Federal News Radio e-Book: Oracle Emerging Tech

EXPERT EDITION INSIDE THIS ISSUE: National Security Implications for AI How GSA Came Up With an Acquisition Time-Saver New Uses for Blockchain DoD’s AI Strategy B R O U G HT TO YO U BY:

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

SPONSORED CONTENT

CHATBOTS 101 Intelligent conversational chatbots are the new interfaces for these apps, and they are changing the way businesses and customers interact.

In the “Mobile-First” world, what type of app is used most widely and most often?

Messaging apps!

4.1 Billion users on messaging apps1

6 of the Top 10 most used apps globally are messaging apps1

CHATBOTS & AI: TWO TYPES OF ENGAGEMENT

NOTABLE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MILESTONES THE TURING TEST

1950

Alan Turing proposed “intelligent” machines would be indistinguishable from humans in text-only conversations

TASK ORIENTED (DECLARATIVE) Think of a more robust, interactive FAQ

DEEP BLUE

1997

2011

ALPHAGO

Defeated Garry Kasparov, Chess World Champion

Most common type of chatbot… so far

WATSON

User-initiated queries with automated responses and conversational menus

Defeated Ken Jennings & Brad Rutter, the two most successful contestants ever, in Jeopardy, but struggled on clues with few words

2016

Similar to Amazon’s Alexa or to Google Assistant Can monitor data, intent, & even initiate conversation; is contextually aware!

Personalized based on user profile and past user behavior

Uses Natural Language Processing, but not much Machine Learning

Uses Natural Language Processing & Machine Learning

Integrates with backend systems of record

LIBRATUS

Defeated Lee Sedol, “Go” World Champion, runner-up for Science’s “Breakthrough of the Year”

DATA-DRIVEN & PREDICTIVE (CONVERSATIONAL)

Defeated four professional poker players in a No-Limit Texas Hold’em tournament; learned how to bluff

Highly specialized & structured interactions

Predictive Intelligence and analytics based on collected data across use cases Integrates with Big Data sources

Most useful in the Support and Service industries

MESSAGING APPS: THE PERFECT CHANNEL FOR CHATBOTS POSSIBILITIES WITH CHATBOTS IN GOVERNMENT SOME OF THE AREAS IN WHICH CHATBOTS CAN HELP

24/7

65%

Consumers prefer using a messaging app when contacting a business2

BUSINESSES ARE FOLLOWING CUSTOMERS ONTO MESSAGING PLATFORMS

90% of businesses

use Facebook to respond to service requests4

5X: How much more often customers message a company than posting on its Facebook page4

The average messaging conversation is 66% longer than the average page conversation4

10 Hours: The average time it takes for a company to respond to a message4

50%

Consumers would make a purchase through a messaging app2

50

Over % Customers expect a business to be open 24/73

When will I get my financial aid?

What energy-saving tax credits are available to me?

What types of jobs are available in my area?

Show me any recalls on items I’ve purchased in the past 90 days.

Where can I find housing assistance for someone who is HIV positive?

I’d like to pay my parking ticket.

BUSINESSES UNDERSTAND THE VALUE OF SOCIAL MESSAGING CHANNELS

What time is the next bus?

What events and tours are taking place at the National Archives today?

Already 30,000 bots on Facebook & Kik5

What National Parks are in my state?

I’d like to apply for social benefits.

What’s the status of my tax refund?

What are the symptoms of Zika virus?

FIND OUT MORE

56% say engagement through messaging is ROI positive; 58% say it reduces costs4

VISIT: ORACLE.COM/BOTS

For more information on chatbots

Chatbots could save

$174 Billion

across Insurance, Financial Services, Sales, and Customer Service6

BI Intelligence, January 2016 and Statista, April 2016 “Fifty Essential Mobile Marketing Facts,” Forbes.com, November 12, 2013 “3 Stats That Show Chatbots Are Here To Stay,” Venturebeat.com, August 26, 2016 “Data: A Massive, Hidden Shift Is Driving Companies To Use A.I. Bots Inside Facebook Messenger,” BusinessInsider.com, May 12, 2016 [5] “Kik Users Have Now Sent Branded Chatbots Nearly 2 Billion Messages,” Adweek.com, August 4, 2016; “There Are Now More Than 11,000 Bots On Facebook Messenger,” TheVerge.com, July 1, 2016 [6] BI Intelligence, McKinsey & Company, and the US Office of Personnel Management, 2016 [1] [2] [3] [4]

