The chatbot is aimed at making the process of looking for NSF grants easier, Dorothy Aronson, the agency’s chief AI officer told FedScoop. It will provide information about grants based on inputs from users about who they are and their research and can answer questions about the process, as it was trained using NSF’s proposal guide, Aronson said.

Aside from testing the chatbot itself, the process has also been a test of sorts for the agency, according to Aronson. 

“The most important thing about this exercise that we’re running is that it’s not only to create the chatbot; I think that’s a nice side effect,” Aronson said. “From my perspective, it’s to experience what it’s like to do a rapid implementation … of an AI capability.”

Aronson said they’re hoping to engage the NSF community in a conversation about responsible AI, how they can do that well at the agency, and get people thinking about the future.

The pilot comes as agencies across the government are experimenting with AI. Already the government has disclosed at least 700 use cases, and chatbots appear to be a popular use of the technology, with agencies like the Department of State and Centers and Disease Control and Prevention recently noting they’re using such tools. 

Although the chatbot is NSF’s first pilot of a commercial platform and first for a public-facing tool, it’s not the first AI use for the agency. NSF lists several use cases on its public inventory, and Aronson said the agency has developed smaller AI solutions before, such as a tool that suggests reviewers for people who work with NSF on research. 

The first three months of the pilot are wrapping up, marking the end of the development phase, according to an NSF spokesperson. Now, the agency is “beginning to widely demonstrate the pilot, gather feedback, and further train and hone the model.” NSF is working with Spatial Front, Inc., a small business contractor, on the chatbot. 

The chatbot will be particularly useful to people outside larger universities, which typically have offices dedicated to things like NSF grants, according to Aronson, who is also the chief data officer and has served as the CIO of the agency.

“This is most important to smaller universities or underrepresented communities who do not have access to large offices within their university that can help facilitate that work,” she said. 

Creating the tool has also been different from the norm for IT solutions, which start with what the end result will look like, Aronson said. With AI, the component is educated to give the desired answers and the interface comes after. “It’s a completely different way of working,” she said.

Aronson said the agency has put the first skin — or appearance — on the chatbot and shopped it out to customers to get feedback. Now, NSF is thinking about two directions: how to improve the chatbot further and what the next AI pilot will be, she said.

Going forward, Aronson said the agency plans to do a few pilots to find additional capabilities of the technology. “In the next one, we know we want to do something more complicated, ultimately, and we’ve broken that more complicated longer-term objective into smaller bits,” Aronson said. 

She also noted that while funding is tight this year, NSF is being “scrappy” about ways to move forward, and using the pilots to help figure out what to ask for in fiscal year 2026 so it has a “legitimate funding bucket for AI.” 

Additionally, Aronson said she’s working with the Federal CIO and CIOs at other agencies to explore the idea of “a journey map of data and AI and IT initiatives that would allow all of the federal agencies better insight into what other people are doing.” 

That journey map would allow agencies to get a picture of what others in the federal government are working on and learn about other solutions they could leverage, she said. An agency, for example, could use the map to see if another agency is developing a testbed for AI, identify extra compute power available elsewhere, or review an existing generative AI policy. 

If agencies could see “where the expertise was across the federal government, we could leverage each other’s expertise instead of each of us evolving to have that level of knowledge on our own,” Aronson said.

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Terry Carpenter will take over the key role of CIO and CTO for the NSF, marking the establishment of a new independent and consolidated Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO). 

Dorothy Aronson is NSF’s new chief data officer and assistant CIO for artificial intelligence, while Dan Hofherr is the new chief information security officer and assistant CIO for operations, and Teresa Guillot is assistant CIO for enterprise services. 

“I am confident that the reorganization of our IT functions will propel NSF to new heights of innovation and efficiency,” NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said in a statement. “This strategic initiative reflects our solid commitment to delivering unparalleled IT services and solutions across the agency.” 

