IDSS, an airport security scanning company based in Armonk, NY, won $500,000 for its solution which combines a 3D X-ray scanner with “automated detection algorithms.”

The runner-up, One Resonance, presented a solution that uses radio frequency to search for illicit substances, for which it won $250,000.

“The influx of illicit drugs is one of the nation’s greatest threats,” William N. Bryan, DHS senior official performing the duties of undersecretary for science and technology, said in a statement. “Through this combined effort to address the trafficking of opioids, S&T, our federal partners, and the private sector have produced technology solutions that will better protect the American people from the effects of this devastating crisis.”

The opioid detection challenge launched in February as a partnership between DHS S&T, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). The stated goal was to find “novel, automated, nonintrusive, user-friendly and well-developed” ideas for tools and technologies that can detect opioids in the mail and thus disrupt their flow.

The broader goal, of course, is to combat the ongoing deadly opioid epidemic, a public health crisis that claimed around 50,000 lives in 2017.

In June, the challenge organizers chose eight finalists and gave each $100,000. The challenge culminated Thursday with an event and a live test of the technologies at the DHS Transportation Security Laboratory (TSL) in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey.

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The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) thinks computer vision technology can help deliver this kind of information — and that’s the focus of xView2, a new challenge organized by DIU with partners at NASA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and more.

Today, disaster relief efforts use satellite imagery to get a sense of disaster damage, but they do it by hand. And because these disasters can impact a large space, analysts have to contend with “huge swaths of pixel space to localize and score damage in the area of interest,” the challenge’s organizers say. “It is a slow and laborious process.”

Automating this process with the help of technology, they hope, could enable quicker recovery after fires, hurricanes and more.

The challenge will benchmark different algorithms against each other. The algorithms must be able to score buildings in a post-disaster image on a scale of one to four — one meaning no building damage and four meaning that the building is completely destroyed.

xView2 is, as the name suggests, the second xView challenge. The first, which kicked off in March 2018, focused on computer vision object detection. Now, organizers are taking the challenge a step further.

Submissions to xView2 are due by Nov. 22 and DIU plans to announce winners in December.

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The agency posted a tweet with a link to a request for information seeking — and this is where things start to get interesting — “underground urban tunnels and facilities that may be available to support research and experimentation associated with ongoing and future research initiatives.”

“The ideal space would be a human-made underground environment spanning several city blocks w/ complex layout & multiple stories, including atriums, tunnels & stairwells,” a second tweet read. “Spaces that are currently closed off from pedestrians or can be temporarily used for testing are of interest.”

Denizens of Twitter had thoughts, questions and, naturally, conspiracy theories. The tweet, as of this article’s publication, received over 700 retweets and 1,300 likes, which, judging by the engagement on the agency’s other recent tweets, is a lot for DARPA.

DARPA’s very good social media manager encouraged the interaction, too.

“We are definitely not looking for new places to keep all the Demogorgons,” one Twitter user tweeted at the agency, referring to the creatures from the Stranger Things series. “Please. Demogorgons are such a Department of Energy thing,” the agency’s account responded.

So what’s the deal with DARPA and the underground tunnels?

The RFI elaborates that the agency is interested in testing “state-of-the-art in innovative technologies” that can “map, navigate, and search unknown complex subterranean environments to locate objects of interest.” These technologies are relevant for “global security and disaster-related search and rescue missions,” the RFI further states.

Turns out, this is part of the agency’s ongoing Subterranean or “SubT” Challenge, which launched in September 2018 and is intended to wrap up in August 2021. Earlier this month, 11 teams competed in the “tunnel circuit” component of the challenge. Up next is the “urban circuit,” scheduled for February 2020.

“As teams prepare for the SubT Challenge Urban Circuit, the program recognizes it can be difficult for them to find locations suitable to test their systems and sensors,” a DARPA spokesperson told FedScoop in an email. “DARPA issued this RFI in part to help identify potential representative environments where teams may be able to test in advance of the upcoming event.”

If you’ve got a university-owned or commercially managed urban underground tunnel, responses to the RFI are due Aug. 30.

No Demogorgons. Yet.

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The challenge — dubbed the Artificial Intelligence Applications to Autonomous Cybersecurity Challenge (AI ATAC) — holds a $100,000 first place and $50,000 second place awards. It is open to all citizens and permanent residents, be they defense contractors, researchers, students or just technology-curious private citizens.

The contest is sponsored by Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) and Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence (PEO C4I). It’s a way to lower barriers for the private industry to work with the military. Contracting requires fine-tuned knowledge on the process and cybersecurity concerns, but with a contest, more people can participate than just the defense industrial base. The contest winnings pale in comparison to some of the multimillion- or billion-dollar contracts the military awards for cybersecurity.

