In a Thursday posting in the Federal Register, the Office of Science and Technology Policy said it is seeking information for the development of the Federal Evidence Agenda on Disability Equity. OSTP’s questions to the public pertain to informing data collection and public access, describing disparities as well as privacy, security and civil rights. 

Specific questions include the type of framework for “defining and measuring disability” or other considerations of which the Disability Data Interagency Working Group (DDIWG) within OSTP’s National Science and Technology Council Subcommittee on Equitable Data (SED) should be aware. The office also seeks to understand “what disparities faced by individuals with disabilities are not well-understood through existing federal statistics and data collection,” according to the posting. 

The notice also states: “Though previous work by the SED has identified how privacy, confidentiality and civil rights practices apply to other marginalized groups, OSTP seeks input on privacy, confidentiality and civil rights considerations that are unique to the disability community and/or are experienced differently by individuals with disabilities.”

OSTP’s RFI follows the Biden administration’s 2023 executive order on advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities through the federal government, which directed SED to “coordinate implementation of recommendations” from the Equitable Data Working Group. 

OSTP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Altin Ilirjani will work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on a project to strengthen the agency’s engineering, big data analytics and interoperable systems. He holds a Ph.D. in political science, has worked at the World Bank, and has also taught at universities including Duke, the European University Institute and the London School of Economics.

Karin Underwood joins the Executive Office of the President as part of the program, after working at health startups and social enterprises, including most recently Verano Health. In addition, material engineer and biomedical scientist Stefany Holguin joins the Department of Veterans Affairs as part of the program to work on improving services for veterans.

Entrepreneur and angel investor Jeff Lee has also been selected to join GSA, where his work will focus on securing access to the provision of online government services.

GSA each year selects a cohort of corporate and technology leaders to undertake a one-year civic service fellowship, during which senior technologists are paired with top civil servants to help drive change and innovation across government.

The Presidential Innovation Fellows program has now spanned three presidencies. It was founded by the White House Office of Science and Technology in 2012 and is housed within Technology Transformation Services at GSA.

Commenting on the appointments, GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan said: “I’m confident that this diverse group will help agencies—now including CDC and FEMA—provide even more value to the people they serve.”

A full list of the 25 new fellows can be found here.

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American intelligence isn’t what it used to be. Some of the types of secrets are changing, morphing from hidden gems cemented behind walls of government hush-hush to emerging signals washed out by open-source noise. Global threats are shifting from relatively scrappy insurgent terror cells to multidimensional great power conflict creeping into cyberspace, as just about every policy wonk in Washington says.

But as those threats change, and so does technology, artificial intelligence is poised to disrupt — but also refresh — intelligence agencies, giving them a new advantage in sifting through a mounting barrage of data to stay ahead of threats.

“The field of intelligence analysis is at an inflection point,” Joseph Gartin, CIA’s deputy associate director for learning, wrote recently in the Studies in Intelligence Journal. “Behind us, several decades of accomplishment and innovation, chastened at times by errors and shaped by cautious incrementalism. Ahead, a future—as in all knowledge industries—still coming into view but shaped by the powerful and potentially disruptive effects of artificial intelligence, big data, and machine learning.”

Changing secrets hidden in an explosion of data

Few certainties are known about the future of work — and even less about the more secretive work the U.S. government does. But what is likely is fewer analysts and more technology assisting analysts; less manual data sorting and more machine-assisted, high-level cognitive analysis; fewer secrets and more open-source information.

Caught in the changing times is a changing relationship between policymakers and the intelligence community that serves them. While public confidence in intelligence remains steady, the proliferation of open-source research tools to provide an informational advantage has chipped away at the grip U.S. agencies long have held on intelligence, Zachery Brown, a career analyst and consultant with the DOD, told Fedscoop.

“There is a growing sense that we do need to change to stay relevant in the 21^st century,” Brown said.

In the windowless classified bunkers dotting Washington, most analysts spend their days sorting and stacking reports—cables from embassies, translations from signals and accounts from debrief interviews.

But with AI, that old model is changing, namely by taking care of some of the dirty work in intelligence analysis.

“Reading information to understand its significance is manual labor,” Carmen Medina, former deputy director of intelligence at CIA, said in an interview. It’s a skill agencies like her former employer has liked to hire for, Medina said, and one that she thinks could be done better with the assistance of machines.

“[M]uch of what we have done over the years, and in many cases still do, comes down to this: read stuff, write stuff.” Gartin wrote.

In the age of a datasphere measured in the tens of zettabytes — one of which is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes — AI will be a needed tool just to even ingest a small fraction of knowable information.

“AI is going to help us to triage,” Brown said. “It is not going to allow us to make sense of it because [AI] relies on structured data and most data is dirty.”

Top CIA officials — who produce the vast majority of the President’s Daily Brief, the IC’s most valuable document — have higher hopes for AI applications in intelligence analysis. AI will give “speed advantage” in data intake and pattern recognition and “enable a high-order human cognition,” Andrew Hallman, deputy director for digital futures at CIA, told FedScoop in June.

“One of the most promising [emerging technologies] is artificial intelligence and machine learning,” he said.

The sentiment is communitywide, with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on board with the AI revolution. In January ODNI released a strategy for AIM, or “Augmenting Intelligence Using Machines.” The strategy recognizes the explosive growth of public data and a need to properly address it in classified and unclassified settings.

Investments in AI

The AIM strategy points out that adversaries like Russia and China are racing to develop their own big data and AI capabilities—a threat much different than what the U.S. has faced in its decades-long focus on counterterrorism.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the intelligence community’s own futuristic DARPA-like research arm, has a keen eye on AI. While the agency’s budget is classified, its priority for AI advantage is no secret. The agency invests and works with academic and private sector partners to develop ideas for national security, much of which has to do with AI.