The IT revitalization within NSF is meant to support the mission of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which provides roughly $52.7 billion to explicitly drive semiconductor research, development, manufacturing, and workforce development in the U.S. 

Of that total, $39 billion is included for manufacturing incentives and $13.2 billion is for R&D and workforce development, according to the White House.

The establishment of the new OCIO office signifies NSF’s aim to adapt to evolving industry best practices and cutting-edge technologies using new tools, resources and expertise.

It also supports NSF’s push to further President Joe Biden’s priorities for federal agencies to use AI responsibly and protect information through cybersecurity practices. 

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Terry Carpenter, the senior adviser to the director at NSF, said in a Tuesday interview that the importance of the role is why the agency felt Aronson — who as the chief data officer “has already been leaning into these areas — is going to continue with that role as the chief AI officer role for the agency.”

Under President Joe Biden’s AI order (EO 14110), many larger agencies in government are required to name a chief AI officer within 60 days of the Office of Management and Budget’s corresponding guidance being finalized. According to the order, that official is responsible for coordinating an agency’s uses of AI, promoting AI innovation, and managing risks, among other things.

While several agencies had a chief AI officer before the order — such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security — others are just beginning to publicly disclose an official or think about their own structures. In response to FedScoop inquiries to large agencies, the General Services Administration disclosed its CAIO is Zach Whitman and the Department of Education said its official is Vijay Sharma.

Agencies were already required to have a responsible AI official under a previous Trump-era AI executive order (EO 13960). But under the new draft OMB guidance, the responsibilities of that role would also be carried out by the chief AI officers “in addition to the other roles and responsibilities outlined in the draft OMB guidance,” an OMB spokesperson said in an email.

Aronson, who FedScoop also interviewed Tuesday, said she’s been involved in NSF’s artificial intelligence work as its top data official for some time, participating in groups such as the federal government’s responsible AI officials organization, in addition to the Federal CDO and CIO Councils.

“My focus has been the past couple of years on improving the quality of NSF’s data and our ability to leverage data,” Aronson said in an interview Tuesday. “Data fuels AI.”

Naming Aronson, who has also served as the agency’s CIO, to the new role comes as NSF is still finalizing the reporting structure and relationship between the technology roles at the agency, according to Carpenter. 

For his part, Carpenter, who joined the agency in July after roughly 14 years at the Department of Defense, said he’s focusing on how “we centralize IT function as we prepare for some of the things” in the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act in addition to how to scale the agency’s mission. 

Aronson said that Avital Percher, who reports to her, is currently the responsible AI official. When asked if NSF would keep both roles, Carpenter said the two roles “work in concert very well,” noting that one looks at the bigger picture and the other focuses on using AI responsibility and ethics.

Ultimately, Carpenter said to expect things like clarifications from agencies, including NSF, as a result of the executive order going forward.

“I think you’re going to see more policy clarifications coming out from us and others because of this. We’ve been working on it for a while,” Carpenter said, adding that the order is helping create a “common language” for artificial intelligence so things are interpreted correctly.

Editor’s note, 11/22/23 at 10:30 a.m.: This piece was updated with additional information from FedScoop’s interview with NSF officials.

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The Foundation’s Chief Information Officer, Dorothy Aronson, said Wednesday that the independent agency, which supports and funds major science and engineering research across universities and institutions in the U.S., has started considering the role ChatGPT and other such AI tools could play within the agency.

“We are building a set of use cases for our appropriate use of ChatGPT so that we can have pros and cons in our guardrails,” Aronson said during FedScoop’s ITModTalks on Wednesday.

“So the tool is amazing. But right now, for example, we’re very careful about the way we ask questions, because we don’t want to release privileged information into the wild without really understanding where it’s going,” she added.

Major AI developer OpenAI in November released its ChatGPT tool, allowing users to interact with an artificial intelligence chatbot which has astounded users, writing short college essays, cover letters, unique poetry, and a weirdly passable Seinfeld scene in which Jerry needs to learn the bubble sort algorithm.