“We are approaching innovation with disciplined urgency,” NAVWAR Commander Rear Adm. Christian Becker said. “This prize challenge presents a unique opportunity to cast a wider net to get the best technology to the fleet faster.”

The period for submission is open through Sept. 30 and winners will be announced in December. Entrants need to submit both an endpoint security solution and white paper.

“We believe by sponsoring AI ATAC we can quickly get new ideas about how we can
incorporate AI and ML into our cybersecurity tool bag,” John Armantrout, a deputy program manager at PEO C4I, said.

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The General Services Administration and the White House Office of Management and Budget announced Thursday that they have teamed up to launch a prize competition around this initiative. The challenge, posted to governmentwide competition platform Challenge.gov, invites problem solvers from the public, from academia, and from industry to “demonstrate the potential of the GEAR Center.”

Solvers are asked to lay out how the GEAR Center would approach one or more major challenges that government faces, as identified in the President’s Management Agenda. The idea is that, through the competition, the government will get a sense for the “feasibility” of the GEAR Center model before it invests in the concept further.

“Today’s digital economy has transformed how citizens interact with government. By leveraging technology and innovation, the GEAR Center will ensure our government connects to cutting-edge thinking and real-world solutions,” OMB’s Deputy Director for Management Margaret Weichert said in a statement. “This Administration is improving the federal government’s ability to provide better citizen-centered services better positioned to address new and complex challenges.”

The concept for the GEAR Center as a research entity focused on helping private companies develop new ideas in the hopes of improving government efficiency has been floating around in the Trump administration since summer 2018.

“If someone has got as great and innovative idea and they are a relatively small company, it’s pretty hard to approach the federal government to get a pilot going,” Weichert said during a conference call in August 2018. “We have prohibitions in our procurement policy that make it difficult for us to take free samples. All of those are things that we feel that we need the market to help us figure out: What’s the right way to approach this?”

In December, Weichert said she anticipated that the government would move to set up the GEAR Center in 2019.

Now, OMB and GSA are sending up the first trial balloons, and there is a total of $900,000 in cash prizes attached. Three winning teams with projects that are innovative, relevant and sustainable will win $300,000 each. Initial concept papers are due May 24. Challenge organizers anticipate that they will announce the winners on Aug. 1.

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The winners, which described of tech-enabled solutions to help reskill and upskill the federal workforce, came from a pool of 60 white papers. The challenge envisions technology that uses artificial intelligence and “knows your skills, strengths and preferences; recommends possible future careers; and suggests growth paths.”

The winning ideas, which each received a $5,000 prize, are:

• Needed: A GPS for Learning and Work
• E-TAG: Employee Training and Growth through Electronic Games
• My Career Compass
• ACCESS: An Integrated Service Platform for Preparing Future Workforce
• The Career CHARTING App

These ideas came from teams of academics, private companies and nonprofits. They are not final products by any means but essentially blueprints that others can build upon in phase two of the challenge.

NSF CIO Dorothy Aronson explained that Career Compass started “with our interest in trying to figure out how we could use artificial intelligence to improve our business processes here at NSF,” which then led to “concern about the workforce.”

“If we went ahead and modernized our business processes, what would the impact be on the workforce?” she told FedScoop. “And we amplified that to ask if this kind of problem exists here it probably exists elsewhere, and we were just wondering, as the nature of work changes and becomes more automated, what are people going to do?”

It’s not an uncommon concern to have in the federal government — and it’s one the White House has paid particular interest to in recent years and placed at the heart of the President’s Management Agenda. It aligns with the administration’s cross-agency priority goal of “developing a workforce for the 21st century.” This challenge’s cross-sector collaboration also serves as a model for the work the administration’s GEAR Center will do one finalized, Aronson said.

Now, in the second phase of the challenge, NSF is calling for teams to submit working prototypes based on the five ideas from phase one. Teams do not need to have participated in the first phase to submit prototypes in phase two. One winner will be selected for a prize of $75,000.

Aronson admitted that it’s an ambitious challenge. Ultimately, though, she said, the point is to “stimulate a conversation, let people know that this was the kind of tool we believed would be essential to enabling people to create their own destinies.”

“A large part of this is the concept that individuals should be able to choose their own future paths and that in the future, the type of work people will do will change frequently throughout their lives,” she said. “So through this tool, we’re hoping to bring to the marketplace’s attention that there’s a genuine desire on the part of the federal government starting with NSF and maybe beyond the federal government to use tools like this to enable the future of work.”

At the end of the challenge, NSF explains on the competition page, it hopes “to have created a ‘market’ for technology solutions that will help employees plot a path for changing careers or identify how to move forward in their current career path, while also facilitating continuous reskilling.”

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CMS launched the Artificial Intelligence Health Outcomes Challenge in partnership with the American Academy of Family Physicians and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation earlier this week.

