Weekly Roundup: March 4-8, 2024

Navy is Using AI Training Models at the Edge, CIO Says.  Navy CIO Jane Rathbun says the service is infusing AI at the edge to improve decision-making. “AI, machine learning, natural language processing, all of those capabilities are critical to managing the massive amounts of data telemetry that come off of our systems that are about cybersecurity,” Rathbun said, adding, “Critical to the cybersecurity and critical in general.” The CIO said that these tools help to sift through the data, and then make it “more agile and effective” to help warfighters know where to look for threats.

Data Prep Key to AI Solutions Providing Actionable Insight. During the inaugural episode of GovExec’s Scrambled web series, Stacey Dixon, principal deputy Director of National Intelligence, explained that data in the IC is everything, but today there is an overwhelming amount of data making it difficult to collect actionable insight. AI is available and able to help, but “we know that the data needs to be conditioned, it needs to be tagged, and it needs to be in a format that makes it useful for AI,” she explained.

NRC CISO Discusses Data Security, Automation Steps. With foreign adversaries looking to disrupt operations of American institutions and collect their sensitive data, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is taking steps to better secure its own data while at the same time making it easier for agency personnel to access the information they need, an NRC official said

How the Education Department Went From ‘F’ to ‘A’ on FITARA. When FITARA was first launched in November 2015, the Department of Education received an “F” on its scorecard. However, just five years later in December 2019, the agency rose to an “A” on FITARA 9.0 and held steady with a “B” grade for the next six iterations of the scorecard. Steven Hernandez, the Education Department’s chief information security officer (CISO), joined the agency in 2017, and has been a key player in pushing up the agency’s FITARA score and “achieving cyber excellence in the Federal government.”

GSA’s emerging tech framework is a priority setter for AI. GSA released the draft Emerging Technology Framework from the cloud security program known as FedRAMP in late January as part of its effort to meet the requirements of the AI executive order. Eric Mill, director of cloud strategy in the Technology Transformation Service in GSA, said the draft framework, for which comments are due March 11, is helping to ensure agencies get the expected benefits of using secure AI and large language models. In the document, GSA says it’s initially focused on emerging technology capabilities that use large language models (LLMs) and include chat interfaces, code-generation and debugging tools and prompt-based image generators.

PMA Update: HHS Leading First-Ever CX Agency Priority Goal. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has committed to leading the first-ever Agency Priority Goal (APG) dedicated solely to advancing customer experience (CX). “This year, we celebrate the launch at the department-level at HHS in co-leading the first-ever advancing customer experience agency Priority Goal,” Ariele Faber, chief experience officer at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) within HHS. 

THIS WEEK @ THE CENTER 

NEW BLOGS

• NEW REPORT: The Role of Risk Leadership in Defining ERM Readiness in Government by Michael J. Keegan  
• Discussing Agile Regulation by Dylan Desjardins 

ICYMI –  Exploring Government-Venture Arrangements. This week Michael Keegan welcomed Arun Gupta. co-author, Venture Meets Mission to discuss his new book and the case he and his co-authors make for using government-venture arrangements. They explore characteristics of an entrepreneurial mindset, how government and entrepreneurial ventures can work together to address significant challenges facing us today, and what a thriving “venture meets mission” ecosystem looks like.