“This is a team sport,” Dawn Meyerriecks, deputy director for science and technology at CIA, said during a 2019 keynote.

While much of the AI investment and development will come from the private sector, a critical value the IC has is data—lots of it.

Neal Ziring, NSA’s technical director for capabilities, quipped during a FedScoop-produced event in June that even in the 1980s when the National Security Agency began experimenting with developing AI, data was in no short supply.

ODNI stresses that the key to AI’s success in the intelligence community is sharing data across agencies, sharing the shallow talent pool and sharing capabilities as they are developed.

Already some of those capabilities are coming to life. Documents released from National Reconnaissance Office show an AI system dubbed Sentient the agency has been working on for years. Likewise, private companies have been trickling out information on multi-million dollar deals to provide AI capabilities to agencies, from login credentialing to data management.

The onus to adapt is huge for Brown and others. He said that some in the IC are racing to stay relevant. The expanse of openly available research tools has led policymakers to stray in their reliance on the IC, and staying ahead of the AI curve could repair that.

“Enough people don’t recognize how different the information revolution is from what we know today,” Brown said.

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The Quantum Computing Research Act of 2018, which Harris introduced Tuesday, would direct the DOD to form the Quantum Computing Research Consortium to oversee research and grant funding to address the development of quantum communication and quantum computing technology.

“Quantum computing is the next technological frontier that will change the world and we cannot afford to fall behind,” Harris said in a statement Thursday. “And without adequate research and coordination in quantum computing, we risk falling behind our global competition in the cyberspace race which leaves us vulnerable to attacks from our adversaries. We must act now to address the challenges we face in the development of this technology – our future depends on it.”

The incipient potential of the emerging technology has drawn a lot of attention recently, mostly because its processors work with quantum bits, or qubits, that exist as both a one and a zero at the same time, providing significantly more computing power than current technology and posing a threat to modern cryptography systems.

But while the technology is still developing and global investment is abounding, there is also a need to work out the possibilities of quantum software and other applications. The consortium aims to address those issues, as well as quantum computer development, under the umbrella of quantum information science.

The consortium would be a partnership of various defense, federal, industry and academic research entities selected by the chief of the Office of Naval Research in the eastern half of the nation and the director of the Army Research Laboratory in the western half. Those two would oversee the consortium with the assistant director for quantum information science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and other experts. The board would award grants, facilitate partnerships and assist in quantum information science research within the group.

The move follows the Senate’s commitment of $20 million for quantum research in its draft version of the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act.

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President Barack Obama Wednesday reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to the Open Government Partnership and announced several new open government initiatives in various agencies and departments during an event held at the United Nations.

“We’re going to work more closely with the health care sector and state and local law enforcement not just to improve public health and safety but to better protect the privacy and personal information of the American people,” Obama said, announcing the expansion effort.

Obama also announced enhanced transparency through upgrades to the USAspending.gov website, as well as expanded collaboration with the private sector and increased access to online education course in the U.S. for people around the world.

President Barack Obama delivers remarks during a meeting on the Open Government Partnership at the United Nations in New York, N.Y., Sept. 24, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The announcement comes amid a growing backlash for what many have characterized as an unprecedented effort to crack down on government whistle-blowers, threats to jail journalists who refuse to divulge confidential sources and new reports that the White House has demanded changes to independent press pool reports.

The new open government initiatives will call on the newly-established U.S. Digital Service to remove barriers of existing digital government platforms by remaking the citizens’ government experiences. To do this, the administration will continue to recruit top digital talent from both the private and public sectors to serve as “digital professionals” in the Digital Service, the General Services Administration’s 18F initiative and other federal agencies, according to a fact sheet released by the White House.

Through the Digital Service team and the Digital Services Playbook, the administration plans to build new digital services in the open using transparent processes “intended to better understand user needs.” And by the end of 2015, the administration intends to adopt an open source software policy to fuel innovation, lower costs and benefit the public.

Another initiative, open education, will focus on increasing awareness and engagement and the open sharing of digital learning materials, tools and practices to ensure free access of learning resources. To do this, the State Department will partner with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Education Department to hold a workshop that will focus on open education internationally.

The Labor Department will launch an online skills academy alongside the Education Department that will award $25 million in grants. Once launched, the online academy will offer open online courses of study to create “high quality, free, or low-cost pathways to degrees, certificates, and other employer-recognized credentials,” according to the White House.

Internationally, the State Department will conduct three new pilots to use these open educational resources to support learning. The results of the pilots, which will be conducted by the end of 2015, will be made publicly available.

“We’re going to do more to help people in other countries, especially students, access the incredible online educational tools and resources that we have here in the States,” Obama said.

In another move to increase transparency, the White House also announced improvements to USAspending.gov, including a website redesign. The Office of Management and Budget will also improve accessibility to federal financial data under the DATA Act.

Obama touted the work of the United States to use open data for innovation.

“More entrepreneurs are using open data to innovate and start new business,” Obama said. “More sunlight is shining on how tax dollars are spent, and more governments are partnering with civil society to find new ways to expose corruption and improve good governance.”

While working toward transparency, the administration also will share best practices for data privacy with state and local law enforcement, in addition to privacy protection for big data analysis in health, led by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Since the partnership’s inception, spearheaded by the State Department in 2011, OGP has grown from eight nations to 64. At the end of his remarks, Obama said he wasn’t sure that an international partnership focused on transparency would work, but now, three years later, the project is successful, even though more work needs to be done.

“It’s not flashy, it doesn’t generate a lot of headlines, but the work you’re doing here is a steady wave of better government and a steady wave of stronger civil societies,” Obama said. “That’s the kind of world I want to leave my children.”

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