AFCEA

Col. Tom Horton, USAF (Ret.), a member of the executive committee on AFCEA’s board of directors died on March 20 at the age of 72. He also served on the board of the Atlanta Chapter.

Col. Horton attended Georgia Tech where he was a member of the varsity football team. Upon graduating in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in industrial management, he was commissioned a second lieutenant. He earned a Master of Science in management from Troy State University.

Charles (Chuck) R. Corjay, a Distinguished Life Member of AFCEA, passed away on March 17. He was 86.

Corjay joined AFCEA in 1972 and held almost every chapter officer position throughout his career at the association. For 12 years he was a regional vice president, supporting multiple chapters in the Mid-West, Mid-South and National Capital regions, and also served on the international board of directors.

A veteran of the Air Force, Corjay helped build the Northern Virginia (NOVA) Chapter from a sub-chapter of Washington DC to the largest AFCEA chapter. At its height, NOVA had more than 7,000 members.

To maintain its strategic position in the world, succeed on future battlefields and protect the homeland, the Department of Defense must increase the adoption of artificial intelligence, according to the department’s newly released Artificial Intelligence Strategy.

In a first-of-its-kind move, new sustaining AFCEA corporate member Abacus Technology is offering its employees associate AFCEA memberships as an employee benefit. So far, the company has signed up 300 employees.

“I wish we had done it sooner because we really have gotten a lot of positive feedback,” says Alice Solomon, a vice president of Abacus. “When we were trying to come up with approaches for tightening up our community, it just seemed like a logical thing to do,” she adds.

A small business providing advanced data security is the third and final firm selected in an AFCEA Small Business Innovation Shark Tank competition to uncover innovative emerging technologies. The company, Avocado of San Jose, California, won against six other firms with its distributed and deterministic layer-7 application security platform.

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is increasing the warfighter’s ability to operate in the complex spectrum environment by providing operational support through electromagnetic battlespace planning, radio frequency deconfliction and joint spectrum interference resolution. DISA’s Defense Spectrum Organization (DSO) ensures the agency and the DOD maintain information dominance through effective electromagnetic spectrum operations.

The U.S. Army is overhauling its relationship with technology providers to incorporate a new class of capabilities that will enable survivable, protected, intuitive, standards-based, interoperable, sustainable and, above all, highly mobile networks. To obtain these types of technologies, the service plans to assume a position where it is articulating its intent, a process that’s being described as “adapt and buy.”

The billions of bits and bytes that make government services, information sharing and even shopping easier also open the doors for adversaries to gather intelligence that aids their nefarious pursuits. AFCEA International’s Cyber Committee has published a white paper that describes several ways big data analytics can help cybersecurity analysts close those doors or at least shrink the gap and reduce vulnerabilities.

I was a junior in high school when I was invited to the house of my best friend, Adam, on the New Jersey shore. This was way before the garish reality TV show of the same name, but in much of the same way, my expectations were objectively excessive and shallow at their core. Who could blame me? Most of the town knew exactly who my friend’s father was. Mike was a vivacious and extremely rich man. We once calculated his estimated yearly income and compared it against Forbes magazine’s reported earnings for American singer, dancer and actress Britney Spears. Mike "won."