Posted by
Cost Estimating NewsBrief: September 9, 2022
Supply chain intel directorate aims to inform procurement ‘risk calculus’
(Federal News Network) The National Counterintelligence and Security Center is taking advantage of a moment when agencies and policymakers are more attuned to cyber supply chain security concerns, as intelligence officials work through avenues like the Federal Acquisition Security Council to identify potential technology risks. The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act established a Supply Chain and Counterintelligence Risk Management Task Force to share sensitive information with the federal acquisition community. The task force is chaired by the director of the NCSC. Jeanette McMillian, assistant director of supply chain and cyber at the NCSC, says the task force has been crucial to helping inform agencies’ “risk calculus” for what they’re buying. Read More
How CBO Forecasts Inflation
(CBO.gov) Presentation by Bob Arnold, Unit Chief in CBO’s Macroeconomic Analysis Division, to the Society of Actuaries. This presentation describes how CBO forecasts inflation and discusses CBO’s inflation projections and how they have compared with other forecasters’ projections in recent years. Read More
DOD’s Innovation Arm Seeks Commercial Software to Help Address Supply Chain Risks
(ExecutiveGov) The Defense Innovation Unit has asked industry stakeholders to propose commercial software platforms that could help address threats to the defense industrial base by building end-to-end alternate paths of key supply chains and identifying and mitigating risks within those supply chains. DIU said it is seeking analytic techniques that could enable Department of Defense users to ingest government-furnished data sources, proprietary data and commercially available information to populate computational supply chain representations and perform modeling and simulation within a particular value chain for supplier diversification, future planning and analysis of downstream effects of disruption in a supply chain node, among other requirements. Read More
National Security Space: Actions Needed to Better Use Commercial Satellite Imagery and Analytics
(GAO.gov) Commercial satellite companies can play a key role in providing imagery and data critical to national security issues. For example, the war in Ukraine has drawn attention to how governments are using commercial satellites to track troop movement and the impact of attacks. The Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense, however, have a slow and cumbersome approach to incorporating emerging commercial capabilities. Until they address this, the U.S. risks losing a technological advantage over emerging competitors, like China. Read More
DOD Calls for Comments on Further Development of Digital AI Marketplace
(ExecutiveGov) The Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office is seeking input on the development of features for a new initiative as part of the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence marketplace. In a SAM.gov notice, CDAO said industry, academia and government organizations are welcome to provide comments and suggestions for the Tradewind Solutions Marketplace, which is a digital environment of competed video pitches accessible to customers. The office looks to align features with Marketplace objectives such as providing a platform where industry and academia can promote data, analytics, digital and AI/machine learning products and services and enabling DOD organizations to search, review, compare, negotiate and acquire the mentioned offerings. Read More
White House to tap DOD weapons testing lead for Navy acquisition role
(FCW) President Joe Biden will nominate the Defense Department’s current weapons testing leader to be the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, the White House announced Friday. If confirmed, Nickolas Guertin would be the Navy’s top acquisition executive and responsible for all of the Navy’s acquisition functions and programs. Guertin was sworn into his role as the director of operational test and evaluation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense last December after being confirmed by the Senate. Before taking on this position, Guertin did applied research on software-relient and cyber-physical systems at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute. Read More
Department of Defense Announces 2022 Class of Laboratory-University Collaboration Initiative Fellows
(Defense.gov) The DoD announced today the 2022 class of Laboratory-University Collaboration Initiative (LUCI) Fellows. The LUCI Fellowship program supports collaboration between DoD laboratory scientists and DoD-funded academics, such as recipients of the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship or Principal Investigators (PIs) of a Multi-Disciplinary University Research Initiative award. “The Department’s investments in our science and technology workforce is foundationally critical to our security, just as important as developing and transitioning emerging technologies to our warfighters. To stay ahead, we need to excel in basic research and a strong collaboration between the DoD and academia makes that possible,” said Heidi Shyu, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. “The groundbreaking research by our LUCI awardees is supporting, maintaining, and advancing our scientific and technological advantage.” Read More
Big Data in Agriculture: Land O’Lakes’ Teddy Bekele
(MIT Sloan Management Review) You might have seen Land O’Lakes’ dairy products on store shelves without giving much thought to how they got there, but that’s something CTO Teddy Bekele thinks about every day. While the farmers and agricultural retailers of Land O’Lakes work to produce the cooperative’s products, starting from the seeds used to grow animal feed, Teddy Bekele is focused on supporting agriculture’s “fourth revolution” — one that’s embracing technologies like artificial intelligence. On this episode of the Me, Myself, and AI podcast, Teddy explains how Land O’Lakes uses predictive analytics and AI to help farmers and other agricultural producers be more productive and make better decisions about the business of farming. Read More
Policies Revised on Vaccination Status, Mask Wearing, Social Distancing in Federal Workplace
(FedWeek) NEW Q: Should agencies require or request employees and potential employees to provide information about their vaccination status? To be consistent with guidance from the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force, agencies should take no action to require or request employees and potential employees to provide information about their COVID-19 vaccination status solely for purposes of implementing the vaccination requirement pursuant to E.O. 14043. Consistent with CDC’s guidance, for most Federal workplaces, COVID-19 workplace safety protocols currently do not vary based on vaccination status or otherwise depend on vaccination information, regardless of the COVID-19 Community Level for the county where the Federal workplace is located. Where this is the case, agencies should pause any efforts to require, request, or collect vaccination status information for the purposes of implementing agency COVID-19 workplace safety protocols. Read More
Why do galaxies stop making stars
(Space Daily) Six billion years ago, two galaxies were colliding, their combined forces hurling a stream of gas hundreds of thousands of light years away. Reported this week by a team including Pitt astronomers, that unusual feature provides a new possible explanation for why galaxies stop forming stars. “One of the biggest questions in astronomy is why the biggest galaxies are dead,” said David Setton, a sixth-year physics and astronomy Ph.D. student in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. “What we saw is that if you take two galaxies and smash them together, that can actually rip gas out of the galaxy itself.” Read More
ICEAA’s NewsBrief is a collection of articles relevant to the cost estimating and analysis community that is delivered weekly to current ICEAA members. To advertise in NewsBrief, contact iceaa@iceaaonline.org.