Copyright © 2017, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Artificial Intelligence Proves Major Time Savings For Federal Employees…2 How GSA Turned an Automation Project into an Acquisition Time-Saver…4 Beyond Bitcoin: How Federal Agencies are Discovering New Uses for Blockchain…6 DARPA: NextGeneration Artificial Intelligence in the Works…10 GAO Shares Guidelines for Testing, Using AI At Federal Level…12 DoD Strategy for AI has Implications Ranging from Intel to Business Reform…14

Introduction The future is always now. When the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) first started its work in artificial intelligence in the 1960s, the future was now, even then.

Today, AI is used across multiple federal agencies, mainly to handle the volume and velocity of data that has been growing exponentially for years. Data that the nation’s security or federal acquisition process depends on.

In this Expert Edition: Emerging Technologies, we’ll explore how the General Services Administration, CIA and Bureau of Labor and Statistics are using AI to simplify or remove tedious, time-consuming or redundant tasks to free employees to work on more complex, mission-critical challenges. In the case of the Defense Department, its advanced research arm tested an autonomous ship that navigates without human oversight while in compliance with maritime law. Over at the Government Accountability Office, their experts are taking responsibility for sharing guidelines for AI’s ethical testing and use.

We’ll also explore the various new uses for the immutable distributed ledger called blockchain and how Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service is using it to manage government-issued laptops and phones.

The General Services Administration also is using blockchain to simplify the business process of Schedule 70 contracts.

One thing is certain for all of these emerging technologies, agencies are adopting and finding value in them at a much faster rate than we’ve seen with previous new, game-changing technologies.

Lisa Wolfe Editor-in-Chief FederalNewsRadio.com

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

1

Artificial Intelligence Proves Major Time Savings For Federal Employees

BY JORY HECKMAN

T

he phrase “artificial intelligence” can stir up a lot of panic at some federal agencies, and can give rise to the idea of intelligent machines putting some employees out of work.

However, some federal agencies are embracing the idea of artificial intelligence, and in those test cases, adopting machine learning comes down to a few key strategies like starting small and managing expectations.

While AI isn’t a panacea for every big-data problem in government, agency leaders say they see value in using machine learning to handle the most tedious aspects of handling data, which frees up human operators to address more mission-critical issues.

“Artificial intelligence is an imperative.

It’s not something that’s nice to have, or something that we should consider at some point,” Teresa Smetzer, the director of digital futures at the Central Intelligence Agency said during an event sponsored by Partnership for Public Service and the IBM Center for the Business of Government. “We have an enormous exponential growth in the amount of data, the variety of data, the velocity of data; and our nation’s security really depends on our ability to quickly understand what data we have, what it means and how we’re going to use it.”

While still in its early stages, artificial intelligence has received lots of buy-in from the private sector and the academic world. But Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas), a co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence Caucus on Capitol Hill, said the conversation around AI has not yet addressed the implications for lawmakers and the federal government.

2

“AI has the ability to provide lawmakers like me with up-to-date information, leading to better-informed decisions. And since AI never, ever forgets, its constant review of the effectiveness of policy gives lawmakers and government officials the opportunity to be proactive and address issues as they first crop up, and not wait to deal with them years and years later, when the problems get much, much, much bigger,” Olson said.

The key to going forward with new developments with AI, Olson said, includes protecting the privacy of individuals’ personal information in databases and educating the workforce to view artificial intelligence as a tool, and not as a competitor.

Mallory Barg Bulman, the vice president of research and evaluation at the Partnership for Public Service, said the rise of AI comes at a time when agencies face new technology-driven challenges, but haven’t received new funds or manpower to address them.

“We’re at a time in government where we’re not able to do more, with more,” Bulman said. “We’re really trying to look for that Option C. What is that other option? What is the way to do things differently to achieve critical outcomes?”

National Security Implication for AI

From a national security perspective, Smetzer said the CIA’s goal is to reach a stage where the intelligence community doesn’t just react to events, but also anticipates them. But to get there, the agency first has to make sense of the troves of incoming data it receives around the clock.

