Page 48 - Federal Computer Week, March/April 2019

2019 FEDERAL 100
Damon Bragg
HSIN Service Operations Manager, Homeland Security Information Network Department of Homeland Security
The reluctant superhero. Bragg
led the migration of the 100,000 member-strong Homeland Security Information Network to the cloud. The network allows federal, state and local governments and private-sector organizations to share sensitive but unclassified information. Even a brief outage or disruption could have seri- ous consequences. Thanks to Bragg’s planning and leadership, the migration was seamless. Donna Roy, executive director of the Information Sharing and Services Office at DHS, said users didn’t “even notice that the website changed...except that it was faster.”
Caryl N. Brzymialkiewicz
Chief Data Officer, Office of Inspector General
Department of Health and Human Services
Data mastermind. Brzymialkiewicz led the OIG’s efforts to build an Enter- prise Dashboard that allows her col- leagues to view the status of projects and monetary recoveries via an inter- active visual analytics platform. To accomplish that, she brought together audit, evaluation and investigation groups spread across 83 field offices to pull data from three tracking sys- tems into a single view. The dash- board adds a new level of transparen- cy for the HHS OIG and builds on the agency’s efforts to manage all its data in a single cloud-based environment for employees to access.
Ian Buck
Vice President of Accelerated Computing
NVIDIA
Summit climber. To put the U.S. ahead of China in supercomputing power, Buck led the development of
a platform that powers the world’s fastest supercomputer. Summit, at
the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is 100 times fast- er than its predecessor. It has already gone to work on solving challenges such as drug discovery, fusion reac- tion modeling and the understanding of genetic factors that cause disease. Buck also worked to make sure poli- cymakers understand the importance of advanced computing, testifying before Congress and meeting with other technology leaders at the White House to discuss how the government can embrace artificial intelligence for the public good.
Joseph R. Castle
Director, Code.gov
General Services Administration
From artillery to open data. When jurisdiction over Code.gov moved from the White House to GSA, leaders wanted to make sure whoever took it over would keep the project a prior- ity. Castle proved worthy. The Army veteran has been instrumental in urging agencies to adopt a culture of data openness. At its start, Code.gov hosted around 400 projects with the goal of reducing duplicative software development. Today, it hosts nearly 5,000. Along the way, Castle has boosted the searchability of the site,
improved data quality and encouraged agencies to update their procurement practices.
Lily Lidong Chen
Manager, Cryptographic Technology Group, IT Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Future-proofing cryptography. If quantum computers break today’s encryption, a stronger scheme will be at hand thanks to Chen. As architect of NIST’s post-quantum cryptography efforts, she is searching for standards that will render brute-force attacks
by quantum machines ineffective. After calling for algorithms that can resist both quantum and conventional attacks, Chen and her team selected 69 from a field of 82 and then nar- rowed the semifinalists to 26. Donna Dodson, NIST’s chief cybersecurity adviser, calls Chen a world-class cryp- tographer and said her work
“will ensure the U.S. has strong cryptographic security controls to protect our digital information and infrastructure.”
Damon Bragg Caryl N. Ian Buck Joseph R. Castle Lily Lidong Brzymialkiewicz Chen
48 March/April 2019 FCW.COM