The challenge, which CMS explicitly ties to President Trump’s recent executive order on AI, “is an opportunity for innovators to demonstrate how artificial intelligence tools – such as deep learning and neural networks – can be used to predict unplanned hospital and skilled nursing facility admissions and adverse events,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a statement. “Adverse events” are defined as unintended situations where care results in further injury or illness — like a hospital-acquired infection. The challenge will “prioritize” explainable AI solutions, per its website and marketing materials.

“The power of artificial intelligence will truly be unleashed when providers understand and trust the data and predictions,” Verma said.

The contest will run in three stages — interested participants have until June 18 to submit an initial application. From there, 20 participants will be invited into Stage 1, where the actual work of testing a proposed solution on medicare data begins. Five Stage 1 winners will go to Stage 2, where further testing will take place. The final grand prize winner will be eligible for a prize of up to $1 million.

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So the agency is going back to the drawing board.

“Last year this prize challenge showed that this is an active area of research, but that the problem is still unsolved,” IARPA Program Manager Lars Ericson said in a statement. “This second iteration aims to further engage the community to advance techniques needed to aid analysts in processing and understanding the large amounts of imagery they receive on a daily basis.”

Once again, IARPA is putting out a call for researchers from academia and industry to deliver algorithms that can detect objects in video footage collected by drones and algorithms that can classify those objects once detected. There is $50,000 in prizes attached to the challenge.

In keeping with last year’s edition, the challenge is being organized and run by the University of Notre Dame. Would-be participants have until April 1 to register, and organizers plan to announce winners in May.

Last year’s challenge solicited image enhancements to aid analysts looking through the images by hand and algorithms to improve automatic object recognition. Teams from Honeywell’s Advanced Connected Sustainability Technologies group won both of these categories.

This isn’t IARPA’s only interest in exploring ways to deal with surveillance video in an efficient manner. Together with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the agency launched a challenge to “encourage the development of robust automatic activity detection algorithms for a multi-camera streaming video environment” in November 2018.

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The Department of Energy is seeking ideas for such technologies through a $1 million challenge posted to Challenge.gov. The agency wants concepts for new technologies that could be used by the energy sector to improve the efficiency, safety and cybersecurity of the country’s electricity system.

“The U.S. electricity sector is facing unprecedented changes,” a challenge description reads. “Increasingly sophisticated cyber and physical technologies, evolving customer and societal expectations, and electric industry restructuring have created a range of challenges and opportunities in how the electricity system is managed and operated today.”

The energy industry is already working to contend with these challenges, but DOE wants to add some fuel to the fire.

“The Department of Energy (DOE) seeks to build off of the electricity sector’s current transformation efforts and drive fundamental shifts in how the electricity system is managed and operated in the future.”

The challenge will be run using two “tiers” — tier one submissions are more complex and should require more work, but are also eligible for bigger prizes. Challenge submissions should describe, in a “written narrative” of between eight and 15 pages (depending on the tier), how a particular technology or solution can be used to make the U.S. energy grid more secure, safe, efficient or reliable. The paper should describe what is currently being used, what should be changed and how that change can benefit stakeholders.

Would-be competitors have until April 26 to register, and until April 30 to send in a submission.

The impacts of a cyberattack on the power grid is an increasingly hot topic (and fear). In November, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) ran a simulation of a cyberattack on a mock power grid.

The exercise served as “an opportunity for these utilities to get familiar with what a cyberattack would look like before they see one in the real world,” DARPA program manager Walter Weiss told reporters at the time.

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“What new or evolved technology will have the greatest impact, either as a challenge or as an opportunity, for [Special Operations Forces] in 2029?” An essay prompt for a Special Operations Command ideation challenge reads. “We want to know how you see the world in 2029 and the critical impacts it might pose for SOF.”

SOCOM wants a three to five pages on the topic. But unlike most school essay contests, this one comes with the promise of a cash prize. Writers can detail the evolution of an existing technology, or talk about how a yet-to-be-created one will rock the world, but the essay should be full of original ideas. “You can use others as references, but the bulk should be your own thoughts,” the challenge description reads.

Essays will be evaluated based on the novelty, impact and feasibility of the technology described. Once the responses have been ranked, the top five to 10 writers will be invited to join an “Innovation Foundry” design thinking event at the Capital Factory in Austin, during which participants will work with SOF Operators to “develop potential technological concepts to face a SOF SR mission, based off a fictional Future Operating Environment.”

Top essay writers are eligible for a prize of $1,000 — event participants will get $1,500 more. Essays are due March 3.

The Army Futures Command recently opened a Center for Defense Innovation at the Capital Factory in Austin — a new space for “collaboration and serendipity” between the Army, the Air Force’s AFWERX, the Defense Innovation Unit, The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and a team of Booz Allen Hamilton contractors.

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