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

As the director of digital futures, Smetzer works closely with the private sector and universities to learn more about the cutting-edge uses of machine learning.

“Artificial intelligence is an imperative. It’s not something that’s nice to have, or something that we should consider at some point…”

largely been the story at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which used AI to compile data on workplace injuries.

For years, BLS employees have had to manually sort incoming descriptions of each injury case, including the names of occupations and industries.

— TERESA SMETZER, DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL FUTURES, CIA

“We’re trying to leverage really the investment, which has grown three or four times over the last few years,” she said.

While artificial intelligence has proven value in a number of case studies, Claude Yusti, a federal cognitive solutions leader at IBM, cautioned viewing machine learning as the end-all-be-all solution for federal IT. “No one sets out to do AI projects. That’s not the ambition,” Yusti said. “The ambition is, people have problems to solve, and a lot of times they’ve been stymied in terms of how far they can get with a solution. And the question is, what is the difference that AI brings to the equation that makes problems go away better, more effectively?”

In the case of the CIA, selling AI as the solution to technology challenges has meant taking an incremental approach.

“Start small with incubation, do proofs of concept, evaluate multiple technologies [and] multiple approaches. Learn from that and then expand on that. That’s the approach we’ve taken,” Smetzer said. “We have the advantage that we made a strategic investment four or five years ago into a cloud computing environment … but we still have a lot of work to do when it comes to the data and the expertise, and really solving our mission-use cases and problems.”

Al Holds Potential to Reduce Tedious Tasks

While AI does have national security implications, it can also be used by civilian federal agencies to reduce workers’ time on more tedious tasks. That has

“But as you can imagine, there’s millions of these data points, and so to figure out how to classify them was typically a human process that took a lot of time,” said William Wiatrowski, the acting BLS commissioner.

In one year alone, BLS saw more than 2,000 different job titles for a position that could generally be described as a janitor or cleaner. While making sense of all those titles would be a tedious task for a BLS employee, AI has reduced that burden on the bureau’s workers.

“Traditionally, we would have staff that would review that data by hand, and would determine that they belonged in Occupation Code X, which is the janitor and cleaner. That’s something that we can now use machine learning to improve the consistency,” Wiatrowski said.

In order to build momentum for machine learning at federal workplaces, Richard Ikeda, the director of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Research Information Systems, agreed that the theme of starting small is the way to go.

“At NIH, there’s the enterprise-level IT systems, which would be an expensive place to basically integrate an AI system. But you can start with the institutes and centers themselves, where they have an issue that they need to tackle that takes a lot of time. And they have a little more flexibility than the enterprise does, and they can experiment and start small with a problem, and then find out if it’s successful or not and move it to the enterprise,” he said.

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

3

How GSA Turned an Automation Project into an Acquisition Time-Saver

BY JORY HECKMAN

A

s the federal government looks to modernize the way it buys things, making the process faster and cost-effective, the General Services Administration is looking at ways to automate aspects of the automation process.

Jeff Lau, the acting regional commissioner for the Northeast and Caribbean region of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, says robotic process automation (RPA) could save the acquisition workforce from having to waste time on administrative “cutting and pasting” tasks.

Those automation tools, he said, could help contracting officers at a time when the workforce is shrinking.

“I’ve seen the workforce shrink over the last fiveto-ten years. When I first started my career at GSA, there was a lot more opportunity to do training. Now we’re heads-down, doing the work, because if they’re not doing the work, who else is? I think there’s an opportunity for us to provide training with their freedup time, to develop them into a more well-rounded acquisition workforce,” Lau said at a recent event sponsored by the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC).

A few cases of small-scale AI applications already exist in government. In 2015, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services launched “Emma,” a virtual assistant that directs website users to online services.

USCIS borrowed the concept from the Army, which has “Sgt. Star,” an AI assistant that answers questions on the service’s recruiting website GoArmy.com.

4

But at GSA, Lau said he thinks AI could give contracting officers more time to work on projects with a higher return on investment.

