FCEDA Hosts May 2022 Career Fair for Veterans & Military Spouses
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FCEDA Hosts May 2022 Career Fair for Veterans & Military Spouses

The second bi-annual Veteran and Military Spouse Career Fair connected over 400 former service members and military spouses with 75 companies seeking to expand their workforce through in-person and online engagements.

The Fairfax County Economic Development Authority said Thursday it partnered with the Virginia Chamber Foundation and the Virginia Department of Veterans Services to present the event on May 11 and a virtual career fair on May 12.

The FCEDA May 2022 Career Fair was aimed at providing veterans, transitioning military members and military spouses with hiring opportunities in government, information technology, finance, defense and other sectors in an effort to attract and retain talent in Northern Virginia.

“More than 130 veterans and military spouses had the opportunity to attend the in-person event at the National Museum of the United States Army and over 600 online conversations were had between more than 300 jobseekers and recruiters during the virtual event,” shared Michael Batt, director of FCEDA’s Talent Initiative.

FCEDA has hosted a series of seven virtual career fairs since 2022, leading to over 11,000 completed conversations participated by job seekers and hiring representatives.

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Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth Assumes NGA Director Role
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Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth Assumes NGA Director Role

Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth officially assumed leadership of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency at a ceremony held Friday at NGA’s headquarters in Springfield Virginia.

He succeeds Robert Sharp, who has led the agency since February 2019 and retired after 33 years of military and federal service, NGA said Friday.

President Biden nominated Whitworth, formerly the director of intelligence at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in January to serve as the eighth NGA director and the Senate approved his nomination in early February.

“In lockstep with our global GEOINT partners, we will continue to deliver “GEOINT advantage” to every echelon – from strategic decision-makers to our forces at the tactical edge,” Whitworth said.

Executive Mosaic recognized Whitworth in this year’s Wash100 list of government and industry leaders of consequence who drive government contracting activity.

Robert Sharp was selected to the premier group of GovCon’s most influential figures in 2019 and 2020.

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CISA Releases Advisory on Flaws in Dominion Voting Machines; Director Jen Easterly Quoted
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CISA Releases Advisory on Flaws in Dominion Voting Machines; Director Jen Easterly Quoted

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has issued an advisory saying it found no evidence that vulnerabilities in Dominion in-person voting systems were exploited in any elections, CBS News reported Friday.

According to the advisory, CISA identified nine vulnerabilities in certain versions of Dominion Voting Systems ImageCast X software, including improper verification of cryptographic signatures, authentication bypass by spoofing, incorrect privilege assignment and origin validation error.

The agency said exploitation of these flaws would require physical access to ImageCast X devices, capability to alter files before they are uploaded to such devices or access to the Election Management Systems.

“Over the past week, we’ve been working with election officials on information regarding vulnerabilities affecting certain versions of Dominion Voting Systems’ software,” CISA Director Jen Easterly, a 2022 Wash100 Award winner, said in a statement Friday. “Today, we are releasing this information publicly.” 

CISA recommends several measures election officials should take to prevent the exploitation of these vulnerabilities.

These include reaching out to Domain Voting Systems to determine which software updates need to be implemented; ensuring all affected devices are physically protected before, during and after voting; closing any background application windows on each ImageCast X device; disabling the “Unify Tabulator Security Keys” feature on the EMS and ensuring new cryptographic keys are used for each election; and conducting rigorous post-election tabulation audits.

“Many of these mitigations, which are typically standard practice in jurisdictions where these devices are in use, are able to detect exploitation of these vulnerabilities and in many cases would prevent attempts entirely if diligently applied, making it very unlikely that a malicious actor could exploit these vulnerabilities to affect an election,” added Easterly. 

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INSA Recommends Ways to Improve Movement of Cleared Personnel Across Agencies; Larry Hanauer Quoted
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INSA Recommends Ways to Improve Movement of Cleared Personnel Across Agencies; Larry Hanauer Quoted

A new Intelligence and National Security Alliance white paper says delays in processing the transition of personnel with security clearances from one agency to another compromise the efficiency of more than 150,000 cleared contractors on an annual basis.

“Contractors typically support multiple contracts at multiple agencies, so they need their security clearance to be portable,” Larry Hanauer, vice president for policy at INSA, said in a statement published Thursday.

