCOUT

SCOUT is a volunteer-run startup established in 2019. Its mission is to create technologies and orbital products to bring a new era of space safety, transparency, and enhanced Space Domain Awareness to government and defense customers.

Spectrohm and Battelle’s Threat Detection Tool Development

Spectrohm and Battelle Threat Detection Tool Development
Vector by HNK on Shutterstock
  • Contract date: April 2023
  • Company awardee: Spectrohm and Battelle

In April 2023, Spectrohm and Battelle’s partnership secured a Phase II  contract from the U.S. Air Force’s innovation arm. The agreement requires them to create a hand-held screening tool to check sealed vehicle tanks for illegal substances like narcotics and explosives.

This award is also a part of AFWERX’s Small Business Technology Transfer program that develops a fuel-tank screening technology to ensure safety at the entry points in the Department of Defense facilities. Spectrohm-Battelle Team’s threat detection tool can enhance border security, critical infrastructure protection, and law enforcement.

About Spectrohm and Battelle

Spectrohm is an expert in internal imaging applications for security, medicine, and inspection. Battelle is a worldwide leader in devising real-world carbon management strategies serving as a valued collaborator for industry and government for a safer future for all generations.

/
White House Issues Draft Ecosystem Services Guidance for Benefit-Cost Analysis
Published on
White House Issues Draft Ecosystem Services Guidance for Benefit-Cost Analysis

The Office of Management and Budget’s office of information and regulatory affairs has released a draft guidance for reviewing changes in ecosystem and environmental services in benefit-cost analysis as part of efforts to strengthen analyses of government investments and regulations.

OIRA collaborated with the Office of Science and Technology Policy on the draft document, which was issued in accordance with an executive order that seeks to strengthen the country’s forests, communities and local economies.

The draft guidance marks a “critical step to help agencies account more fully for costs and benefits linked to the environment,” reflects collaborations with economists and ecologists across agencies and aligns government best practices with scientific knowledge, OIRA Administrator Richard Revesz and OSTP Director Arati Prabhakar, a previous Wash100 awardee, wrote in a blog post published Tuesday.

According to the draft document, considering ecosystem services in benefit-cost analyses could help agencies understand tradeoffs among various ecosystem services and with other benefits and costs.

The document also recommends five steps for assessing ecosystem services, such as ensuring that the analysis’ scope is sufficiently broad to reflect key ecosystem services in the baseline and across alternatives and describing the links between regulatory alternatives and likely changes to ecosystem services.

/
PSC Comments on Federal Contractor TikTok Prohibition
Published on
PSC Comments on Federal Contractor TikTok Prohibition

The Professional Services Council has submitted its comments on an interim rule that would prohibit the use of social media application TikTok on all devices used to perform work on federal contracts.

PSC said Tuesday the U.S. government could educate federal contractors of the potential risks of the app to government data and information and communication technology systems by conducting an “education campaign.”

The Department of Defense, NASA and the General Services Administration published the interim rule in early June.

The council called on the government to publish frequently asked questions based on how it is implementing its prohibition on the video-hosting service within its own systems and consider the appropriateness and ease of prohibiting such an app on employee-owned devices.

The government should reconsider its evaluation of the rule’s economic impact on federal contractors and review the potential impacts on competition, according to a letter sent by PSC to GSA on Tuesday.

PSC also sought clarification on certain terms in the rule and matters related to monitoring compliance.

FedRAMP Launches 3PAO Training Course on Obligations, Performance Standards
Published on
FedRAMP Launches 3PAO Training Course on Obligations, Performance Standards

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program has unveiled a course introducing third-party assessment organizations to obligations and performance standards in the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation R311 policy.

FedRAMP said Tuesday the training course outlines the scope of a 3PAO’s roles and responsibilities related to the assessment of commercial cloud offerings and the process for qualifying an independent assessment organization as a FedRAMP-recognized 3PAO.

3PAO personnel must complete the first mandatory course within 60 days of the training announcement and maintain copies of the certificates in their training records for the A2LA assessment.

In late July, FedRAMP announced that A2LA will review assessment reports to ensure that accredited 3PAO personnel are competent and qualified to evaluate documents from cloud service providers starting on Oct. 1.

The remaining seven courses in the training curriculum will focus on readiness assessment report guidance, security assessment plan guidance, security assessment report guidance, documenting evidence procedures, 3PAO vulnerability scanning methodology and documentation, review of SAR  tables and assessment of penetration testing guidance.

/
Air Force Commemorates Boeing KC-46A Tanker Arrival at Travis AFB
Published on
Air Force Commemorates Boeing KC-46A Tanker Arrival at Travis AFB

The U.S. Air Force transported its first KC-46A Pegasus aircraft from Boeing’s facility in Seattle to the Travis Air Force Base in California.

The aerial refueling plane will be housed in a $136.2 million hangar that the service branch completed in May, according to USAF.

The flight was led by Maj. Gen. Joel Jackson, commander of the Air Force District of Washington, with the participation of members of the 60th and 349th Air Mobility Wings units.

Moving forward, KC-46A will be in active operation by the 6th and 9th Air Refueling Squadrons, with the 70th and 79th Air Refueling Squadrons in reserve.

The aircraft features communication, defense and self-protection capabilities to enhance the connectivity, situational awareness and survivability of its crew especially in contested environments. It is designed to replace the KC-10 Extender as the refueling vehicle for Travis AFB.