“From an employee engagement standpoint… I’m no longer spending most of my day cutting and pasting addresses or telephone numbers. I’m doing important, high ROI stuff, such as contract negotiations, engagement with industry and customers, and really making themselves a better contracting workforce. We all benefit from that,” Lau said.

For his first automation test case, Lau said he had his RPA tool do a validation of whether or not a vendor was eligible to do business with the government.

“We were able to have the bot pull a DUNS number from an offer, go to the website, run validation, print PDF results, drop it in an email,” Lau said.

Done manually, Lau estimated this task would’ve taken an employee about 15 minutes. But for the AI application, it only took 10 seconds.

For his second test case, Lau had the automation tool pull information from vendor offers on websites and populate them into a pre-negotiation memo.

That process, Lau said, would’ve taken a contracting officer 22 minutes, but only took 20 seconds for the computer.

Pitching the Pilot

When he started out, Lau said he had zero funding.

What he did have was a laptop and a free RPA software demo. Lau knew how the acquisition process worked, and he had a coworker on his team who took

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

programming in college.

But pretty soon, his team got results.

“Over the course of 20-30 hours, we had tangible results.

We developed two use cases using RPA software against our schedules program,” Lau said.

Lau’s team had a great proof of concept, but he needed to sell the idea to GSA management.

And shortly thereafter, he got his opportunity.

“If you’re just taking a broken, old process and slapping RPA on it, all you’re going to have is a faster, broken process... We’re not taking people out of the process, we’re taking the robot out of the people themselves and freeing it up so people can focus more of their time on what they do best…”

— JUSTIN HERMAN, EMERGING CITIZEN TECHNOLOGY INTERAGENCY PROGRAM LEAD, GSA

At a quarterly FAS Leadership Council meeting, Lau gave 30 GSA executives a live demonstration of his RPA pilot.

systems, in the cloud — will make their life easier and they can do more challenging work.”

“I ran this demo live, and I showed the software on the screen, pressed the ‘run’ button, and within 10 seconds, everyone’s email on their phones was buzzing. Everyone looked down and I said, ‘Check your email.’ And when they opened their email, the bot had sent them the results of the test,” Lau said.

But AI isn’t the end-all-be-all.

Automation, Lau said, could really help his employees do their jobs better. But a lot of people, in and out of government, think automation could replace their jobs.

In order to assuage some fears, Lau ran his AI demonstration during a town hall meeting with his entire contracting workforce — the people whose jobs this would impact. After the demo, Lau said his employees were pretty happy with the results.

“The reaction wasn’t, ‘Oh my god, robots are going to take over.’ The conversation really was about what else we can automate. There are these pain points in my day that I have to do, and they’re required to do, but it’s really administrative in nature. And they were looking forward to that opportunity where they could focus on those higher ROI things,” Lau said.

“Robotics isn’t going to take over their job. Rather, it’s going to augment the work. Having a digital employee sit alongside of them — not actually there, but in the

Automation Won’t Fix Everything Justin Herman, GSA’s emerging citizen technology interagency program lead, said a lot of agencies have been asking about robotics process automation.

Herman said he’s cautioned them that RPA isn’t a onesize-fits-all solution.

“If you’re just taking a broken, old process and slapping RPA on it, all you’re going to have is a faster, broken process,” Herman said.

However, Herman added that automation does have the power to give contracting officers more time to do the job for which they’re paid.

“There’s a lot of focus on, ‘Are we automating people?’

We’re not taking people out of the process, we’re taking the robot out of the people themselves and freeing it up so people can focus more of their time on what they do best… Once you take some of these menial tasks out of the way, once there’s analysis already being done, that perhaps you had teams doing before, now it’s already taken care of, what are some of those other challenges at the table that now, with our limited resources, we can tackle,” Herman said.

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

5

Beyond Bitcoin: How Federal Agencies are Discovering New Uses for Blockchain

BY DAVID THORNTON

6

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

Y

ou rarely hear blockchain mentioned outside of the context of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency taking Wall Street by storm. That’s because the concept was created to make cryptocurrencies possible.

But defining it that narrowly would be like calling the internet: a system to allow Defense Department computers to communicate. Just because that’s how it was conceived doesn’t mean that’s all of which it’s capable.