“The amount of time it takes for a cleared contractor to get approved to work at a second agency hinders the execution of contracts and undermines the government’s effectiveness,” added Hanauer.

The white paper offers five recommendations to improve security clearance mobility, including the need for the Department of Defense to designate a lead official to unify the processes, forms and performance to ensure that all DOD components comply with reciprocity policy or the goal of processing the movement of an employee’s security clearance from one agency to another within five days.

The reciprocity policy was established as part of the federal government’s Trusted Workforce 2.0 initiative. The document also calls for the establishment of adjudication and reciprocity practices across DOD and the Intelligence Community.

Other recommendations in the INSA paper are providing industry security officers expanded access to clearance repositories to help them assess the whether contractor employees meet specific contract requirements; considering counterintelligence polygraphs sufficient in order for cleared personnel to kick off work while they wait to take more comprehensive polygraphs; and streamlining access to Sensitive Compartmented Information by adjudicating all Tier 5 investigations for SCI eligibility to make existing personnel immediately available for additional missions.

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Lt. Gen. Bill Liquori on Needs Analysis for Space ISR Capabilities
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Lt. Gen. Bill Liquori on Needs Analysis for Space ISR Capabilities

Lt. Gen. Bill Liquori, deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs, requirements and analysis at the U.S. Space Force, said a service branch-led interagency team has come up with a draft needs assessment for space intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities across the Department of Defense, Breaking Defense reported Friday.

Liquori currently leads the Integrated Process Team that is working on the “needs memo,” which seeks to determine how to divide responsibility between the Intelligence Community and the Space Force when it comes to the development, procurement and operation of ISR satellites.

“This is the first one of a kind, we’re kind of giving it a little bit of time to work through,” he said of the needs analysis.

The IPT conducts ISR assessments and includes representatives from the IC, other military branches, combatant commands and the Joint Staff.

Liquori noted that the needs assessment will be handed over to the Joint Requirements Oversight Council for its review and approval in the next few months. Once approved, the document will be used to help shape DOD’s budget request for fiscal year 2024.

After JROC reviews the document, the Pentagon and the IC will conduct a gap analysis to identify missing capabilities in the space ISR force structure and determine “what is it that the IC is currently planning to budget for and how much of those requirements can they cover, so that we understand the piece that would be complimentary from a Department of Defense perspective.”

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Kleos, Navy Partner to Test Geolocation Data Application in Maritime Domain
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Kleos, Navy Partner to Test Geolocation Data Application in Maritime Domain

The U.S. arm of Luxembourg-headquartered Kleos Space and a Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indiana have partnered to apply the company’s radio frequency geolocation service in maritime activity monitoring tests.

Kleos Space Inc. will provide RF geolocation data to NSWC Crane under a cooperative research and development agreement to support the U.S. Navy’s SCOUT Experimentation Campaign, the company said Tuesday.

The partnership is for the first phase of the campaign slated to kick off in mid-2022 and aimed at testing applications of potential warfighting tools in real-world settings.

Eric von Eckartsberg, chief revenue officer of Kleos, said the company has four satellites that perform data collection across millions of square miles every day.

He added that RF data could help the service branch detect suspicious vessels over a wide coverage area.

The Naval Research and Development Establishment collaborates with industry, and academia through the SCOUT program to experiment with technologies intended to help military leaders make decisions.

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Teresa Carlson Rejoins Microsoft as Corporate VP, Executive-in-Residence
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Teresa Carlson Rejoins Microsoft as Corporate VP, Executive-in-Residence

Teresa Carlson, an executive specializing in technology and the public sector and a six-time Wash100 Award winner, has returned to Microsoft, her employer of a decade ago.

Since May 23rd, Carlson has occupied the newly created position of corporate vice president and executive-in-residence at Microsoft, reporting to executive vice president of business development, strategy and ventures Chris Young, FedScoop said Wednesday.

From 2001 to 2010, Carlson oversaw strategy and implementation of sales, contracting, pre-sales technical efforts, product marketing and customer experience of Microsoft’s international federal-facing business as vice president of federal sales and operations.

Subsequently, she worked for 10 years at Amazon Web Services, where she incepted the global public sector division, in a position that encompassed leading the business units for the financial, energy, telecommunications, aerospace and satellite sectors.

