Lillian Ingster, director of the National Death Index (NDI), has access to the entire universe of death data in the United States since 1979. Ingster shares her experience managing this data with her Federal peers as often as she can. […]

The active critical vulnerabilities at the Department of Homeland Security have decreased by 99 percent and the time that it takes to detect problems has been cut in half in government agencies since October. The Cybersecurity Strategy and Implementation Plan and Cybersecurity National Action Plan focused on bringing the whole government up to speed on cybersecurity initiatives; however, some individual agencies developed their own way of protecting their digital information. […]

Six hundred people have registered for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity Multi-View Stereo 3D Mapping Challenge, which was announced on July 1. The Mapping Challenge invites people to submit 3-D maps created from IARPA’s vast data sets, most of which come from satellite images. […]

The potential harmfulness of mobile health care apps was one of the chief concerns raised at the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Disrupter Series Hearing on Health Care Apps. […]

European companies wishing to transfer sensitive data, such as payroll information, to American companies will now be able to do so securely, should they register for the Privacy Shield Framework. […]

A recent survey, “The State of Education Technology 2015,” pinpoints the need for more technology training for teachers and greater transparency about how student data is shared. […]

The European Union announced that the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, an international data privacy agreement, has been adopted by its member states. […]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will launch two satellites to monitor weather and temperature patterns around the globe, but the agency is concerned about potential issues including data gaps following the expiration of previous satellites. […]

Private companies with access to personally identifiable data, such as credit card information, may be able to work with the U.S. Census Bureau to provide new insights into gross domestic product through the National Technical Information Service Joint Venture Partnership program. […]

The Department of Defense needs to improve its data about cost saving and streamlining opportunities, according to a June 30 Government Accountability Office report. […]

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Attorney General on June 29, arguing that a section of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act unconstitutionally criminalizes research aimed at determining whether online algorithms result in discrimination against certain races, genders, and other minority groups. […]

In the increased adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR), usability is a key concern, according to a recent survey by the Scottsdale Institute. […]

Visitors to the Department of Commerce’s website can receive a free tutorial on atmospheric rivers. Created with the map design platform Mapbox, this tutorial is one of nine available on DOC’s website and is part of the larger Commerce Data Usability Project. […]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Big Data Project last spring transferred a big data set from Next-Generation Radar to the cloud platforms of Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Open Cloud Consortium. Now, the members of NOAA’s BDP are trying to compile and present more big data sets in a clear and accessible way. […]

The White House announced that it’s launching the Data Driven Justice initiative, which intends to use data to decrease prison recidivism and improve response and care for at-risk and mentally ill citizens. […]

Commercial data services can help the efficiency of program integrity activities for certain government agencies. The Government Accountability Office stated in a June 30 report that agencies can focus their efforts on other tasks if they allow commercial data service providers to offer Web and phone-based services to authenticate taxpayers’ identities. […]

David Meza, chief knowledge architect at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Johnson Space Center, is trying to find a way to share visual data so that a NASA employee at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida can log in to a computer and see what Meza and his team have been working on in their Texas-based studio. This project to streamline visualization tools falls under a broader initiative to link the agency, especially in regard to big data. […]

The Internet of Things will soon transform the way transportation and infrastructure operate in the United States, according to witnesses at the Senate Subcommittee on Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety, and Security hearing. […]

The Supreme Court overturned controversial Texas law H.B. 2, which implements regulations on Texas abortion clinics, such as requirements for surgical facilities and for doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. However, the American Civil Liberties Union alleged this month that the Texas Department of State Health Services was intentionally hiding abortion data that would be relevant to the case. […]

NOAA next month plans to launch the Deep Space Climate Observatory, a satellite equipped with a Faraday Cup plasma sensor and a magnetometer that measures the severity of space weather storms. This satellite will collect more accurate data than previous technology has offered on space weather. […]

Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell this week announced an anti-fraud task force led by the Justice and Health and Human Services Departments executed the largest takedown of health care fraud in U.S. history, charging 301 individuals in 36 Federal districts for health care schemes equaling $900 million. […]

The U.S. Forest Service used a Cessna 205 aircraft to discover that 26 million trees have died in California since October 2015. Instead of relying on satellite images or unmanned aerial vehicles, popular devices in today’s agriculture, the Regional Aerial Survey Program uses a more old-fashioned method of collecting data. […]

The recent upgrade to the Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) Big Data Platform (BDP), projected to release in August 2016, will give cyber operators and analysts with a need to run custom analytics on specific data sets access to increase ad-hoc query capabilities and enable faster identification of cyber threats. […]

Farmers are concerned about some aspects of the Federal Aviation Administration’s recent regulations regarding unmanned aerial vehicles. Robert Blair, vice president of agriculture for Measure, one of the nation’s leading drone operators, specifically addressed the regulation that states a UAV operator must fly his or her drone within a line of sight. […]

Not enough transit providers are taking advantage of Intelligent Transportation Systems, according to a Government Accountability Office study. “Most small urban and rural transit providers are not using other ITS technologies—such as automatic passenger counters or electronic fare payment—due to the cost of the technologies or because there is no perceived need,” the study said. […]

The U.S. Energy Information Administration created a free software tool in which users can import data from the agency’s application programming interface into their own Google Sheets. […]

The Commerce Department’s National Technical Information Service is increasing its capacity to share and use Federal data with the public, through the announcement of a new Joint Venture Partnership and the appointment of a new director. […]

While education hasn’t gotten much air time in the 2016 election cycle, one common refrain from both parties is that all children deserve a high-quality education. The Data Quality Campaign a nonprofit policy and advocacy organization designed to bring the education community together to empower educators, families, and policymakers, shares the goal of a high-quality education for every student. […]

The National Institutes of Health announced plans to fund a biobank to support the Precision Medicine Initiative and the Genomic Data Commons in an effort to increase data sharing more broadly across clinical and research fields. […]

More than 80 percent of non-Federal, acute care hospitals as of 2015 reported electronically exchanging lab results, radiology reports, clinical care summaries, or medication lists with ambulatory care providers and hospitals outside of their organization in a new study released by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. […]