Speaking with FedScoop, five AI policy experts said adhering to both the White House’s Blueprint for an AI ‘Bill of Rights’ and the AI Risk Management Framework (RMF), published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, presents an obstacle for companies working to develop responsible AI products.

However, the White House and civil rights groups have pushed back on claims that the two voluntary AI safety frameworks send conflicting messages and have highlighted that they are a productive “starting point” in the absence of congressional action on AI. 

The two policy documents form the foundation of the Biden administration’s approach to regulating artificial intelligence. But for many months, there has been an active debate among AI experts regarding how helpful — or in some cases hindering — the Biden administration’s dual approach to AI policymaking has been.

The White House’s Blueprint for an AI ‘Bill of Rights’ was published last October. It takes a rights-based approach to AI, focusing on broad fundamental human rights as a starting point for the regulation of the technology. That was followed by the risk-based AI RMF in January, which set out to determine the scale and scope of risks related to concrete use cases and recognized threats to instill trustworthiness into the technology.

Speaking with FedScoop, Daniel Castro, a technology policy scholar and vice president at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), noted that there are “big, major philosophical differences in the approach taken by the two Biden AI policy documents,” which are creating “different [and] at times adverse” outcomes for the industry.

“A lot of companies that want to move forward with AI guidelines and frameworks want to be doing the right thing but they really need more clarity. They will not invest in AI safety if it’s confusing or going to be a wasted effort or if instead of the NIST AI framework they’re pushed towards the AI blueprint,” Castro said.

Castro’s thoughts were echoed by Adam Thierer of the libertarian nonprofit R Street Institute who said that despite a sincere attempt to emphasize democratic values within AI tools, there are “serious issues” with the Biden administration’s handling of AI policy driven by tensions between the two key AI frameworks.

“The Biden administration is trying to see how far it can get away with using their bully pulpit and jawboning tactics to get companies and agencies to follow their AI policies, particularly with the blueprint,” Thierer, senior fellow on the Technology and Innovation team at R Street, told FedScoop.

Two industry sources who spoke with FedScoop but wished to remain anonymous said they felt pushed toward the White House’s AI blueprint over the NIST AI framework in certain instances during meetings regarding AI policymaking with the White House’s Office of Science and Technology (OSTP).

Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., chair of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, and House Oversight Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., have been highly critical of the White House blueprint as it compares to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, expressing concern earlier this year that the blueprint sends “conflicting messages about U.S. federal AI policy.”

In a letter obtained exclusively by FedScoop, Arati Prabhakar responded to those concerns, arguing that “these documents are not contradictory” and highlighting how closely the White House and NIST are working together on future regulation of the technology.

At the same time, some industry AI experts say the way in which the two documents define AI clash with one another.

Nicole Foster, who leads global AI and machine learning policy at Amazon Web Services, said chief among the concerns with the documents are diverging definitions of the technology itself. She told FedScoop earlier this year that “there are some inconsistencies between the two documents for sure. I think just at a basic level they don’t even define things like AI in the same way.”

Foster’s thoughts were echoed by Raj Iyer, global head of public sector at cloud software provider ServiceNow and former CIO of the U.S. Army, who believes the two frameworks are a good starting point to get industry engaged in AI policymaking but that they lack clarity.

“I feel like the two frameworks are complementary. But there’s clearly some ambiguity and vagueness in terms of definition,” said Iyer.

“So what does the White House mean by automated systems? Is it autonomous systems? Is it automated decision-making? What is it? I think it’s very clear that they did that to kind of steer away from wanting to have a direct conversation on AI,” Iyer added.

Hodan Omaar, an AI and quantum research scholar working with Castro at ITIF, said the two documents appear to members of the tech industry as if they are on different tracks. According to Omaar, the divergence creates a risk that organizations will simply defer to either the “Bill of Rights” or the NIST RMF and ignore the other.

“There are two things the White House should be doing. First, it should better elucidate the ways the Blueprint should be used in conjunction with the RMF. And second, it should better engage with stakeholders to gather input on how the Blueprint can be improved and better implemented by organizations,” Omaar told FedScoop.

In addition to compatibility concerns about the two documents, experts have also raised concerns about the process followed by the White House to take industry feedback in creating the documents.

Speaking with FedScoop anonymously in order to speak freely, one industry association AI official said that listening sessions held by the Office of Science and Technology Policy were not productive.

“The Bill of Rights and the development of that, we have quite a bit of concern because businesses were not properly consulted throughout that process,” the association official said. 