OpenAI yesterday released a powerful new image- and text-understanding AI model, GPT-4, which the company calls “the latest milestone in its effort in scaling up deep learning.”

ChatGPT does not represent a revolution in machine learning as such but is significant in regards to how users interact with it. Previous versions of OpenAI’s large language models require users to prompt the model with an input. ChatGPT, which relies on a tuned version of GPT-3.5, OpenAI’s flagship large language model, makes it far easier to interact with that model by making it possible to carry a fluid conversation with a highly trained AI. 

The National Science Foundation is excited about ChatGPT’s potential use within the agency, Aronson said, but highlighted that federal employees and citizens who use it for government services need to be careful about what information they feed highly sophisticated AI tools.

“So our main concerns about ChatGPT are what data you provide it in questions. And in general, we would prefer people be conservative in their use of it, so we’ve got a few guardrails set up like you can’t determine an NSF grant award winner using chat GPT,” Aronson said.  

Prior to her time at NSF, Aronson served as the Director for the Office of Management Operations for the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) which is the agency where the internet and AI first made major breakthroughs.

Aronson was speaking at ITModTalks, which was hosted in Washington D.C. by FedScoop.

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The result could be a hybrid workforce more evenly split between in-person and remote employees than it has been in the past, federal IT officials told FedScoop.

“I expect after COVID that more people will appreciate working remotely and a higher portion of our workforce may want to work remotely,” National Science Foundation CIO Dorothy Aronson told FedScoop. “I would anticipate that we’ll need to look very closely at those hybrid meetings, where some people are in the office and some people are at home, to even out that interaction.”

Lessons from this prolonged period of telework that began last March — both technological and social — will be important to implement in the new normal.

“I believe that a lot of the things that we’ve learned through the COVID pandemic, once we’re on the other side of it, we’re going to continue to embrace more telework, more virtual, better use of technology in order to engage,” Stacy Cummings, the principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition at the Department of Defense, said during a Jan. 13 panel organized by AFFIRM. Cummings has taken over as the Pentagon’s acquisition lead in an acting capacity under the Biden administration until that role is filled.

An October 2020 survey of 300 federal government executives from the Science Applications International Corporation found that 82% of respondents expected to telework at least three days per week after the pandemic.

Of course, such a change would require agency leaders and the new administration to embrace the new trend as well. Prior to the pandemic, the most recent federal data showed 42% of employees across government were eligible to telework, and just half of those actually did. And most often, they teleworked on a situational basis. When they did telework regularly, roughly a third of those eligible did so three or more days a week.

The NSF is one agency that already had robust telework and hybrid work policies set up prior to the pandemic— a result of a 2017 headquarters move that forced continuity of operations planning in case equipment and technology got lost in transport.

One-third of the organization had already been working remotely at least one day a week before the pandemic, Aronson said. Not only did this help the organization switch to complete telework with little fuss, but it gave leaders a glimpse into the potential challenges of a hybrid workplace.

“You want the conversation to be balanced,” she said. “You become a moderator of the meeting, and you have to make sure that you’ve heard the voice of everyone in the engagement.”

To make it work, employees in both the conference room and the living room need to communicate in “an optimal way that is fair and inclusive.” She said that just as workers figured out equitable communication in an all-virtual space this past spring, they will have to write and then re-write the rules of engagement for hybrid meetings.

“What happens in the future if someone wants to come in through [Microsoft] Teams and someone else wants to come in through Zoom and you have three people in the room? How do you work that scenario? Process is a very important part of how we work,” she said.

It is a challenge that leaders across the federal government are anticipating.

“One of the things we have to prepare for is the democratization of access,” Vaughn Noga, the chief information officer at the Environmental Protection Agency, told FedScoop. “One of the things that we’re really focused on is making sure that we don’t have a disparity of experience.”

