October, 2024

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Updating the UNCITRAL Model Procurement Law for “Green Procurement”

Public Procurement Intl

Around the world, governments are embracing “green procurement” – environmentally sustainable strategies to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution. A number of webinars we have held at GW Law School, including a July 2024 series on emerging international best practices, confirmed that there are many parallels between these “green procurement” strategies.

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DOE Selects 4 Vendors for $2.7B Uranium Enrichment Contract

GovCon Wire

The Department of Energy has awarded four companies spots on a potential 10-year, $2.7 billion contract to procure uranium enrichment services to help establish a domestic supply chain of high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, used for deploying advanced nuclear reactors.

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2024 U.S. Presidential Election Special Series

Art of Procurement

There are two weeks to go until the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. Interest, speculation, and tension have been building all. The post 2024 U.S. Presidential Election Special Series appeared first on Art of Procurement.

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Top National Security Execs to Watch in 2024

WashngtonExec

National security leaders play key roles in modernizing, protecting and defending the technologies that drive missions on land, sea, air and space. These leaders support one of the government’s most important missions: securing and defending the nation’s citizens, economy and institutions. The security-related missions highlighted here cover critical infrastructure, cyber-connected operating equipment, Internet of Things, [.

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How to Create a Blueprint for Fleet Resilience

Speaker: Jeff Dickinson - President and CEO of Railgistixs Transport, Supply Chain and Logistics Thought Leader

Despite the ongoing transformation of the supply chain and logistics landscape, the steadfast importance of carrier safety remains a core principle. From prioritizing preventative maintenance to optimizing fleet utilization, the fundamentals persist. If you’re overlooking and neglecting essential safety precautions today, this could result in expensive repairs and potential safety hazards in the future. 🚧 Join Jeff Dickinson for a conversation on how to mitigate risk, enforce compliance,

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Pentagon releases final CMMC rule, paving way for implementation

Federal News Network

The Defense Department released the final rule for the long-awaited Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program today, further paving the way for CMMC requirements to show up in contracts starting next year. The final CMMC program rule was released for public inspection today. It’s expected to officially publish in the Federal Register on Tuesday, Oct. 15.

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The FBI is using AI to mine threat tips, but isn’t sharing much detail

FedScoop

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is using artificial intelligence to mine tips about potential threats but is revealing little about how the system actually works. Specifically, the bureau is using a system it calls the “Complaint Lead Value Probability” to prioritize tips by conducting algorithm scores and triaging, according to two versions of an agency AI disclosure.

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Chuck Brooks Debuts Book on Privacy & Cyber Impacts of Emerging Tech

GovCon Wire

“Inside Cyber: How AI, 5G, and Quantum Computing Will Transform Privacy and Our Security” by Chuck Brooks is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand and take advantage of the next wave of technological progress. Brooks is a well-known executive and adviser who breaks down complicated technological trends into easy-to-understand insights.

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Creating a B2C to B to C Improvement Cycle at Walmart Business

Art of Procurement

Whenever I find out that a company – or a person – decided to do something new in 2020 or. The post Creating a B2C to B to C Improvement Cycle at Walmart Business appeared first on Art of Procurement.

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Elevating internal customer support at Thorn with AWS: A generative AI use case

AWS Public Sector

Delivering top-notch internal customer support is crucial for nonprofit organizations. Efficiently addressing internal customer support tickets can profoundly impact an organization’s productivity and employee well-being, apart from their ability to focus on the mission at hand. To meet these demands, many nonprofits, including Thorn , are turning to innovative technology solutions.

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Native American Tribes Defend Their Very Heritage Against Ransomware

FedTech Magazine

For the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a tribe of nearly 40,000 in Shawnee, Okla., guarding against a potential loss of data related to its history, language and culture is a huge priority. That means protecting tribal history at CPN’s Cultural Heritage Center museum and data in the Tribal Rolls Department, which handles membership, including tribal enrollment, burial insurance and tribal ID cards.

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National Archives getting a big boost from AI to transform its search capabilities

FedScoop

In the pre-GPT era of artificial intelligence, there wasn’t a ton for the National Archives and Records Administration — and its billions of unstructured documents — to do with the technology. According to Gulam Shakir, NARA’s chief technology officer, those more nascent AI tools “did not really fit” with the agency’s needs — namely the processing and management of massive “free-form” datasets lacking any logical formatting or rules.

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International Public Procurement Conference 9: Umm Al Quwain, UAE

Public Procurement Intl

Photo: Umm Al Quwain – Rainer Strehl David Drabkin and Christopher Yukins presented on October 3, 2024 at the International Public Procurement Conference 9, a regular event which was held this year in the emirate of Umm Al Quwain in the United Arab Emirates. (Because of a surge in armed hostilities in the Gulf, they presented virtually.) Messrs.