The official added: “OSTP’s listening sessions were just not productive or helpful. We tried to actually provide input in ways in which businesses could help them through this process. Sadly, that’s just not what they wanted.”

The AI experts’ comments come as the Biden administration works to establish a regulatory framework that mitigates potential threats posed by the technology while supporting American AI innovation. Last month, the White House secured voluntary commitments from seven leading AI companies about how AI is used, and it is expected to issue a new executive order on AI safety in the coming weeks.

One of the contributors to the White House’s AI Blueprint sympathizes with concerns from industry leaders and AI experts regarding the confusion and complexity of the administration’s approach to AI policymaking. But it’s also an opportunity for companies seeking voluntary AI policymaking guidance to put more effort into asking themselves hard questions, he said.

“So I understand the concerns very much. And I feel the frustration. And I understand people just want clarity. But clarity will only come once you understand the implications, the broader values, discussion and the issues in the context of your own AI creations,” said Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a Brown University professor and former top official within the White House’s OSTP, where he helped co-author its Blueprint for an ‘AI Bill of Rights.’ 

“The goal is not to say: Do every single thing in these frameworks. It’s like, understand the issues, understand the values at play here. Understand the questions you need to be asking from the RMF and the Blueprint, and then make your own decisions,” said Venkatasubramanian.

On top of that, the White House Blueprint co-author wants those who criticize the documents’ perceived contradictions to be more specific in their complaints.

“Tell me a question in the NIST RMF that contradicts a broader goal in the White House blueprint — find one for me, or two or three. I’m not saying this because I think they don’t exist. I’m saying this because if you could come up with these examples, then we could think through what can we do about it?” he said.

Venkatasubramanian added that he feels the White House AI blueprint in particular has faced resistance from industry because “for the first time someone in a position of power came out and said: What about the people?” when it comes to tech innovation and regulations. 

Civil rights groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center have also joined the greater discussion about AI regulations, pushing back on the notion that industry groups should play any significant role in the policymaking of a rights-based document created by the White House.

“I’m sorry that industry is upset that a policy document is not reflective of their incentives, which is just to make money and take people’s data and make whatever decisions they want to make more contracts. It’s a policy document, they don’t get to write it,” said Ben Winters, the senior counsel at EPIC, where he leads their work on AI and human rights.

Groups like EPIC and a number of others have called upon the Biden administration to take more aggressive steps to protect the public from the potential harms of AI.

“I actually don’t think that the Biden administration has taken a super aggressive role when trying to implement these two frameworks and policies that the administration has set forth. When it comes to using the frameworks for any use of AI within the government or federal contractors or recipients of federal funds, they’re not doing enough in terms of using their bully pulpit and applying pressure. I really don’t think they’re doing too much yet,” said Winters.

Meanwhile, the White House has maintained that the two AI documents were created for different purposes but designed to be used side-by-side as initial voluntary guidance, noting that both OSTP and NIST were involved in the creation of both frameworks.

OSTP spokesperson Subhan Cheema said: “President Biden has been clear that companies have a fundamental responsibility to ensure their products are safe before they are released to the public, and that innovation must not come at the expense of people’s rights and safety. That’s why the administration has moved with urgency to advance responsible innovation that manage the risks posed by AI and seize its promise — including by securing voluntary commitments from seven leading AI companies that will help move us toward AI development that is more safe, secure, and trustworthy.”

“These commitments are a critical step forward and build on the administration’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and AI Risk Management Framework. The administration is also currently developing an executive order that will ensure the federal government is doing everything in its power to support responsible innovation and protect people’s rights and safety, and will also pursue bipartisan legislation to help America lead the way in responsible innovation,” Cheema added.

NIST did not respond to requests for comment.

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The contract, part of GSA’s IT Schedule 70 Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) Enhancement Program, will allow the agency to provide ServiceNow IT management software on its acquisition schedule at a discounted price, driven by high-volume buying, officials said.

“This contract addresses a variety of important federal IT needs and supports key areas of software management services,” Kay Ely, assistant commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service Office of Information Technology Category, said in a statement. “With this newly negotiated agreement, the government will see immediate benefits that come from using a single contract to drive significant cost savings. We appreciate the willingness of our industry partners in the software sector to work with GSA to meet these critical government objectives.”

The deal will provide GSA the software through Reston, Va.-based reseller Carahsoft Technology Corporation as part of its nine-year, $2 billion supply schedule contract and includes solutions for IT service management, cybersecurity operations, IT operations management, customer service management and human resources service management.

Agencies could receive discounts ranging from 4 to 10 percent, depending on purchase volume,  officials said.