That disparity, however, may be inevitable. During that same Jan. 13 AFFIRM panel, Beth Anne Killoran, deputy chief information officer for the General Services Administration, quipped that it will take much more than additional collaboration tools to put everyone on an even playing field.

“You’re going to have to move to virtual reality,” she said. “The only way you’re really going to have the same experience is if you all have a virtual reality experience so it’s like everybody is in the same space doing the same types of things.”

Obviously, federal agencies are not yet equipped to deploy that kind of technology. For now, they are relying on software like Zoom, WebEx, Teams, Google’s G-Suite, Slack and others to connect the workplace and working to permanently integrating them into workflows.

“We view 2021 as a year of opportunity for Zoom because as our government customers are evolving in line with this new normal, we’re going to be a key partner for them as they modernize their information technology and in turn increase productivity, lower costs and strengthen security for their organization and workforce,” Matt Mandrgoc, Zoom’s head of U.S. governments, told FedScoop. Zoom’s simplicity and ease of use, he said, are key factors in making remote and hybrid work functional.

Noga said the EPA is working on implementing collaboration technologies so that everyone has the same experience, whether working from home or not. The goal is to seamlessly integrate teleworking employees into how meetings are executed. That means updating videoconferencing equipment, ensuring strong network bandwidth and continuing the technological education that the pandemic accelerated.

“I think that’s one of the largest parts. It’s not always the IT or the technology. It’s how you train and support folks who may not be IT folks to use this technology,” he said. “We spent a lot of time on training to make sure people understand on their terms.”

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Agencies have been able to continue operations without major disruptions in large part because of the progress they made on IT modernization well before 2020’s global health crisis, several CIOs told FedScoop.

“We’ve been making a lot of investments across all the agencies,” Federal CIO Suzette Kent told FedScoop of recent federal IT modernization efforts — things like the adoption of cloud services, collaboration tools, digitized forms and more. “What the performance we’re seeing shows is that many of those investments are paying off.”

The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has been ramping up its telework-readiness over the past decade, CIO Vaughn Noga said.

“We’ve been preparing the workforce for a long time for telework. I joined the agency in 2008,” Noga said. “And over the last 12 years, we’ve been moving folks from desktops to laptops. So a good portion — 95% — of our computers are laptops.”

Preparations such as these “have put us in a position where we haven’t seen the significant IT [shifts] across the board” during the pandemic, he said. “But as this progresses, one of the things that we’re looking at is what additional resources do we need.”

“Our job is to make sure the EPA and the employees EPA can do their jobs. That’s our single focus,” Noga said.

For the last three years, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been locked-in on its IT modernization efforts. It has paid great dividends during the move to full-scale telework, CIO David Nelson told FedScoop.

“We went through just last year and finished up a complete refresh of all of our laptops. So everybody has new laptops with Windows 10,” Nelson said.  “Two years ago, we moved up into the cloud with Office 365 and the whole set of collaborative tools. We did a voice over IP upgrade to all of our [telecom] equipment. So really we were in a pretty good place. All that planning was around both modernizing and trying to get the agency ready to really do continuity of operations which we can do operating things up in the cloud or virtually much better than it ever has before.”

Because of this, Nelson said, “we’ve been able to handle all the traffic. We pretty much have everybody in the agency working remotely. And our capacity and network are able to handle it easily.”

Processes that the average American citizen may take for granted — like moving forms to digital and enabling e-signatures — have made a world of difference in limiting personal contact during the pandemic.

To be clear, the situation hasn’t been perfect, and there have been bumps in the road for some agencies. But if some of these prior modernization efforts hadn’t happened, “we would be in a very different place,” Kent said.  “We would be extremely limited, and in a pandemic situation, we would be putting people potentially in situations where person-to-person contact is critical for continuity … the investments in the citizen-facing services are helping continue continuity — telehealth, interviews on the phone, and more.”

