LaVerne Council, national managing principal of Enterprise Technology Strategy and Innovation at Grant Thornton, spoke today at the Infor Government Forum about the future opportunities afforded by artificial intelligence (AI), and sought along the way to debunk myths that have inspired some apprehension from the public about the emerging technology. […]
Funding needed for further U.S. research and development of quantum information sciences (QIS) and the computing and other advances that QIS is expected to yield, along with the pressing need to develop a highly skilled workforce to leverage those expected advances, dominated discussion today at a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee examining the Department of Energy’s (DoE) efforts in the QIS field. […]
The Defense Department’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU)–formerly known as DIUx–has selected Michael Brown as its new director. […]
The General Services Administration (GSA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) today announced they are partnering as part of the GSA’s Centers of Excellence (CoE) initiative. […]
Reps. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Robin Kelly, D-Ill., today released a new white paper on artificial intelligence (AI) that urges the Federal government to increase its engagement with the technology. The paper focuses its attention on four key issue areas–workforce, privacy, biases, and malicious use of AI–and provides concrete recommendations for each area. […]
The rate of cloud adoption in the Federal government may not be keeping up with the hype around the new technology or the demands of IT professionals at Federal agencies, according to new research conducted by MeriTalk. […]
The software industry group BSA | The Software Alliance offered its support for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Act in the Senate. […]
Google released their framework for privacy legislation, which highlights providing transparency, securing personal information, and giving people access to their personal information as key requirements of a data regulation framework. […]
A new “strategic overview” document published by the White House’s National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) says the U.S. government’s efforts to advance quantum information science (QIS) will “focus on a science-first approach that aims to identify and solve Grand Challenges: problems whose solutions enable transformative scientific and industrial progress.” That focus, NSTC said, will […]
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., told Politico to expect an updated version of the Secure Elections Act to hit the Senate floor next month. […]
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General criticized the agency’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement organization for failing to make timely deliveries of IT equipment and arrange for proper IT support staffing in connection with growth in the number of state and local law enforcement agencies participating in ICE’s 287(g) program under which state and local agencies assist ICE in immigration enforcement missions in their jurisdictions. […]
The National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) at the Department of Homeland Security held its first in a series of webinars “on protecting enterprise network infrastructure devices” today. […]
The Office of Management and Budget today released a draft of its new Cloud Smart strategy, marking the first update to White House guidance on Federal agency cloud adoption since 2011. With the new draft strategy the administration has broadly highlighted three areas–security, procurement, and workforce–as the foundational areas of the strategy and where it feels that updated guidance is most necessary. […]
A multi-agency appropriations bill signed into law by President Trump on Friday provides funding for a new office at the Department of Energy focused on protecting critical infrastructure, along with a range of smaller IT-related projects. […]
The Department of Justice (DoJ) announced Friday that Ruslans Bondars, the operator of counter- antivirus service “Scan4you,” was sentenced to 14 years in prison. […]
A new survey conducted by the International Information System Security Certification Consortium, also known as (ISC)², found that 50 percent of well-performing organizations surveyed have successfully recruited government cybersecurity talent. […]
As Federal agencies migrate applications to the cloud, data integration can be a major stumbling block that prevents them from reaping the benefits of cloud services. While agencies are putting more applications in cloud environments, often the underlying technologies connecting these applications are still on-premise. As a result, information technology teams must spend time provisioning and maintaining their middleware infrastructure to avoid performance bottlenecks. […]
The General Services Administration (GSA) today announced that it awarded a $2 million contract to HackerOne for the facilitation of GSA’s bug bounty programs. […]
As the administration makes its push to implement reforms and reorganize government under an audacious plan released on June 21, it’s finding modest success in some areas, but has somewhat faltered on initiatives where it did not cultivate appropriate stakeholder engagement. […]
CrowdStrike announced Thursday that it received an agency FedRAMP authorization which it said will allow the company “to significantly expand its footprint in the Federal government to meet demand from Federal agencies for its endpoint protection technologies. […]
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Thursday that CIO Pamela Dyson will leave the agency to become executive vice president, head of the Technology Group, and CIO at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. […]
Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., has introduced a consumer data privacy bill that would require online service providers to provide “opt-in” rights to consumers whose “sensitive personal information or behavioral data” they collect, store, process, sell, or share with third parties. […]
The National Cyber Strategy policy document released by the White House late Thursday tracks in tone and wording with the tough stance adopted in the Defense Department’s cyber strategy announced earlier this week–including its adoption of a more offensive-minded position than previous written policies–and appears to respond in tone to demands from across the political spectrum that the U.S. fashion policy that will do a better job in creating a deterrence effect against adversaries. […]
The Federal government is continuing its push to update the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) initiative to provide “improved solutions for accessing cloud services while maintaining cybersecurity,” according to the latest progress updates to the President’s Management Agenda (PMA). […]
The general election in 2016 was a watershed moment for Federal, state, and local election officials. […]
As the FCC prepares to vote next week on an order that would make it easier for wireless service providers to deploy small wireless antennas and other infrastructure to speed the deployment of fifth-generation–or 5G–services, two of the agency’s five commissioners discussed the pros and cons of taking that course at an event organized by Politico. […]
The Office of Management and Budget recently released its Q3 FY 2018 progress update to the President’s Management Agenda’s cross-agency priority (CAP) goals, and for CAP goal No. 1, IT Modernization, it appears that there has been a notable progression on cloud adoption in the Federal government. […]
The Office of Management and Budget received more than 40 responses to a request for information (RFI) for its planned Government Effectiveness Advanced Research (GEAR) Center, and today a representative from OMB provided more detail about the RFI’s results, the proposed structure of the new center, and where the currently-unspecified amount of “seed funding” for the center would go in order to support various disciplines including Federal IT modernization. […]
According to a new study prepared for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the agency’s development of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) has created an estimated $250 billion in economic impact over the last 20 years. […]
Small drones have been a useful tool to the military for years, primarily as a way to provide on-the-spot surveillance. But as hardware and artificial intelligence guidance systems continue to improve, macro- and nano-drones are poised to begin playing a bigger role in contested areas as both friend and foe. […]