By Lauren C. Williams
NOTE: This article first appeared on FCW.com.
President Joe Biden will nominate the director of the Defense Department’s innovative acquisition arm to be the Pentagon’s top buyer, the White House announced April 2.
Michael Brown has been the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, which helps DOD prototype and field new technologies with rapid acquisition techniques, since 2018.
DIU recently celebrated its five-year anniversary and has expanded its portfolio under Brown’s leadership, fielding 26 new capabilities.
Brown was previously a White House Innovation Fellow for the Defense Department and was the CEO of two Silicon Valley companies, the cybersecurity firms Symantec and Quantum, which is one of the biggest suppliers of drives for personal computers.
By Lauren C. Williams
Mar 16, 2021
The governing body in charge of standing up and running the Defense Department’s unified cybersecurity standard for contractors is preparing to shift to a more permanent staffing arrangement.
Since it officially stood up in January 2020, the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification Accreditation Body (CMMC-AB) has been run by industry professionals volunteering their time, often in addition to their primary careers.
“The AB is in the process of hiring professional staff to provide the needed level of effort for continuing its mission,” Karlton Johnson, the body’s chairman, said. “That will allow those on the board to transition from hands-on working members to the true advisory role that all boards are chartered to fill.”
Mar 16, 2021
The Department of Defense s Commercial Virtual Remote environment, spun up to accommodate telework in the COVID-19 pandemic, quickly became the largest Microsoft Teams deployment in the world and brought department-wide collaboration tools to DOD after years of less-successful attempts.
DOD personnel have embraced the tools and the silo-spanning interactions they enable, but CVR was always intended as a temporary fix. So the Defense Information Systems Agency is working hard to ensure the collaboration doesn t fade when CVR sunsets in July.
Les Benito, the director of operations for DISA s Cloud Computing Program Office, said that Global Directory is the key. Speaking at FCW and Defense Systems March 10 event on Defense Readiness, Benito explained that the initiative will provide a cloud-wide identity as the military services spin up their own Microsoft 365 environments under the Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS) contract.
By Stephanie Kanowitz
Mar 16, 2021
The Defense Department is preparing for 5G-based telemedicine experiments with technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and robotic surgery.
DOD is expected to issue requests for prototype proposals from Joint Base San Antonio (JSBA) in Texas after releasing a statement of work for a 5G telemedicine and medical training project. The SOW sought industry input on development related to 5G-enabled AR/virtual reality-guided medical training, advanced telehealth information access, advanced robotic surgery and telementoring via AR for medical procedures.
The 5G network is critical to telemedicine because it shifts from the voice-centric 4G network to application-to-application communication without human intervention, National Spectrum Consortium (NSC) Vice Chairman Randy Clark said.
By Defense Systems Staff
Mar 16, 2021
As artificial intelligence advances, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is moving toward treating computers less as tools and more as partners that can help solve complex military problems, according to Matthew Turek, program manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office.
Speaking at FCW’s March 10 Defense Readiness Workshop, Turek said DARPA has approximately 30 programs focused on AI and another 90 that are leveraging AI technologies from foundational science and hardware to algorithms, knowledge representations, machine learning and autonomy. Some of those, he added, are already in the field.
Those programs fall into three waves of AI. The first covers symbolic reasoning, in which engineers create sets of rules to represent knowledge in well-defined in domains, like optimizing the shipping of military equipment. The second wave applies statistical models that have been trained on big data for specific problem domain