“We were already focused on mission-critical things, but we would have been having a much more narrow conversation if we weren’t in a place to support delivery of citizen services and business exchange across the federal government in a virtual manner,” Kent said. “Modernization has paid off in this situation.”

IT modernization, accelerated

Some CIOs are using the pandemic — and, in some cases, its injection of emergency funding — as an opportunity to accelerate modernization that will stick around long after federal workers return to their desks around the nation.

“We accelerated a couple of modernization initiatives that were already underway — deployment of an electronic document routing/signature system and a new virtual collaboration tool — to enhance our distributed operating model,” National Science Foundation CIO Dorothy Aronson told FedScoop. She emphasized that the new distributed style of work “gave us an opportunity to move to a true digital signature in place of the print, sign, scan process” NSF had been using.

Even in the massive IT operating environment that is the Department of Defense, agency CIOs have been nimble in scaling up critical services in days rather than weeks and months. As each of the military services experienced triple-digit surges in teleworking, DOD CIO Dana Deasy led the department to boost its network capacity and launch the Commercial Virtual Remote (CVR) Environment, a software-as-a-service platform based on Microsoft’s Teams collaboration tool.

Deasy said the telework capabilities the DOD has developed in the past month “will be sustained at the end of COVID-19.”

The Air Force specifically has used the crisis as an opportunity to move more quickly in some areas to scale up cloud usage and supply airmen with the devices and applications they need.

“So the COVID-19 crisis, if we do this right, it allows us to address some of the digital modernization needs, the increase in mobility and cloud utilization and cybersecurity — they very much align with what we’ve already put in place. It’s just starting to accelerate,” said Bill Marion, the outgoing deputy CIO of the Air Force.

In fiscal 2020, the Army Corps of Engineers already had planned a major effort to “untether the end-user from their desktop,” CIO Dovarius Peoples said. The corps kicked off that work with fortuitous timing just as the coronavirus was beginning to spread across the globe.

The pandemic “expedited a lot of our momentum,” Peoples said. “So we are now trying to expand the digital footprint within the corps … really empowering the end-user to be able to access a lot of the mission-critical applications. …We are geographically dispersed, and having those users out in the field, being able to access their applications, being able to stand up some of the COVID-19 efforts for some of the assisted living facilities and those types of things, we’re definitely enhancing how we do business.”

Change management

Prior to the pandemic, some agencies had telework policies in place for an eligible portion of their workforces. But few if any were ready for something of this scale, leaving CIOs in late March scrambling to get personnel ready to work remotely for the foreseeable future. And though many agencies may have had the tech in place to support such a shift, the change management of it all took some extra finesse to make personnel feel comfortable.

A week before the federal government moved to mass telework to combat the spread of the coronavirus, the NRC set up a sort of IT help desk in the lobby of its Rockville, Maryland, headquarters. Nelson and his team made themselves available to answer any questions, train people on new collaboration tools and make sure NRC staff were comfortable with the unprecedented plunge into telework they were about to take.

“We focused completely on making sure any of the agency’s employees that weren’t familiar with using the new capabilities had an opportunity to come by,” Nelson said. “We would set them down and actually install things on their laptops. If they weren’t installed, things like a [virtual private network], we walk them through how they work and how to use it.”

Then, the Friday before the workforce would be told to work remotely until further notice, Nelson and his team asked NRC personnel to voluntarily telework to not only stress-test the VPN and network capacity, but also to expose any challenges that employees might face.

Fortunately, Nelson said, NRC already had the tools in place. “We just had to help people really understand how they could be used. And it’s amazing when you’re forced to use these how quickly people start to understand how to use them very efficiently. It’s just that whole change management thing — when you offer the tools, and people don’t have to use them, your adoption just kind of moves along not at a very fast pace. But when you’re just thrust into that kind of situation, people have adapted very well.”