“So at the core, the blockchain is a ledger,” Mark White, chief technologist at Deloitte Consulting, told Federal Drive with Tom Temin. “Think of a general ledger.

Think of an accounts payable or accounts receivable ledger. Think of perhaps a non-financial ledger like a list of land records or a list of professional licenses.”

By breaking blockchain down to its core concept, federal agencies are coming up with new uses for the innovation. Ledgers are an important tool in the bureaucrat’s repertoire. Agencies use them to keep records, like birth certificates or veterans’ benefits.

They track fixed assets like vehicles, office furniture, even offices themselves, and the value of those assets.

Blockchain is a ledger system that allows each individual, group or agency to keep their own copy of the record, yet still ensure that the copies match.

And that’s the point of blockchain, White said. It’s the digital equivalent of a trusted third party, certifying transactions are completed in the way that every party agreed to.

“So what if those records were in a distributed ledger so that you could digitally access them?” White asked. “You would know that they’re the truth, and in fact, they come with a thumbprint, a cryptographic signature to certify that they’re the truth. It’s the same as a notarized document, but you can access it freely

from wherever you are. You can then distribute it digitally for whatever purposes.”

John Hill, assistant commissioner of financial innovation and transformation at the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, is looking at ways to improve efficiencies in internal accounting and control operations with blockchain. He said it could be a new and more effective way of performing the tasks that currently use databases.

“I think another way to look at it is it’s a networked solution and that blockchain essentially, instead of having the controls centralized in one spot where you’re always reconciling against a single ledger, this puts the responsibility for multiple ledgers across a network, so that they are always sort of crosschecking each other and the actual truth or the absolute information resides across that network,” Hill said.

Hill is working alongside Craig Fischer, a program manager for the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, to implement blockchain to manage physical assets like government-issued laptops and phones.

“We take a lot of time and effort trying to make sure that the right equipment is in the right hands,” Fischer said. “We are trying to understand if blockchain technology can help improve efficiencies around that and streamline it a bit more because there is a lot of hype around this technology and I think we’re trying to understand where the applicability is and how it can actually make processes and inventory more efficient.”

Fischer said they are working with open-source software and grappling with the decentralized nature of the technology, both of which come with a learning curve. But that’s really the point of the experiment: Fischer and Hill aren’t actively trying to replace the current system, but instead to learn how that might be

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

7

done. And once they’ve accomplished that, they intend to share what they’ve learned across the financial management community. Their current goal for the experiment is a proof of concept.

each entity coming in through the blockchain in an immutable way. But we only keep the information that’s on the chain itself that we need to automate so that the chain can operate flexibly and very lightly.”

For example, Fischer said the experiment has shown that anyone planning on moving to blockchain needs to have an extensive understanding of current processes. Integrating blockchain will change many of these processes, and that knowledge will be fundamental both to placing relevant items on the chain, and indexing to items that are off-chain.

Arrieta said blockchain has the potential to help make contracting more efficient, simultaneously delivering value to the taxpayer, lessening the burden on industry and freeing up contracting professionals from process-oriented tasks so they can spend more time focusing on critical thinking.

This is something that Jose Arrieta, now deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and senior procurement executive at the Department of Health and Human Services, discovered while experimenting with using blockchain for contracts at the General Services Administration, when he was the director of contract operations for the Schedule 70 IT program.

Arrieta and his team at GSA studied the business process of Schedule 70 contracts — what vendors had to go through to get the contracts established — and identified the two longest processes in what Arrieta called the “optimal path” — financial analysis of the company and the prenegotiation memorandum. They then instituted blockchain by putting everything in a distributed ledger and redesigned the user interfaces so that industry only has to enter the information once instead of logging into multiple systems, and ran microservices to automate the processes.

But Arrieta found that blockchain becomes less efficient when more information exists in the chain.

“What we did to combat that is we actually took anything that was heavy, whether it’s pictures or whether it was a video, and we got drafted into a database called Mongo DB,” he said. “It’s also immutable. And so the database has information on 8

“From a cost perspective, we believe this will lower the direct costs of analyzing a proposal by close to 80 percent,” Arrieta said. “That’s not proven yet; we still have to build out the rest of the microservices so that much of the business process is automated, but our goal is actually to get the onboarding time from scheduled contractors from 110 days through our normal process and 40 days through our fast-lane process to less than 10 days.”

