Georgia Tech Procurement Assistance Center

Commission: AI dominance requires bold action

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The United States must pump billions of dollars into artificial intelligence research if the nation wants to be “AI-ready” by 2025 and successfully compete with great power competitors China and Russia, according to new findings from a congressionally chartered panel.

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence — which was established under the fiscal year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act to examine ways to advance the development of AI for national security and defense purposes — recently released its final report to Congress in March after two years of work.

“To win in AI, we need more money, more talent [and] stronger leadership,” said Chairman Eric Schmidt, the former head of Google’s parent company Alphabet.

The 700-plus page report includes recommendations to the Biden administration and Congress that will require sweeping changes to better posture the nation for competition with other AI-enabled nations, such as China and Russia.

Continue reading at:  National Defense Magazine

AI contract spending set to grow in the federal market

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The United States government is trying to get smarter about getting smart.  Throughout the federal government, and especially in defense and national security, artificial intelligence (AI) is getting an increased amount of attention, including the adoption of hefty AI budgets.  That should lead to increasing contract opportunities for information technology vendors with high competence in AI.

Federal civilian and defense contract spending for artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) is likely to grow to $4.3 billion in fiscal year 2023, according to a recent report from Bloomberg Government.

Continue reading at:  eCommerce Times

DHS tests AI for making sense of contractor past-performance data

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The Department of Homeland Security is almost done with the first phase of a project that will allow federal agencies to use artificial intelligence for a task that can be overwhelming for humans: extracting, analyzing and visualizing the underutilized data in the governmentwide system for contractor past-performance records.

Next week DHS will finish reviewing services from nine vendors who were given data sets from the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS).  Before awarding contracts worth more than $250,000, agencies review historical data in the CPARS to see how offerers acted under previous agreements.  It’s not an easy task.

With more than 1 million records covering 60,000 contractors, CPARS can bog down contracting officers, said Polly Hall, acquisition innovation advocate director of the Procurement Innovation Lab at DHS.  They can sort records by contract value, Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number or performance period, but even once those filters are applied, the results frequently still number in the hundreds and can only be viewed PDF at a time.

Continue reading at:  Fedscoop

Georgia Tech hosts ‘mad scientists’ for U.S. Army symposium

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The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) presented its Mad Scientist symposium on “Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy” at Georgia Tech on March 7 and 8, 2017.

TRADOC’s Mad Scientist Initiative is a collaborative partnership with academia, industry and government to help anticipate and prepare for the challenges of future warfare. By exploring the operational environment of the future, the Army seeks to shape the future of warfare, rather than respond to it, and increase the rate of innovation within its branch of the military.

Different themed events call on researchers and other partners to imagine the challenges facing the Army in 2030, and provide solutions to those problems today. Lee Grubbs, director of the Mad Scientist Initiative based out of Fort Eustis, Va., said the symposium came to Georgia Tech because that’s where the experts are.

“We want to partner with leading institutions in the topic areas we are interested in,” Grubbs said. “When we wanted to discuss robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomy, we knew that Georgia Tech is one of the leading academic institutions in the country. It seemed like a natural connection.”

Researchers from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and Georgia Tech joined faculty from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Maryland as well as Army and industry representatives to present their research and work on robotics and machine learning.

“The opening from Dr. [Stephen] Cross really set the stage in showing what Georgia Tech does for the state, for the country and for our military,” Grubbs said. “We’ve had the best experts in robotics with Dr. Egerstedt, the best in autonomy with Dr. Pippen and the best in artificial intelligence and sensory perception with Dr. Kira.”

Speakers included the following:

  • Dr. Stephen Cross, Georgia Tech Executive Vice President for Research
  • Dr. Zsolt Kira, branch chief of the Advanced Machine Learning Analytics Group within the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Division at GTRI
  • Dr. Charles Pippin, senior research scientist within GTRI’s Aerospace, Transportation and Advanced Systems (ATAS) Laboratory
  • Dr. Magnus Egerstedt, executive director for Georgia Tech’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines
  • Dr. Augustus Fountain, deputy chief scientist, Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army (Research & Technology)
  • Dr. Robert Sadowski, robotics senior research scientist, Research, Technology and Integration Director at U.S. Army TARDEC, U.S. Army Chief Roboticist
  • Alexander Kott, chief scientist, U.S. Army Research Laboratory
  • Juliane Gallina, director, U.S. Federal Solutions, IBM Watson
  • Dr. Gary Ackerman, University of Maryland, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism

During the two-day event, attendees were encouraged to attend a robotics “petting zoo,” where they were afforded a close-up look at some autonomous vehicles and other examples of artificial intelligence, machine sensing and machine learning.

IBM Watson representatives showed off the ability for Watson to communicate and parse native human language, even detecting the “sentiment” behind the statements.

Georgia Tech researchers are working on several items, including:

  • A low-powered brachiating robot that swings by its “arms” to monitor plants in a field.
  • A 25-pound, helicopter-type unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that can deliver up to 65 pounds of payload in the field.
  • A combined LIDAR with a UAV to map areas, seeking changes to the environment, people’s walking habits, and reconstructing static and dynamic objects in three-dimensional space.

More than 100 registered and attended, including representatives from NATO, South Korea and from several other European countries. More than 200 watched the event at any given time online from around the world, and even were participating in live chatrooms during the event. All of the content are posted on the TRADOC G-2 OE Enterprise YouTube page.

Source: https://gtri.gatech.edu/casestudy/georgia-tech-hosts-mad-scientists-us-army-symposiu

Intel community scientist subjects contracts to frequent review

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Forget the traditional annual review.

The top scientist for the intelligence community’s innovation grant maker says his agency reviews contracts every six months to decide whether the funding continues.

“The bulk of time on my job is to review progress on new programs, and a fourth of our budget is test and evaluation,” Jason Matheny, director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity since 2015, told an analytics breakfast on Tuesday sponsored by Johns Hopkins University Graduate School and REI Systems.

Like its larger and older Pentagon counterpart—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—Matheny’s agency seeks to find and outfit its agencies (17 in the intel community) with cutting-edge technology tools. That means scanning research being done in government, business and academia in fields as diverse as physics, math, chemistry and political science, he said, to apply their skills to high-performance computing, robotics and biotechnology.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/contracting/2017/03/intel-community-scientist-subjects-contracts-frequent-review/136463/

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