EPA accelerated its adoption of Microsoft Teams when the pandemic hit. “We’ve engaged the workforce, and they’ve embraced working with us on trying out these new technologies,” Noga said. “And I think they recognize the situation may not be perfect and there may be lessons learned. But I would say, certainly on the IT community, they’ve embraced working with us on rolling out to new technologies.”

Before this, the historical reference point for surge capacity and shifting to telework was a severe snowstorm in the D.C. metro area, Kent said, with a few days of telework max. The comparison just isn’t close. But “now that somebody’s [teleworked], and they’ve done it every day for 30 days, it’s not scary anymore,” she said.

This crisis, Kent said, has “shown people that we can successfully work differently.”

“The federal agencies are able to stay connected to the workforce, the workforce is able to be responsive and support mission continuity,” she said. “Those are great outcomes… It’ll make both our business people inside government more comfortable with those processes. And it will demonstrate to citizens that they can still have a fulfilling, accurate, fair experience electronically.”

Ready for a different kind of normalcy

The Federal CIO Council now meets daily — compared to its regular monthly cadence — as agencies are saturated with new IT guidance on a daily basis during this novel time, Kent told FedScoop.

“We have a constant inbox and a constant dialogue going back and forth,” she said. “We’ve had guidance come out almost every single day.”

That sort of crisis communication won’t last forever. The White House issued guidance this week for how agencies should begin to shift back to working in the office. Things will at some point return to some state of normalcy; CIOs, too, will turn back to larger modernization projects they had to put aside to focus on IT services needed to support mission continuity during the pandemic.

But still, an air of uncertainty remains for what CIOs have in the days ahead of them — and how this period of time will come with lessons learned that may forever change federal technology operations.

“I think we’re over a big hump,” Kent said. “But we are going to have to look at what does business continuity look like, continue to tweak it based on the duration and the sets of activities, and however we might need to move people for activities.”

NSF’s Aronson said: “As time goes on, it is likely our needs will change, and we will have to pay attention to our next new requirement and remain agile and responsive.”

In some cases, the pandemic has obviated the IT areas that need the most support. The importance of continuity-of-operations IT support systems, telework and capacity testing has never been more apparent.

“I learned just how important it is,” Nelson said. “Our agency did take that pretty serious even before this particular event. And it’s something we’ve always done, but I can’t imagine what it’s been like for some of the private sector companies that don’t put that kind of rigor into it.”

It also showed IT officials the great partners they have in the private sector.

Based on the telework test NRC performed, “we were able to quickly put in some orders with our carriers to up our bandwidth,” Nelson said. “I’m telling you all the carriers were doing a fantastic job and they still are helping the agencies in that way. They were able to move quickly and help us put a lot more bandwidth in place.”

Kent echoed that praise: “One of the things I’ve been really happy about is that vendor partners have been incredibly responsive. They’ve been flexible. And they worked with us on solutions, not just coming to the table with, ‘Hey, here’s this thing.’”

CIOs often tend to describe modernization as a continual evolution rather than an end state. And in Kent’s case, she acknowledges that “there are still things where we need more digital capabilities. There are still opportunities to create a more resilient workforce. And those are the investments we need to continue with.”

“It took an event of forced acceptance to get comfortable” with working in this digitally-dependent manner, Kent said. “And, I only hope that we will knock out all the bad things in this situation as quickly as possible, but we’ll also take some of the learnings, the resiliency and the open eyes to what can be done in a digital and virtual environment and save those and use them as a spring for the future.”

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For NSF CIO Dorothy Aronson, the experiment — which involves giving documents the equivalent of “digital fingerprints” — represents more than just finding a new way to solve an old problem. It also offers a glimpse of how the expertise of data scientists, together with modernized technologies, can potentially accelerate the government’s efforts in identifying and funding innovative ideas.

“I’m fantasizing here, but if you’re a citizen, you could send any proposal for innovation to a single [government] location and it would be automatically distributed, or suggestions would be made, to various federal organizations,” she said. “We’re just starting off with little experiments. But there’s a lot of benefits that could come from this.”