And that kind of creation of smart-contracts, White said, is the third possible use of blockchain, after value exchange and records-keeping.

“So rather than recreate the copy multiple times, you have a data layer that all stakeholders have a view into,” Arrieta said. “From a GSA perspective, we control what our market participants have a view into, because there are certain rules associated with what an industry partner can see. We’re not going to share multiple industry partners’ information with each other. But it’s not actually multiple databases with copies. It’s one transparent view that multiple stakeholders can see in real time, and is a record of all interactions with one another.”

But that’s also a point where things can get sticky. If everyone simultaneously has access to the blockchain, who owns it, and who owns the data?

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

“Who owns the blockchain is one of these true headhurting things,” White said. “It’s so often the case that we’ll get in discussions with people about a great use-case opportunity, we describe who’s in the ecosystem, who would participate, what the value proposition is, how we might implement it and then the question comes, ‘Now are we going to own the chain? Who’s going to own the chain?’ And so, in point of fact, the ecosystem collectively owns the chain.

That’s a hard thing to get your head around. And so one of the barriers is this is truly a shift change in how I might engineer a business process, how I might even disrupt a mission process. And in certain cases, in these most advanced cases, how I might create a new marketplace.”

Fischer, Hill and Arrieta are some of the first federal employees to begin experimenting with this new concept. Arrieta is waiting on feedback from stakeholders before moving forward, while Hill and Fischer are operating in a more experimental capacity. But as they share their lessons learned, more questions like that of ownership will likely spring up just as quickly as new use-case scenarios.

“We think that blockchain and the distributed consensus ledger will and should have the same sort of impact that the World Wide Web has had,” White said. “Therefore, it falls on us to say, ‘So what mission process could I improve, change or invent? I can do it better. I can do it fundamentally differently or I can do something inherently new with this system capability, the solution that is blockchain.’”

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

9

Chatbots: The Key to Government’s Customer Service Needs?

Federal agencies historically have had a challenge with customer service. The demand for meaningful interaction from constituents on a daily basis has far outpaced agencies’ ability to keep up. In fact, some agencies have reported that while assistance to their constituents often receives positive feedback, overall dissatisfaction of citizens who failed to get timely attention for important inquiries undermines their efforts. So how can agencies bridge this gap?

Oracle can help these agencies in deploying “chatbots” — computer programs that simulate human interaction and conversation through machine learning and AI technologies. Still not clear? Think Alexa, Siri, messaging applications, or any of the other digital assistants THIS CONTENT PRESENTED BY that are becoming more common in the technology marketplace.

“This is being considered as a strategy to provide citizens with additional channels to interact with government and provide the information required,” said Franco Amalfi, director of

innovation for Oracle Public Sector North America. “A lot of the questions government agencies get are very repetitive in nature and take a lot of time to respond to. If, somehow, agencies can redirect these generic inquires to a page on the website or a FAQ document, it saves a great deal of time and resources, and allows government employees to focus on individuals who need immediate attention.”

On the flip side, Chatbots offer a range of capabilities, including: •

Simple question and answer functions

•

Taking specific actions defined by databases

•

Sustaining complex conversations

•

Adapting to personal circumstances

More importantly, every time chatbots interact with customers, they get smarter and smarter.

This provides significant value to federal agencies in a number of ways. It offers 24/7 customer service – something consumers are increasingly coming to expect – without increasing staffing costs. So, for example, military service members deployed overseas would be able to find specific information about their benefits without having to worry about time zones and office hours. In fact, using chatbots, the application process itself could be automated.

Chatbots can also ease the burden of agencies with seasonal peak workflows, like the busy tax season for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

INSIGHT BY ORACLE

Even during normal business hours, they can help deflect calls from contact centers, helping to boost customer satisfaction ratings and saving DAN KUENZIG, agencies money. They SMARTER can also help agencies GOVERNMENT monetarily because PROGRAM the cost of ownership DIRECTOR FOR ORACLE is lower than standard mobile apps, which many government agencies are working to create.