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NSA’s Kristina Walter on How Cyber Has Changed the Battlefield

GovCon Wire

The nature of global conflict has changed, extending the battlefield beyond the physical realm and into the cyber domain. As physical barriers continue to fall and global tensions rise, the United States has recognized the need to master cyber combat, but so have its adversaries.

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Tips for Surviving in a Brave New World

Art of Procurement

In 1932, Aldous Huxley published the book Brave New World. At the time, the actual world was perched between World. The post Tips for Surviving in a Brave New World appeared first on Art of Procurement.

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AWS and USAID accelerate Armenia’s cloud journey and digital resilience

AWS Public Sector

During her visit to Armenia on July 10, 2024, Samantha Power, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator, announced $5 million in funding for a new public-private collaboration between USAID, the Government of Armenia, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The collaboration will be delivered through USAID’s Enterprises for Development, Growth, and Empowerment (EDGE) Fund , launched to leverage the private sector’s competitive edge to solve global challenges.

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Artificial Intelligence May Augment Diplomatic Data Security

FedTech Magazine

The State Department’s law enforcement arm, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, defends the department and the foreign affairs community by applying cybersecurity, technology security and law enforcement expertise to help advance U.S. foreign policy and safeguard national security interests. Specifically, the bureau’s Directorate of Cyber and Technology Security is responsible for ensuring tactical cyberdefense for all U.S. diplomats and data held by the department, spanning more than 260 locatio

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MITRE’s Federal AI Sandbox will focus on critical infrastructure, weather modeling, social services

FedScoop

MITRE, the federally funded operator of research and development centers on behalf of agencies, unveiled plans this week to train three new artificial intelligence foundation models in critical infrastructure, weather modeling and sustainable social services. The Federal AI Sandbox, a supercomputer, is expected to be capable of training large-scale foundation models and supportive of generative AI, multimodal perception systems and reinforcement learning decision aids, according to a Wednesday p

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OMB gives agencies new considerations when buying AI

Federal News Network

As artificial intelligence becomes more ingrained in all aspects of technology, agencies and vendors alike must consider new factors when it comes to buying these capabilities. In a new memo released today, the Office of Management and Budget outlined these considerations in three buckets: Proactively manage AI risk and performance Promote a competitive AI marketplace Create structures to govern and manage business processes related to acquiring AI in acquisition “This new memo provides agencies

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Building smarter, stronger communities with an AI-enhanced government workforce

American City & Country

There are an estimated 20.3 million public sector employees in the United States, representing a significant 13% of the country’s active workforce. The implications for turnover are staggering, as several thousand of these employees retire each year on average as others constantly join. Technologies once relied on to manage this process and reduce knowledge loss are no longer able to do so in an efficient, transparent way—skyrocketing costs, zapping institutional knowledge and worse.

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East and Gulf Coast Port Strike – Part 1

Art of Procurement

“Let me be clear: we don’t want any form of semi-automation or full automation. We want our jobs—the jobs we. The post East and Gulf Coast Port Strike – Part 1 appeared first on Art of Procurement.

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VA Releases RFI for AI Programs, Governance Support for Veterans

GovCon Wire

The Department of Veterans Affairs has issued a request for information to determine possible artificial intelligence programs and governance support to enhance services for veterans. According to the notice published on Sam.

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Q&A: GSA’s Chief AI Officer on the Future of Generative AI

FedTech Magazine

Zach Whitman, the General Services Administration’s chief AI officer and data scientist, reminds his colleagues that the GSA was one of the first agencies to adopt email and internet access for the government workplace. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that GSA has fully embraced experimenting with generative AI, an emerging technology that has similar potential to transform the workplace, Whitman says.

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Battling the food security crisis with Agents for Amazon Bedrock

AWS Public Sector

The 2024 version of the United Nations (UN) annual report The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World found that about 29.6 percent of the global population, or about 2.4 billion people, were moderately or severely food insecure in 2022, meaning they did not have adequate access to food. Food security can be caused by a number of factors, including poverty, inflationary factors, violent conflict, and the effects of climate change.

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Senate bill to create NSF-awarded AI challenges gets House companion

FedScoop

A Senate bill that would task the National Science Foundation with overseeing a multimillion-dollar competition on artificial intelligence innovations now has a House companion from the leaders of the chamber’s AI task force. The AI Grand Challenges Act from Reps. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Ted Lieu, D-Calif., announced in a press release Wednesday, pairs with the May bill from Sens.