That vision may seem like a pipe dream for the thousands of scientists, engineers, academic institutions and entrepreneurs who apply each year to 26 federal grant-making agencies and more than 1,000 programs nationally. But for NSF, which accounts for roughly 20% of federal support to academic institutions for basic research, the technology foundation to build on that vision is now largely in place, according to Aronson.

Capitalizing on modernized IT   

The challenge facing NSF and other grant-making agencies — including the National Institutes of Health, which is working with NSF on the project — is how to share and compare proposals without exposing private information and potentially valuable ideas to the public.

NSF CIO Dorothy Aronson

“We often get multiple ideas that have a very high degree of similarity and we don’t want to fund that same idea multiple times,” explained Aronson. “So we have to work hard to figure out where there’s duplication.”

Streamlining the workload of program officers and automating as much of the proposal process as possible is “a perennial objective,” said Aronson. “This is not a new problem. It’s just one that we didn’t have the opportunity to solve before.”

What has changed, she said, is a combination of newer technology capabilities and “the availability of people who know the tools used by data scientists in order to create and apply the concepts [we needed] to compare the proposals.”

NSF already had the technology in place to convert PDF and other types of documents into machine-readable formats. And about five years ago, it had begun investing in an enterprise data warehouse, which provides greater flexibility than traditional transactional database systems.

“That was a very important transition for us because it put the data more closely into the hands of the customers,” said Aronson. “They didn’t have to know tools like SQL, for example, to derive the information they needed. And that allowed us to go to things like dashboards for executives.”

Since then, NSF also began gradually moving much of its IT operations, including the enterprise data warehouse, into a cloud environment. That’s helped give NSF the ability over the past two years to capitalize, for instance, on language processing capabilities and artificial intelligence, according to Aronson.

All of those technology upgrades, however, weren’t enough to solve a critical problem: How to simultaneously mask the content of proposals, for privacy protection, and still give program officers a form of visibility into how one grant proposal was similar or different from thousands of others.

What NSF ultimately needed, explained Chezian Sivagnanam, NSF’s chief enterprise architect, was a way to create a mathematical abstraction, or “fingerprint,” for each proposal that could be compared to other documents, each of which typically runs 15 pages in length and includes a variety of images. However, that fingerprinting process also has to work in a way that can’t be reversed engineered, in order to prevent someone from exposing the underlying content.

Data scientists to the rescue

Aronson said the big “breakthrough for us” occurred when NSF began “bringing people into our organization who understood how to apply data science principles and look at problems through the lens of a data scientist. It opened a wider world to us because of the knowledge base of what other data scientists had already created.”

That led to discussions with a number of data science experts and a variety of testing sprints, according to Sivagnanam. “Luckily, we found an algorithm being used within NIH, called Word2Vec, that basically converts document content into numbers. It then applies mathematical statistics on top of these numbers and looks for cosine similarities to relate one document with another,” he explained.

There was just one more catch, he said. “Once we converted the documents, we needed to put the results in a common infrastructure.” That’s where the capabilities of a blockchain and a distributed ledger entered the picture.

“The idea is to score each proposal [for similarities] then build this ledger, scale this up, so that going forward, every grant that comes in through all these organizations will get in this ledger,” Sivagnanam said. “The ledger has the analytical capability that when it finds a close scoring match, it then automatically triggers an alert to the respective program officers on both sides saying, ‘Hey, there is something similar between these proposals. You may want to talk about them further,’ as a pre-conditional exercise.”

NSF’s blockchain development work gained traction early last year from the General Services Administration’s 10x program — a kind of incubator investment fund that supports promising technology projects that can scale across the federal government or improve public services.

“The blockchain part is important,” Sivagnanam said, “because the proposals may come in two or three years after one another. So you need to make sure there are immutable records…with the blockchain monitoring what historically has happened.”

