The Internet of Things has spawned many changes within the Federal government, including new methods of data collection at the Department of Agriculture (USDA), new policy considerations at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and a realignment of the Office of the CIO (OCIO) at the Department of Commerce. […]

Hundreds of people have submitted feedback regarding the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s redesigned website since its March 6 launch, according to Peter Rhee, the agency’s director of Digital Communications. […]

Gregory Reams, leader of the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis program, said that the open data sets his office makes available are unlikely to suffer the same fate as the animal welfare documents that disappeared from the Department of Agriculture website. “It’s been supported for 80 years and used by a wide constituency,” Reams said at Esri’s FedGIS conference. […]

Federal chief financial officers want to have access to data analytics tools during the next administration, according to a survey from the Association of Government Accountants and Grant Thornton. […]

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) released its annual Technology Transfer Report on Nov. 22, revealing the new inventions researchers, universities, and small businesses created in the past year. […]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation announced the winners of the first Innovations in Food and Agricultural Science and Technology prize competition on Nov. 1. […]

At MeriTalk’s webinar on Preparing for the Federal Data Deluge, big data experts said that data storage and protection, which includes managing data centers, is a balancing act that only gets harder as the amount of data increases. […]

With information from the Department of Agriculture’s new database, a person walking through the grocery store can use their phone to look up how many calories are in their cart. Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture, announced the Branded Food Products Database, an open data partnership. […]

Worldwide, 800 million people suffer from starvation every day, according to a blog post from the U. S. Department of Agriculture website. With the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition Summit, USDA plans to address this problem. […]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture received a C grade on its Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act scorecard, which was released in May. Flip Anderson, acting executive director of FITARA for USDA, was so frustrated with the FITARA grading system that he created his own scorecard to gauge how closely the USDA complies with the act’s mandates. […]

The Agriculture Department’s Flip Anderson is the only known agency-level FITARA director–an indicator of both the level of importance USDA has assigned to the new law and the resources necessary to manage the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act compliance correctly. […]