Building off the Defense Department's recent adoption of five artificial intelligence principles, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will soon release its own public set of AI principles. Ben Huebner, the chief of ODNI's Civil Liberties, Privacy and Transparency Office, gave a preview of that upcoming strategy Wednesday at an Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) conference. "None of them will be surprises," Huebner said. "We have been very integrated with the work of the [DoD Joint AI Center] and others, and fundamentally, there's a lot of consensus here." Aside from DoD, other corners of the federal government have begun to roll out their own AI ethics platforms.

Congress is authorizing $10 million in prize money to help the Defense Department reach out to the public to battle foreign disinformation, and to further ramp up the Pentagon's 5G technologies. The 2020 defense authorization act allows the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to use the funds for two prize competitions: one for 5G, and the other to study and detect deepfake technology. Deepfakes are videos manipulated to look like a celebrity or politician said something they did not say. Foreign and domestic groups are using the videos to sway public opinion. The defense authorization act allows IARPA $5 million specifically for stimulating "the research, development, or commercialization of technologies to automatically detect machine-manipulated media."

The most recent update from the Office of Management and Budget on the President's Management Agenda shows just how automation is taking hold in the government. OMB says out of the more than100 initiatives under the leaner government portion of the PMA, the 24 civilian CFO Act agencies reported 30 projects using robotics process automation, artificial intelligence or other innovative software. And agency financial management offices are right in the middle of this transformation. For example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development used RPA to improve financial controls and reduce the time required to prepare financial statements. OMB says automation allowed HUD to cut nearly 6 months and more than 2,000 hours of employee time out of the process.

Artificial intelligence is a concept that seems tailor-made for the intelligence community. The ability to sort through massive amounts of data, seeking out patterns large and small, anomalies that warrant further investigation, that's what intelligence analysts do already. Imagine what they could achieve when augmented by AI? Dean Souleles, chief technology advisor for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said on Agency in Focus – Intelligence Community that the IC is working now to lay the foundation for adopting AI. "You cannot build a house without a solid foundation. The foundation of AI is data and computational technology," Souleles said. "The intelligence community has spent much of the last decade on a program we call ICITE, the information technology enterprise of the IC. And that's been about modernizing the technology infrastructure. And that is about getting cloud technology throughout the community, making basic computational capability available to our technologists just as it is in the private sector. But that's not good enough, because the new era of computation requires sophisticated kinds of computing. We talk about GPUs, graphical processing units, or tensor processing units (TPUs), or neuromorphic chips or field programmable gate arrays, or any of the wide variety of things that are the specialized computation that enable AI computation. And we need to make the investments in those things."

Artificial intelligence is a concept that seems tailor-made for the intelligence community. The ability to sort through massive amounts of data, seeking out patterns large and small, anomalies that warrant further investigation, that's what intelligence analysts do already. Imagine what they could achieve when augmented by AI? Dean Souleles, chief technology advisor for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said on Agency in Focus – Intelligence Community that the IC is working now to lay the foundation for adopting AI. "You cannot build a house without a solid foundation. The foundation of AI is data and computational technology," Souleles said. "The intelligence community has spent much of the last decade on a program we call ICITE, the information technology enterprise of the IC. And that's been about modernizing the technology infrastructure. And that is about getting cloud technology throughout the community, making basic computational capability available to our technologists just as it is in the private sector. But that's not good enough, because the new era of computation requires sophisticated kinds of computing. We talk about GPUs, graphical processing units, or tensor processing units (TPUs), or neuromorphic chips or field programmable gate arrays, or any of the wide variety of things that are the specialized computation that enable AI computation. And we need to make the investments in those things."

The Defense Department has pinned its hopes on someday putting artificial intelligence tools in the hands of warfighters to help them make data-driven decisions on the battlefield, but given the current state of the technology and the dearth of training data that algorithms need, that goal appears difficult to achieve in the short-term. The defense community, including the Defense AI Center stood up last year, have rolled out AI pilots on everything from predictive maintenance of aircraft and vehicles to autonomous ships. For all of DoD's aspirational projects, AI tools tend not to fare well in situations where data is spare or not structured in a way that the algorithm can't process. Ranjeev Mittu, the head of the Naval Research Lab's information management and decision architectures branch, said the AI algorithms of today are starved for reliable training data to make informed decisions in the real world. "It's not really clear how much data is needed under what scenarios, for what kinds of problems yet, and I think it's kind of emerging. There's a lot of research going on, but I think fundamentally there's still a lot more research that needs to be done in the relationship between data and training, and what the right tradeoffs are for the different kinds of problems," Mittu said in an interview with Federal News Network.

The Trump administration, as part of its strategy on artificial intelligence, has spent a considerable amount of time identifying jobs that become obsolete with the rise of automation. As part of that effort, agencies have also looked at predicting what new career paths automation might create in the years ahead. But now some officials say fear over automation-related job security might have gone too far. Federal Chief Information Officer Suzette Kent, who has overseen some of the administration's reskilling pilots, like the Federal Cyber Reskilling Academy, said some of these anxieties about automation aren't new. "This is not a story that we haven't heard before in our nation: Something comes along that radically changes the way that we work, the way that we live, and creating fear about that is not the best path forward," Kent said during a panel hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center on Wednesday.

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) methods, technology, and solutions represent a fundamental shift in how people interact with information, and a huge opportunity for government agencies to improve outcomes. However, a common misconception is that AI is "plug-and-play." Perhaps because of this, according to McKinsey research, only 8% of companies use practices that enable effective adoption of AI. For this reason, here is a test for AI readiness that we call the "6 pillars of AI." AI is most effective when an organization has centered all functions around using it. Project-based AI has its place, but the more that an organization shifts from seeing AI as a tool to seeing it as a broad methodology, the more the promises of AI will be realized.

This week on Off the Shelf, Booz Allen Hamilton's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Team, vice president Jeff Kimmons and directors Graham Gilmer, Kathleen Featheringham, and Justin Betof, discuss how to operationalize AI and machine learning (ML) to support the Department of Defense mission. The Booze Allen Hamilton (BAH) AI team highlight how the federal government is engaging and evolving with AI and the unique challenges and opportunities that entails. Among the changes is a focused organizational structure and key champions supporting AI development and deployment across the Department of Defense, including the Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Tea, (aka Project Maven) and the Joint AI Center (the JAIC). The group also highlights and outlines a holistic approach to AI development that delivers mission centric AI services. Everyone can build AI in a lab--the challenging it getting it to work in real-world environments--and the BAH AI team outlines key strategies necessary to getting it done.

The Energy Department has a new chief information officer and a plan to bring its infrastructure into the modern age. DOE CIO Chris "Rocky" Campione outlined four primary objectives to modernize and rationalize the IT infrastructure that supports his agency's wide scope of programs. In fiscal 2020, operational visibility, delivery excellence, delivering innovation and workforce development will be the name of the game. "How do we make sure -- and that's everything from making sure we're reskilling and retraining the federal workforce," Campione said of the fourth objective, on Federal Monthly Insights -- A New Approach in IT Modernization. "But's also looking at how do we provide the information to our workforce so that we can make good decisions?"