Dan Kuenzig, program director for Oracle’s Smarter Government, said there are millions of applications on the app stores. The average citizen has between 30 and 50 apps on their phone, but only a small percentage get used on a daily basis – and most of them are messaging apps. In fact, 6 out of the top 10 apps in Google and Apple app stores are messaging apps, according to Statista, April 2016.”

“Oracle Chatbots Service can meet the citizen on social and organic channels, providing services that use something they inherently know how to use,” Kuenzig said. “There’s no downloading, no learning the app interface, no finding the app on your phone. You can access everything through the same experience.”

Federal agencies are already starting to take notice. According to Amalfi, the General Services Administration (GSA) hosted an AI Pilot program on these technologies in 2016. There were 10+ federal agencies in attendance that year. Now, close to two years later, more than 300 agencies have expressed interest, and GSA’s Office of Emerging Technologies is looking closely at pilot programs.

“It’s not that government lags behind the private sector; it’s more that government has different needs than the private sector,” Amalfi said. “GSA

FRANCO AMALFI, DIRECTOR OF INNOVATION, ORACLE PUBLIC SECTOR NORTH AMERICA

is looking at what the private sector is doing and all these trends, and they’re finding innovative ways of addressing agencies’ unique requirements.”

In addition to offering a holistic enterprise perspective, Oracle’s solutions are particularly valuable to federal agencies due to their ability to handle complex citizen conversations and clearly explain the decisions derived from them. Consistency across channels is important; customers need to get the same answers to the same questions.

That’s one of the reasons Oracle has introduced Chatbot Cloud Service to its suite of mobile cloud tools. Essentially, this will help build trust and public adoption in these new technologies.

Oracle is also sensitive to privacy concerns, especially in the current environment where agencies and citizens alike are increasingly concerned about data security. That’s why Oracle has structured its chatbot architecture in such a way that there are two tiers of interaction: anonymous and authenticated.

Most interactions, where customers are simply seeking information, whether about an application process or benefit eligibility, would be anonymous. But more personal interactions, like financial services, would be fully authenticated and secure. This level of granularity sets Oracle Chatbot Cloud Service apart.

“We have architected our solution to make sure that we address security from the get-go,” Amalfi said.

Learn More About Chatbots at www.oracle.com/bots

INSIGHT BY ORACLE

DARPA: Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence in the Works

BY JORY HECKMAN

T

he head of the Defense Department’s advanced research arm pushes back on concerns that countries like Russia or China could soon outpace the U.S. on artificial intelligence developments.

Steven Walker, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, told reporters that DARPA, which has worked on artificial intelligence since its inception in the 1960s, will play a leading role in developing the nextgeneration of AI breakthroughs.

While federal agencies over the past few years have looked at using AI to bolster cybersecurity or reduce the human work-hours on redundant tasks, DARPA has found major applications for AI in the defense community.

Walker’s comments came in response to claims made by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, early this year that near-peer adversaries, like Russia or China, could overtake the U.S. when it comes to new AI developments.

10

“I don’t think we’re falling behind. DARPA certainly is investing in the next generation of AI pretty heavily,” Walker said at an event hosted by the Defense Writers Group.

Earlier this month, DARPA completed its end of an autonomous ship project called Sea Hunter and handed it over to the Office of Naval Research. DARPA outfitted the ship with software and sensors to help it navigate without human oversight, while still complying with maritime law.

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

In light of these achievements, Walker said DARPA is developing the nextgeneration of AI, aimed at addressing some of the critical gaps he’s seen with the cutting edge of modern artificial intelligence.

Walker said DARPA has several programs working on developing third-wave AI.

“These are a very nascent effort and basic research efforts, but they’re going to be important if you want the warfighter to trust the machine and trust the answer the machine If you change the data that is giving the warfighter they’re trained on, you put new to help him or her make a decision,” he said. data into the system, into the

Walker described the current generation of AI as its “second wave,” which has led to breakthroughs like autonomous vehicles. database, they tend to start to Why Other By comparison, “first fail.

They can be tricked easily.

Countries Don’t wave” applications, Have DARPA like tax preparation — STEVEN WALKER, DIRECTOR, DARPA Before becoming software, follow simple DARPA’s director, Walker logic rules and are served as the agency’s widely used in consumer technology. deputy director for more than four years. Over the last While second-wave AI technology has the potential to, few years, he’s been working to help countries like for example, control the use of the electromagnetic South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, France and spectrum on the battlefield, Walker said the tools Germany develop their own versions of DARPA. aren’t flexible enough to adapt to new inputs.