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Expert: Internal combustion engines will be propelling fleet vehicles for many years to come

American City & Country

Public-sector fleet managers may want to consider delaying replacing their internal-combustion-engine (ICE) vehicles with electric vehicles/trucks (EVs) says Randall Taylor , CEO of The Fuel Ox , a global provider of fuel treatments and lubricants. For more than 10 years Taylor has led daily operations at the firm, which helps consumers and fleet managers reduce their footprint on the environment with bio-based, eco-friendly and almost completely toxin-free products.

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Supply Chains as Business in Action

Art of Procurement

We know supply chains are complex, but to truly understand how complex they are, and how they reached this point, The post Supply Chains as Business in Action appeared first on Art of Procurement.

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Boeing Awarded $6.9B Air Force Contract for Small Diameter Bomb Production

GovCon Wire

Boeing (NYSE: BA) has secured an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract valued up to $6.9 billion from the U.S. Air Force to manufacture and deliver small diameter bombs to the militaries of U.S., Japan, Bulgaria and Ukraine.

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Agencies Save the Day with Effective Backup and Recovery Solutions

FedTech Magazine

U.S. Navy IT leaders received notification from an aircraft carrier on deployment that the ship’s entire unclassified network was inoperable in April 2022. “The impact is tremendous,” says Jeff Myers, deputy program manager for PMW 160, the Navy’s tactical networking program office. The office oversees the Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services, or CANES, program, providing a tactical edge network for all ships and submarines in the Navy.

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DOJ Whistleblower Award Program has Received Over 200 Tips So Far

Whistleblower Network News

In August, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) launched its Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program. So far, the program has received over 200 whistleblower tips according to a DOJ official. On October 23, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Marshall Miller delivered remarks at the New York City Bar Association Compliance Institute. “In the first few months of the Justice Department’s whistleblower awards program, we’ve already received more than 200 tips,” he stated.

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Labor Department’s AI roadmap geared toward ‘worker empowerment’

FedScoop

The Department of Labor is spelling out how artificial intelligence can boost job quality without harming the rights of workers, releasing a roadmap this week that aims to empower workforces in underserved communities as use of the emerging technology proliferates. The 17-page document, titled “ Artificial Intelligence and Worker Well-Being: Principles and Best Practices for Developers and Employers ,” details eight key priorities for AI companies and management to follow that are intended to ke

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As cyber threats evolve, cities and counties need to safeguard staffers’ mobile devices

American City & Country

No question, more local governments are facing cyber threats in 2024, says Tim LeMaster, vice president, worldwide systems engineering at Lookout. His firm is a data-centric cloud security company. It uses a defense-in-depth strategy to address the different stages of modern cybersecurity attacks, which now start with infiltrations of mobile devices.

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Procurement 6 – October 25th, 2024

Art of Procurement

Procurement 6 is a short podcast from Art of Procurement that publishes in the Art of Procurement feed every Friday. The post Procurement 6 – October 25th, 2024 appeared first on Art of Procurement.

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Lockheed’s Sikorsky Receives $1.2B Army Contract Modification for UH-60M Helicopters

GovCon Wire

Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin subsidiary, has secured a $1.2 billion contract modification from the U.S. Army for the procurement of UH-60M helicopters. The Department of Defense said Monday the award covers UH-60M aircraft for foreign military sales to Australia, Brazil, Greece, Sweden and Thailand in fiscal 2025.

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Solving the Multicloud Security Puzzle with CSPM

FedTech Magazine

Cloud security posture management offers a lifeline to agencies struggling to implement cyber best practices, such as continuous monitoring, when going multicloud. The Senate’s consideration of the Multi-Cloud Innovation and Advancement Act of 2023, which would help agencies modernize and streamline their IT environments, also underscores these conflicting priorities amid increased multicloud adoption.

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Federal Court Declares False Claims Act’s Qui Tam Provision Unconstitutional

Whistleblower Network News

In a ruling that could shake up the landscape of whistleblower litigation, a federal district court struck down a key provision of the False Claims Act as unconstitutional. The decision, which came out on September 30, 2024, in United States ex rel. Clarissa Zafirov v. Florida Medical Associates, LLC , found that the FCA’s qui tam provisions violate the Appointments Clause of the U.S.

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ARPA-H wants information on autonomous AI systems for health care

FedScoop

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health is seeking information about how autonomous artificial intelligence systems, known as agentic AI, might be used in the health care space. A recent request for information posted by the Department of Health and Human Services agency specifically asks for information on implementations of agentic AI, how multiple agentic AI systems work together, scalability, risks, and how autonomy is decided, among other things.

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