ORNL Study Yields Breakthrough in Solar Cell Development, Best Practice in Scientific Quantum Computing
Published on
ORNL Study Yields Breakthrough in Solar Cell Development, Best Practice in Scientific Quantum Computing

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers who used a commercial quantum computer learned that the energetic levels of the four-hydrogen linear molecule meet the requirements of singlet fission, a process that could boost the efficiency of solar cells.

The H1-1 quantum computer used for the study was developed by Quantinuum, formerly Honeywell International, ORNL said Friday.

The findings, which are published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, show the potential of quantum computers as a simulation tool for scientific research.

To describe the quantum states of singlet fission and calculate energetics data, ORNL used a quantum computational solver created by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory based on the Peeters-Devreese-Soldatov approach.

They maximized the use of qubits in the H1-1 computer using a technique called qubit tapering, and through parallel implementation of the four circuits the system. The process could serve as a best practice to speed up the problem-solving process in scientific quantum computing, ORNL stated.

/
Microsoft, Council of State Governments Partner for Election Security Initiative
Published on
Microsoft, Council of State Governments Partner for Election Security Initiative

Microsoft‘s open-source voting integrity software ElectionGuard will support a new initiative aimed at improving the transparency and security of U.S. and international elections.

Ginny Badanes, senior director of Microsoft’s Democracy Forward initiative, said in a blog post published Friday that ElectionGuard will be the first project of the Election Technology Initiative, a project led by the Council of State Governments and The Turnout.

ETI will start with incorporating, developing and enhancing ElectionGuard and continue to test the software through pilot elections, the next of which is set to be held in November in College Park, Maryland.

Microsoft unveiled ElectionGuard in 2019 as a free open-source software development kit designed to secure votes placed on electronic voting machines.

“The aim of the project was to enable end-to-end verification of elections, open results to third-party organizations for secure validation, and allow individual voters to confirm their votes were correctly counted,” Badanes said.

ElectionGuard was developed through Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program in partnership with Galois.

/
Laura Stanton: GSA’s Market Research as a Service Could Help Shape Agencies’ Acquisition Strategies
Published on
Laura Stanton: GSA’s Market Research as a Service Could Help Shape Agencies’ Acquisition Strategies

Laura Stanton, a General Services Administration official, said federal agencies looking to find compliant capabilities and suppliers can seek the help of GSA’s market research as a service team to facilitate the acquisition process.

The MRAS team has carried out more than 3,000 requests for information for agency customers in three years, including over 25 percent for information technology category special item numbers on the Multiple Award Schedule, Stanton, assistant commissioner for the office of IT category at GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, wrote in a blog post published Tuesday.

She said the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army were the top military agency customers of GSA’s MRAS team.

According to Stanton, MRAS experts help guide the acquisition strategies of federal, local and state agencies by helping them develop RFIs and providing them with customized market research reports within two weeks free of charge.

She said these experts use the latest research methods and technology tools and work with GSA’s customer service directors to provide information and help agency customers come up with a list of vetted industry partners that can help meet their requirements.

Stanton cited how the MRAS team helped the Department of Defense find a vendor on the schedule’s IT professional services SIN in support of a project at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada and at Fort Irwin in California.

Leidos Helped Complete DOD Chemical Weapons Destruction Effort; James Ridgely Quoted
Published on
Leidos Helped Complete DOD Chemical Weapons Destruction Effort; James Ridgely Quoted

Leidos participated in a successful project to destroy all remaining chemical weapons in the Department of Defense’s inventory and associated manufacturing facilities.

This historic effort was completed in early July, and throughout the process, Leidos offered technical and program support for multiple DOD organizations, the Reston, Virginia-based organization announced on Wednesday.

According to James Ridgely, senior program manager at Leidos, the company’s work encompassed technical expertise, engineering support, compliance with treaty mandates and planning analysis for technical and program efforts as well as public engagement.

“Leidos personnel have been side-by-side with government teams and contributed significantly to key technical and programmatic decisions that led to the safe completion of operations. We’re proud to have been part of making the world a safer place by eliminating these deadly weapons,” he said.

As a project participant, Leidos assisted the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in treaty compliance and inspector interface and supported the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Activity while it carried out program work across seven sights.

Leidos also helped the Program Executive Office Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives destroy the final chemical weapons at Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado and Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky.

The initiative took over three decades to complete, and its conclusion reflects the U.S.’ commitment to chemically disarm under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.

/
IARPA Seeks Industry Information to Develop Categorization for Large Language Model Threats
Published on
IARPA Seeks Industry Information to Develop Categorization for Large Language Model Threats

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity issued a request for information on the possible threats and vulnerabilities associated with the use of large language models in intelligence operations.

In a notice posted Monday on SAM.gov, IARPA said the RFI will aid in the development of a framework to categorize the risks in LLM technologies.

The agency is looking to examine threats in “white box” LLM models, which means there is some privileged level of access to code or parameters, as well as “black box” models, which covers those with no privileged access to code.

IARPA is seeking feedback from organizations that may have novel methods to detect and mitigate LLM vulnerabilities, or approaches to quantifying their confidence in LLM results.

Interested parties may submit their response by Aug. 21.

1 … 538 539 540 541 542 … 2,658