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June/July 2021 FCW.COM
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DARPA seeks just-in-time data
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking for ways to deliver the right nuggets of policy and procedural knowledge to the right people at the right time, with- out including irrelevant or already known information.
The Knowledge Management at Scale and Speed program aims to develop technologies that can deliv- er sufficiently granular and relevant knowledge where it can help a user complete a current task. This con- cept of “JustIN” data — just enough, just in time and just for me — is the key to KMASS.
Such a system will require advances in three complementary areas:
• Organizing background knowl- edge, which may come from docu- ments or videos created for human consumption.
• Providing local or timely con- text with tags and indexing as the information is collected and ensur- ing that data that has been docu- mented for one purpose can be retrieved and linked to others.
• Disseminating the contextual- ized knowledge usefully, appropri- ately and on time, which requires that KMASS know that the data exists, where it is housed, when it will be relevant, how to retrieve it and how to identify the appropriate details in what could be a multipage document or a video that is several minutes long.
DARPA expects KMASS to scale to a broad set of tasks and contexts so users can take advantage of the massive amount of knowledge that the military stores in terms of doc- trine, policy and procedures.
— Susan Miller
64%
DOD’s EHR system hits 30% adoption mark
The Defense Department’s rollout of Cerner’s commercial electronic health record system is nearly a third com- plete and has 42,000 active users in more than a dozen states, officials told reporters on June 10.
Holly Joers, acting program execu- tive officer for Defense Healthcare Management Systems, said the latest deployment of MHS Genesis was com- pleted in April. Dubbed Wave Carson Plus, that deployment was the largest to date. It extended the platform across 11 states and 20 military installations and added about 10,000 active users to the system to bring the completion rate to 30%.
Joers said DOD is on schedule for completing the rollout of MHS Gen- esis by the end of 2023. The next “go live” deployment, called Wave Tripler, is scheduled for Hawaii in September.
As the deployments become larger,
challenges related to synchronizing and standardizing operational workflows will grow, particularly for joint DOD and Department of Veterans Affairs facilities.
“The standardization of workflows and processes across the enterprise is actually one of the most important things about this system,” said Maj. Gen. Ned Appenzeller, assistant direc- tor for combat support at the Defense Health Agency. “But the most critical piece of that is because of that stan- dardization, because it’s done the same way everywhere, because it is so demonstrable...safety has improved.”
Appenzeller added that the data management capabilities are already proving useful. “We can actually see how much time people are spending in the record during duty hours and after duty hours,” he said.
— Lauren C. Williams
AI task force may open government data to researchers
To spur innovation, the new National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force is exploring ways to give AI researchers secure access to anonymized government data and the computing power to analyze that data.
The task force was created to advise the Biden administration on develop- ing and implementing the National AI Research Resource for sharing compu- tational resources, high-quality data, edu- cational tools and user support.
“In order to investigate a lot of their really great ideas in AI, [researchers] need access to powerful computing infrastructure, and they need access to data,” Lynne Parker, assistant direc- tor of AI at the White House Office of
Science and Technology Policy and co- chairwoman of the task force, told the Wall Street Journal.
Anonymized census, medical and other government and nongovernment data could be made available to research- ers, officials said, adding that the task force is working to ensure that Ameri- cans’ data privacy is protected.
“Because you have very sensitive data about individuals, there are challenges in being able to make that data available to the broader research community,” said Erwin Gianchandani, senior adviser for translation, innovation and partnerships at the National Science Foundation and co-chairman of the task force.
— Susan Miller
of U.S. water utilities do not employ a chief information security officer