Page 72 - Federal Computer Week, March/April 2019

FCWPerspectives Your agency
isn’t ready for AI
To truly take advantage, government must retool both its data and its infrastructure
Artificial intelligence has been around for more than half a century, yet in many ways it’s poised to be 2019’s hot new thing for federal IT. The commercially available toolkit is growing rapidly, a new executive order emphasizes AI’s transformative potential, and several provisions of
the President’s Management Agenda explicitly depend on intelligent automation. Perhaps more importantly, projects across government — from chatbots that deliver citizen services to purchasing-data analytics — are proving that AI can be put into production.
So far, though, success stories are mostly small and scattered. FCW recently gathered a
group of specialists from across government to discuss what’s needed to bring AI into the federal IT mainstream.
The discussion was on the record but not for individual attribution (see Page 74 for a full list of participants), and the quotes have been edited for length and clarity. Here’s what the group had to say.
First, get your data house in order
The ability to make sense of unstruc- tured data is a key selling point for AI solutions, but the group stressed the limitations that come with sloppy datasets.
“It’s all about people interacting and providing value to the data,” one participant said. “Then the machine can be intelligent about it.”
Part of the challenge is settling on standards, but multiple participants said the real key will be effective ontologies that connect and “trans- late” between multiple standards. “If we can really make our data smart, then the AI and the machine learning are just going to be phenomenal,” one participant said.
Even though users of specific data- sets have very specific needs, anoth- er executive said, “there’s an upper ontology that we all should agree to — [such as] what is a person? — those kinds of simple things. If we agree to that, then everything underneath is based on that domain. We agree that this means that, and here are all the things that are associated, and yes, that’s the parent of this. You have to do that hard work, and once that hard work is done, then wow. You can... use it for everything.”
The government is already in catch- up mode on those efforts, another participant said, adding: “We can’t get ahead of AI because it’s already out. People are running it, and they’re actually doing things.”
“If you don’t do those simple foun- dational things, I think we’ll be creat- ing chaos,” a third participant warned.
Second, fix the infrastructure
According to multiple participants, another key ingredient is getting agen- cies’ IT infrastructures in order. Cloud- based services power many advanced analytics tools, so preparing data and workloads for the cloud is critical.
“There are powerful algorithms out there,” one participant said, “but do you have the backing infrastructure to support it?”
Another participant divided agen- cies into three key segments. First, “you have people who are terrified of the cloud. They want to say they’re doing something in the cloud so they take their existing processes and put them in. But there’s no point to it. It’s probably more expensive than when they were running it on-premises.”
The second segment has accepted cloud technology, and “you’ve just got to get your arms around your data,” the executive said. “You need to start labeling data, and you need to have data that you can use.” The third seg- ment is “more of the cutting edge, and that’s where we’ve really been suc- cessful. Health sciences, Department of Energy, NASA, some of the leading Defense Department organizations — they’re embracing [AI], and they’re the ones that are really ready.”
When one participant cited U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
72
March/April 2019 FCW.COM