As part of the IT Schedule 70 FITARA Enhancement Program, GSA is required to secure a minimum of two annual governmentwide software agreements with the aim of providing new technology solutions on its IT schedule with cost savings.

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Since the breach, USPS has made a number of relatively major infrastructure and account management changes, according to John Edgar, USPS’ vice president of information technology. Now the agency is positioning itself toward the next phase of response to the breach: recovery.

“We’re doing OK,” Edgar told FedScoop. “We are now in the middle of planning the next phase of [response], which we’ll be implementing at a future date. We’ll be continuing to incrementally improve the security posture of the organization and deal with the infrastructure, the operational and the end user behavioral changes necessary to raise the overall security level.”

And though cybersecurity and protecting against another future breach will remain a huge part of any future IT initiative out of the Postal Service, Edgar and his team aim to make cloud computing, mobility and analytics the focal points of the agency’s 2015 IT agenda.

“Our goal is to continue to provide more technology capability to the organization, particularly in the mail operations area, to continue to improve the efficiency of the organization and allow us to continue to reduce our operating costs,” Edgar said.

With cloud, as the agency has rolled out its use of developing internal apps with the ServiceNow platform, Edgar and his team now must start looking at the agency’s model of managing several different applications. In addition, the IT team will look at the legacy applications within the organization and evaluate which ones could be adapted to a new cloud solution and which ones should be left behind.

“It could be software-as-a-service, it could be platform-as-a-service, it could be in some cases even an infrastructure-as-a-service-like solution so that we can continue to modernize our applications and increase the accessibility of the application and the information it contains to end users,” Edgar said.

One of the ways to increase that accessibility, Edgar said, is through mobility. Right now, the agency has about 15,000 smartphones and tablets across the organization. If the agency looks at the legacy applications and adapts them to a mobile-friendly cloud solution, those apps could be the key to unlocking access to the company’s data at several different points in the agency’s structure.

“So they can get access not just to the application, but the data, the information within it and more advanced analytics all about that information so [employees and managers] can make near-real-time decisions as they’re out on the floor and not sitting behind a desk,” Edgar said.

With more applications in more formats, analytics becomes incredibly important, Edgar said. Now, the agency is in the process of standing up a Hadoop cluster to build what Edgar refers to as a data lake, which will allow USPS to take a lot of the new data the agency is collecting and build the right model to take them to the next level of performance. The analysis will be conducted by a combination of USPS-employed data scientists and analysts, and contracted experts.

“Today, that data is segmented. Some of it is in our data warehouse, but a lot of it is in the original source systems of record, and obviously, from an operational standpoint, you’ve got to be careful about how people use that information within the systems of record so you don’t affect performance,” Edgar said. “We want to take that information and put it into this data lake, in a secure way, where the analyst will be able to have the advanced analytical tools to build the operating models to look at business in the future.”

Also in 2015, Edgar plans to use analytics and geofencing technology to help create dynamic delivery routes for letter carriers to save on time and fuel costs. The agency also will continue to deploy new tech-equipped mail scanners to allow for better communication between the physical post office and the letter carrier while on a route.

In addition, the agency is beginning to look at how it can replace the nearly 160,000 long-life vehicles that are now almost four years past their projected lifespan. Edgar said when these vehicles are replaced, they will be replaced with new vehicles that increase the communication and tracking capabilities of the vehicles while on their routes.

If everything goes perfectly in 2015, at the end of the year technology will have been the key to the agency’s ability to enhance and innovate the way USPS does business, Edgar said.

“Through technology, we would have made significant enhancements to allow the organization to operate more efficiently, to have reduced our operating costs, to have improved our mail service above where it is today and continued to provide an enhanced and more efficient service to all of our customers across the country,” Edgar said. “The integrated technology that we bring would be a key driver in enabling that to happen.

Edgar added, “I think that’s really what we’re trying to do. It’s about taking advantage of new technologies and using them to increase the speed that we can deliver solutions and the ease with which our users can access those solutions for the benefit of the business.”

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When Kathy Warnaar, the USPS manager of information technology performance achievement, was at the grocery store during the holidays last year, she encountered a frantic man who asked the cashier for Christmas stamps. The cashier replied that the store had run out of them, and the man was visibly upset, Warnaar said.

Warnaar took the experience to a meeting of the agency’s IT team and found that other employees had encountered similar problems.

“[Because I work for the USPS] I felt somehow personally responsible to find these stamps for that man,” Warnaar told FedScoop in early November. “That man and his wife wanted a lovely stamp on their Christmas cards. That meant something to them. That means something to me.”