Aronson made it clear, the process, for now, is still in a “manual” mode. “We’ve got the logic together that allows us to create the fingerprints. And we’re able to identify potential overlap. But in order to make it a real-time capability, we need something that will automatically convert a proposal to a fingerprint, add it to the blockchain and then communicate to everybody else on the chain — so it would be a constant conversation,” she said.

“Because we really didn’t have everything in place two or three years ago, this idea really wouldn’t have been actionable,” she said.

She now believes the time is no longer far off when, if a proposal comes to NSF, but is better suited for the Department of Energy, it could be routed and flagged within minutes instead of months. “It would allow us as a federal government to be more efficient at our distribution of innovative proposal ideas.”

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Huber — and more specifically jobZology’s platform PathwayU — is the winner of phase two of the National Science Foundation’s Career Compass challenge. The competition was launched in November 2018 to “address the changing nature of work.” Winners for phase one, the concept phase, were announced in March. Phase two, which wrapped up at the end of August, asked participants to build a prototype of an app that would serve to help American workers navigate their careers.

PathwayU, one of jobZology’s flagship products, promises to “guide you through your education, career and employment paths so you can live with joy and purpose.” Practically, this means the app walks users through skill and value assessments, and then suggests vocational opportunities based on the results.

The platform doesn’t stop at the theoretical, though. PathwayU also ties in with job boards to show users available jobs that match their strengths and skills. Looking for a career pivot instead? There is information on the kind of education it will take to get from where you are to where you want to go.

“It really just brings a lot of disconnected resources together,” Huber told FedScoop. “It’s this full lifecycle platform.”

NSF CIO Dorothy Aronson told FedScoop that the agency liked PathwayU because of the clear career roadmap it helps users build — not just for the beginning of a career, but for a world in which jobs are constantly evolving.

“What we really need, I believe, is a tool that says not what job do I want to apply to today, but how do I prepare myself for my next career move,” Aronson said. “What do I do today in order to get myself prepared for where I want to be next?”

Federal workforce development has been a big focus of the Trump administration, and it was heavily featured in the President’s Management Agenda with the attendant cross-agency priority goal of “developing a workforce for the 21st century.”

With the $75,000 prize, the team behind PathwayU intends to keep building out functionality within the tool. And for its part, NSF hopes to “stay in touch,” Aronson said.

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So often in the federal IT community, we get lost in discussion about the latest shiny gadgets and the million-dollar acquisitions to get them. But many CIOs would tell you, their biggest concerns are around the people and the process behind the technology — things like policy, risk management, culture, the workforce and more.

In its newest podcast, Let’s Talk About IT, FedScoop will interview senior technology leaders to explore what’s going on at agencies behind the systems and software to uncover success stories and best practices that can be applied governmentwide.

Episode 1, sponsored by Splunk, focuses on IT modernization. Guests Dorothy Aronson, CIO of the National Science Foundation, and Adilson Jardim, area vice president for public sector sales engineering at Splunk, Inc. discuss the buzz around federal modernization, what exactly it means as differentiated from legacy IT, and what progress is being made.

“From the NSF perspective…we’re like a petri dish for modernization in that we’re a small agency, a single-mission agency…and we have sufficient funding to try new things out,” Aronson said. “We really started maybe 10 or so years ago modernizing the infrastructure below the legacy systems.”

Aronson said she believes the recent uptick in talk about IT modernization coincided most closely with 2015’s FITARA.

Jardim, though, goes back to the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 as when it all started.

“We started to see a shift in patterns in terms of how the investments were justified, and that led to a number of other initiatives, like enterprise architecture definitions and consolidating and formalizing the role of the CIO in agencies,” he said. “It’s really, I think, a continuum of that discussion that began in the mid-90s in terms of moving off of really large backend mainframe processing types of environments and then trying to web-enable technology and trying to get ahead of that curve.”

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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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