President Donald Trump's administration has dramatically expanded its work with Palantir, elevating the company cofounded by Trump ally Peter Thiel as the government's go-to software developer. Following massive contract terminations for consulting giants and government contractors like Accenture, Booz Allen, and Deloitte, Palantir has emerged ahead. Now the data analytics firm is partnering with those companies--offering them a lifeline while consolidating its own power. Palantir has become one of the few winners in the Trump administration's cost-cutting efforts, receiving more than 113 million in federal spending since the beginning of the year, according to The New York Times. Palantir's US government revenue has grown by more than 370 million compared to this time last year, according to the company's most recent quarterly earnings report.

Technology being developed in a nondescript office building in Reston could change how Army soldiers train for and operate in combat thousands of miles away. The Army's Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) runs on a pair of Microsoft goggles and links to a microsized drone that flies autonomously and collects video analyzed in real time by artificial intelligence algorithms trained to identify threats, like an enemy combatant with an assault rifle coming around a corner, or a vehicle of interest. Detections are sent to a heads-up display within the goggles and are shared across a squad. "It can all be done at the tactical edge out on the battlefield, using new-edge computing technologies, which basically puts the power of a supercomputer in the soldiers' hands," says Rob Albritton, a vice president at Reston-based Octo who heads up the AI Center of Excellence at the federal contractor's oLabs tech accelerator. Octo has been working on developing AI technology for IVAS since 2020 and is currently working with about 20 government agencies on a variety of other AI projects.

Booz Allen Hamilton announced the creation of HELworks, an innovative developer of directed energy and high energy laser (HEL) weapon systems designed to meet the needs of warfighters in the modern battlespace. "Booz Allen's significant investment in HEL technology maturation and operational prototypes ensures that HELworks solutions are operationally relevant and producible at scale--ready for use by warfighters, today. We are proud to be on the forefront of innovation and mission-focused leaders in this area." Booz Allen has made significant investment in independent research and development projects focused on developing directed energy solutions over the past 5 years, based in the firm's understanding of Department of Defense (DOD) needs and mission requirements. HELworks leverages Booz Allen's 25-plus year heritage of directed energy expertise to optimize size, weight, and power (SWaP); deliver enhanced military utility; and provide rapid deployment of first-of-its-kind HEL solutions.

As fraud, waste, and abuse (FWA) cost government agencies and private companies billions each year, artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed how organizations prevent, monitor, and respond to FWA activity, powering advanced analytics, repeatable processes, and workflow automation and orchestration tools. Indeed, AI offers a wealth of tactics for combatting fraud, such as advanced authorization for credit card transactions, deep learning to combat false positives, and behavioral analytics. However, here we explore another facet of AI's fraud-fighting potential: helping all of the pieces work in concert towards a "fused" FWA solution. Fraud targeting and tactics have grown more sophisticated--and expansive--in recent years. The rapid proliferation of apps, payment platforms, and digital assets entering the financial services ecosystem has often outpaced regulatory oversight, and many of these channels have become a magnet for illicit activity.

The cornerstone of collaboration is based on knowledge transfer; sharing of research tools, methodologies and findings; and sometimes combining mutual funding resources to meet shortfalls necessary to build prototypes and commercialize technologies. Collaborations often involve combinations of government, industry and academia who work together to meet difficult challenges and cultivate new ideas. A growing trend for many leading companies is creating technology specific innovation centers, labs, and foundries to accelerate collaboration and invention. As the development of new technologies continues to grow exponentially and globally, collaboration has more value as a resource for adapting to the rapidly emerging technologies landscape by establishing pivotal connections between companies, technologies and stakeholders. In the US Federal government, the National Labs (including: Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, Argonne, Sandia, Idaho National Laboratory, Battelle, and Brookhaven, and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDC's), and federally funded Centers For Excellence have been outlets for innovation and public/private cooperation.

Are you excited at the prospect of unlocking the secrets held by a data set? Are you fascinated by the possibilities presented by the IoT, machine learning, and artificial intelligence advances? In an increasingly connected world, massive amounts of structured and unstructured data open up new opportunities. As a data scientist, you can turn these complex data sets into useful information to solve global challenges. Across private and public sectors -- from fraud detection, to cancer research, to national intelligence -- you know the answers are in the data.

Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the 10 largest U.S. defense contractors, launched a $100 million venture capital fund to invest in fledgling companies creating promising new technology. The fund announced Wednesday, dubbed Booz Allen Ventures, will concentrate on bankrolling early-stage firms working on cutting-edge technology, and help them find ways to get those innovations into the field for use. Brian MacCarthy, vice president of tech scouting and ventures at Booz Allen, said in a Monday interview that the fund plans to invest in four to six firms per year, providing seed money ranging from hundreds of thousands to low millions of dollars. MacCarthy said there is a growing understanding in the defense world that more must be done to open funding streams for firms working on new capabilities such as artificial intelligence, which could in turn help Booz Allen's government clients. He pointed to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence's 2021 final report, which recommended major new investments in AI research and development, as an example of the emerging consensus around this need.

Booz Allen Hamilton, the Virginia-based, defense-focused IT consulting firm, today announced the launch of a corporate venture capital arm, Booz Allen Ventures, that will initially put $100 million toward "strategic" defensive and offensive technologies. The move signals Booz Allen's desire to shape startups in areas it considers aligned with its core business, mainly AI and machine learning, defense, and cybersecurity. Brian MacCarthy, Booz Allen's VP of ventures, said that the new fund will invest primarily in early-stage (seed, Series A, and Series B) companies and build on Booz Allen's existing Tech Scouting program, which connects with entrepreneurs to vet emerging security technologies. Through Tech Scouting, Booz Allen has recently backed firms including Latent AI, whose technology compresses AI models; Synthetaic, a data-generating platform; and Reveal Technology, which performs analytics on aerial data. In addition to capital, Booz Allen Ventures-backed companies will gain access to Booz Allen's executive and engineering teams as well as client teams, McCarthy elaborated.

This article was contributed by Steve Escaravage, senior VP and leader of Booz Allen's analytics practice and AI services business. Today, almost any organization can prove AI's capability in a non-production, innovation laboratory setting -- but fielding AI in real-world environments is the true test of success. National security is rapidly becoming a digital enterprise -- and winning in the digital battlefield of the future demands continued advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). But right now, too many AI applications are stuck in the lab at the conceptual stage, and too few reach deployments in the "field" (i.e., production environments with real workloads, users, and problems). This gap is dangerous because AI improves through operationalization, learning from real-world data how to work faster and better.

Roughly a year ago, Latent AI, a now three-year-old, Menlo Park, California-based startup, pitched a handful of investors during TechCrunch's Battlefield competition. It didn't win that contest, but that hasn't kept it from winning the interest of investors elsewhere. It just closed on $19 million in Series A funding in a round co-led by Future Ventures and Blackhorn Ventures, with participation from Booz Allen, Lockheed Martin, 40 North Ventures, and Autotech Ventures. The company has now raised $22.5 million altogether. Steve Jurvetson, the veteran investor and co-founder of Future Ventures, says of possible applications to think of "face-detection algorithms running locally within security cameras or appliances, or Siri-like voice interfaces working instantly," even when there's no network connectivity.