So, in response, the IT team got to work. Using the ServiceNow platform, USPS developed a new mobile-compatible stamp inventory management system to increase the efficiency of the stamp’s return on investment.

“As we produce stamps, there’s a fixed amount that get produced,” USPS Vice President of IT John Edgar told FedScoop Friday. “In the general process, at some point in time, we take a look at our stamp inventory and decide that whatever’s left is pulled back out of circulation and ultimately destroyed.”

But to avoid this, the team developed a desktop app with mobile compatibility to manage the general stamp inventory at the post office level nationally and locally.

“We use that information to move the inventory between post offices to meet local demand, not just national demand for those particular stamp products,” Edgar said. “This application, which we built on the ServiceNow platform, is designed to do just that. It gives both the national view and local post offices the ability to manage their inventory.”

It’s the first holiday season that the post office has used this inventory management system, which it says can help to avoid or lessen the amount of problems like the one Warnaar encountered at the grocery store.

“If they are starting to run low on a particular holiday stamp, it gets identified early, and we can then identify geographically local sites that may have excess where the sale demand is not as great at that one particular office and use that information to reallocate the inventory and continue to make the stamps available to the general public in the limits of the overall production run,” Edgar said.

So far, according to Edgar, the progress is going well. USPS employees are primarily using the desktop version of the application, but as they become more familiar with it, the mobile feature may get more use.

Transitioning out of the holiday season, the inventory system may help USPS cut down on the amount of stamps wasted and destroyed, which will directly result in cost savings for the independent government agency that receives no taxpayer funding.

“The expectation is that it will reduce the amount of inventory that at some future point in time has to be disposed of,” Edgar said. “We’ll be more efficient about how [stamps] are made available to where people want to buy them.”

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Acting Energy Department CIO said it’s time to realize what’s possible through IT service management. (Credit: iStockphoto.com)

Acting Energy Department CIO Don Adcock is serious about service, be it service through IT or service to his country.

That service, Adcock said, is what drives him to be so passionate about the possibilities in front of today’s CIOs.

At a Wednesday forum sponsored by ServiceNow, Adcock highlighted how products, like ServiceNow’s IT service management system, have allowed CIOs to create an entirely new line of service, providing the backbone of what an organization needs to achieve its mission.

“There was a time where the CIO had a value to sitting at the table and was a key part of the CXO framework, but over time they became the guy that you would reach over to during a staff meeting and go ‘My BlackBerry’s not working,'” Adcock said during his keynote speech. “It’s time we get back to the table and show them that we understand the mission and use tools like this to show them how we can drive change and innovation.”

Adcock stressed that ServiceNow allowed him, along with other Energy Department bureaus, to make data-driven decisions across areas that traditionally sit in stovepipes: facilities management, IT asset management and human resources.

“We need to be using the tools to track our enterprise that gets to the data and exposes it in ways that are very helpful,” he said.

Some of these helpful tools are coming from the department’s network of national laboratories, which are using ServiceNow along with other IT service management suites to create new tools to manage everything from open science projects to nuclear security. Adcock highlighted one program at the Argonne National Laboratory that allows employees to track ice across the facilities campus in order to avoid accidents or workplace injuries.

“[The laboratories] jumped on this, and they are really trying to figure out how to take this tool and really focus it on a tough mission issue and empower that tough mission issue,” Adcock said.

After Adcock saw all the departmentwide uses, he met with a ServiceNow representative and decided to up the ante: He created the IMPACT challenge, aimed to inspire people across the department to create new tools that will use the platform in ways never before seen. The winner will be submitted to a contest at Knowledge 15, ServiceNow’s yearly expo.

“If we do this together, look at the power we have as a service provider enabling our mission,” Adcock said.

The platform is not only responsible for internal department innovations. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the department developed several tools for the public, including an app that allows people to highlight power outages and search for functioning gas stations in the wake of a natural disaster.

“So now the American guy or gal sitting in their car at a gas station can geo-tag the gas station, take a picture, upload it to an interface, and I can take the data, I can call [the station], I can search for them and figure out ‘What do you need from me to stay in business?'” Adcock told FedScoop.

Be it internal or external innovation, Adcock was adamant that the time is now for CIOs and other IT professionals to take control of the tools at their disposal in order to drive considerable advancements.

“I need to start harnessing technology that so that I can start showing the enterprise that we can be a service-oriented enterprise,” Adcock told FedScoop. “I’m not asking [the department] to buy a tool. You’ve already bought the tool. What I’m asking you to do is shape and integrate it so that we can harness the true power at the enterprise level, which is it the reporting, the analytics and driving business decisions.”

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