Technology

An industry leader has delivered 50 million artificial neurons—a number roughly equivalent to the brain of a small mammal—to Sandia National Laboratories. Intel Corporation and Sandia will explore numerous potential uses from neural-inspired computing and plan to examine the effects on artificial intelligence in commercial and defense areas.

Facing a pandemic and an aging legacy medical record system with limited data storage capacity at an on-premise data center in Charleston, South Carolina, the Enterprise Intelligence & Data Solutions (EIDS) team, sprang into action to complete a game-changing cloud migration project. The effort, called the Accelerated Migration Project, or AMP, moved petabytes of secondary healthcare data and related applications to the cloud. The project digitally transforms access to U.S. Defense Department medical records and offers better data analytics and more reliable information discovery, driving improved outcomes in patient care and business operations, experts say.

Artificial intelligence technology tested during the Army’s Project Convergence exercise largely met expectations and will help transform the way the Army fights in the future, officials say.

The U.S. federal government should consider implementing a digital identity for each citizen and enable the use of mobile devices for in-person access and other applications, experts say. Mobile devices, paired with strong standards, can enable physical access to federal buildings—as the common access card, or CAC, does currently. In addition, employing more digitally integrated, holistic systems would improve privacy. And given the onset of COVID-19, the pandemic has heightened the need for innovation, especially around contactless technologies, said officials speaking yesterday at the Federal Identity Virtual Collaboration Event.

From plumbing to space travel, the vast majority of future good-paying jobs will involve technology. Not only will these careers offer regularly increased salaries but also opportunities for advancement and, even more importantly, independence. These are some of Irma Becerra’s beliefs borne of personal experience, a deep passion for technology and a personal purpose in education.

Identity drives everything across the federal space, from the PIV-CAC cards staffers carry to massive defense projects involving huge budgets and diverse players. The federal identity landscape has evolved rapidly in recent years, with the rise of public and private clouds, DevSecOps and zero trust. But underlying architectures have not kept pace with these advances. Established agencies are still grappling with aging investments made over successive waves of innovation, going from one authoritative directory behind a firewall to a growing collection of attributes scattered across diverse repositories.

The U.S. Army wants an automated communications planning system. In the short term, researchers expect to use an “intelligent engine” but in the future, artificial intelligence will likely take over the task.

Planning communications for different conditions is commonly known as PACE planning. The acronym stands for “primary, alternate, contingency and emergency” communications. Different situations call for different communications systems, explains Michael Brownfield, chief of the Army Future Capabilities Office within the Combat Capabilities Development Command’s research organization formally named the Command and Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) Center.

The next era of satellite communications is upon us in the form of low-earth-orbit constellations aiming to revolutionize personal connectivity, according to satellite experts. These new satellite swarms are being driven by technology innovations simultaneously with the growth of less-expensive launch services. The result will be an explosion in the number and type of orbiters serving their earthbound hosts while raising the bar for support technologies on the ground.

By year’s end, U.S. Navy researchers intend to add one of two remote autonomous antennas to its satellite tracking architecture, enhancing its ability to collect strategic satellite data and support space-related research and development.

The first antenna will be located at a secure, undisclosed and unmanned site in California and will extend the tracking capabilities from Blossom Point, Maryland. The second is planned for Hawaii.

Blossom Point is located south of Washington, D.C., and is owned and operated by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). It is considered a state-of-the-art command and control facility capable of supporting satellite spaceflight missions from launch through end-of-life.