Carlson’s achievements with Amazon included securing a $600 million contract from the Central Intelligence Agency that proved instrumental in promoting AWS’ reputation in offering cloud services for classified government matters.

Over the course of the last year, Carlson has also steadily accrued board memberships and advisory positions such as non-executive chair at KnightSwan and board of directors member at Commure, as well as her recently announced board role at Karat, an interviewing-as-a-service software development company.

Mohit Bhende, CEO and co-founder of Karat, cited Carlson’s “deep expertise in building markets from scratch for some of the world’s leading companies.”

Carlson’s appointment follows the late 2021 installations of John McNiff as Microsoft Federal vice president and Rick Herrmann as vice president of education at Microsoft’s Industry Solution division.

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DARPA Seeking Proposals for ANSR Program to Improve Trustworthy AI; Sandeep Neema Quoted
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DARPA Seeking Proposals for ANSR Program to Improve Trustworthy AI; Sandeep Neema Quoted

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced on Friday that the agency is seeking proposals for its Assured Neuro Symbolic Learning and Reasoning (ANSR) program to address the trustworthiness of artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. 

“Motivating new thinking and approaches in this space will help assure that autonomous systems will operate safely and perform as intended,” said Dr. Sandeep Neema, DARPA ANSR program manager. “This will be integral to trust, which is key to the Department of Defense’s successful adoption of autonomy.”

DARPA’s ANSR program is looking to address these challenges in the form of new, hybrid (neuro-symbolic) AI algorithms that deeply integrate symbolic reasoning with data-driven learning to create robust, assured, and therefore trustworthy systems.

ANSR will explore diverse, hybrid architectures that can be seeded with prior knowledge, acquire both statistical and symbolic knowledge through learning, and adapt learned representations. The program includes demonstrations to evaluate hybrid AI techniques through relevant military use cases where assurance and autonomy are mission-critical.

DARPA has a need to develop these capabilities in our to establish data-driven machine learning transparency and robustness while also taking a different approach than the traditional process that heavily relies on knowledge representations and symbolic reasoning can be assured but are not robust to the uncertainties encountered in the real world.

Selected teams will develop a common operating picture of a dynamic, dense urban environment using a fully autonomous system equipped with ANSR technologies. The AI would deliver insights to the warfighter that could help characterize friendly, adversarial and neutral entities, the operating environment, and threat and safety corridors. 

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Johns Hopkins APL Books $638M Deal for DOD Secretary Office Support
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Johns Hopkins APL Books $638M Deal for DOD Secretary Office Support

Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has secured a $637.6 million contract modification from the Washington Headquarters Services to provide operational knowledge support to the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The university-affiliated research organization will help OSD personnel develop capabilities in engineering, research, development, test, evaluation and analytic areas, the Department of Defense said Thursday.

APL will assist DOD across critical programs under the award, which raises the ceiling of the cost-plus-fixed-fee, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract from $873 million to $1.51 billion.

The nonprofit will perform work at its locations in Virginia and Maryland and U.S. government facilities within the National Capital Region. DOD expects the contractor services to be complete by March 25, 2024.

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NASA Seeks to Advance Lunar Excavation Tech via New Prize Competition
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NASA Seeks to Advance Lunar Excavation Tech via New Prize Competition

NASA has opened the next stage of a prize competition that seeks prototype systems designed to excavate and transport icy regolith, or unconsolidated debris, on the moon’s surface.

The agency said Thursday it will award as much as $3.5 million in the Break the Ice Lunar Challenge’s second phase, which consists of three levels over a 23-month period. Initial teams that took part in the first phase and new competitors are invited to sign up for the contest’s second phase by September 30th.

In phase one, 13 teams have won a total of $500,000 for proposing system concepts to dig and haul icy moon “dirt.” The list of winners was unveiled in August 2021.

For phase two, NASA plans to ask participating teams to create detailed engineering designs and test plans for prototype demonstration.

Participants that will advance to level two will work on developing full-scale terrestrial analog models and demonstrate the durability of proposed systems. Level three will focus on testing prototypes and the U.S. team with the highest score will receive $1 million.

NASA added that it offers opportunities for participation in thermal vacuum test activity to see how concepts will work in a simulated lunar South Pole environment.

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