“One thing I want to make clear is I actually support “They’re trained on massive data sets, they do a great our allies and partners trying to stand up a DARPA,” job in pattern recognition and looking for images …

Walker said. but they’re still very brittle. If you change the data that While those efforts have not yet panned out, Walker they’re trained on, you put new data into the system, said a key to DARPA’s success in the U.S. has been its into the database, they tend to start to fail. They can rapid influx of new talent. be tricked easily. There are lots of folks looking at how you would trick an AI system, we’re starting to look “Every culture’s different though. So I think one of the at that, and from the initial things I’ve seen, it doesn’t reasons why it works here is compared to some other take a lot to trick an AI system. We have more work to countries, we have a risk-taking culture. We have folks do, I think, in second wave, in terms of making them who are willing to come to a place, have a job for more robust,” Walker said. three years and then get booted out, which is actually what happens. … We get new people in the door with The third wave of AI will rely on contextual adaptation new ideas all the time who are not bound by 10, 20, — having a computer or machine understand the 30-year-old thinking,” he said. context of the environment it’s working in, and being able to learn and adapt based on changes in that environment.

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

11

GAO Shares Guidelines for Testing, Using AI At Federal Level

BY AMELIA BRUST

I

mplementing artificial intelligence at federal agencies requires emphases on safety, ethics and testing. Timothy Persons, chief scientist at the Government Accountability Office, said regulators need to be a part of preliminary conversations as departments consider AI’s applications in their own operations.

So far, the software is mostly used in datacrunching or customer service capacities. But some agencies such as the Defense Department are eager to expand AI’s scope.

Participants at a spring 2018 GAO forum on AI highlighted several policy issues they believe require further attention, as well as areas warranting further research.

GAO’s comptroller general held a forum last month to discuss the possibilities of federal AI applications, as outlined in the agency’s report to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Persons told the Federal Drive with Tom Temin Congress wants a forwardlooking approach when it comes to AI for economic as well as regulatory purposes.

12

“They want to have a prospective look at what’s emerging in this area,” he said. “This is obviously a key technological development that’s having tremendous impact on all sectors of the economy and the public sector.”

The common concern — that AI will replace human jobs — is something that Jeff Lau, acting regional commissioner for the Northeast and Caribbean region of General Service Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service, discussed at an event sponsored by the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC). He said automation tools can help relieve employees of menial tasks, but people will likely still have to do more difficult work.

Persons said last month’s forum included people from academic and nonprofit circles who have studied potential AI applications in criminal justice and automobile safety. Regulators interested in gauging checks on the technology were also present.

“We like to have that cross-sectoral conversation because the federal nexus is quite important and all these various agencies have a particular role,

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

but it’s much broader in terms of what’s happening in the private sector and what needs to happen in terms of education and other nonprofit activities,” Persons said.

He used self-driving vehicles as an example of the collaboration needed to utilize AI. With automated vehicles, safety is paramount and the machines must adhere to both federal and state transportation statutes. Persons recommended testing the vehicles in “regulatory sandboxes” where regulators can determine what questions or standards to enforce on tech developers.

He also said AI could help with the constant challenges of cybersecurity. AI has the potential to help human operators, of which Persons said the public and private sectors will never have enough, to monitor networks and deal with other problems.

“The key issue is doing it in a reliable way,” he said.

“How do you do it while preserving personal privacy and constitutional civil liberties at the same time?”

“You can have the best algorithm and if you don’t have quality data or sufficient data, unbiased data, then no algorithm will be unable to overcome that,” … “You need to have a robust research development and testing environment. And that’s entirely possible in today’s computational world.”

Calculating AI’s risks

On the latter point, Persons said ethics are a major concern regarding AI. Algorithms can have unintended consequences that conflict with constitutional values of equal opportunity and other protections, he said.

“There’s just a need to look at things and get explainability on the algorithms so you can ask the question of why did you come out with this answer, given these inputs?” he said.

Another ethical concern is bias in the data that drives the algorithms of AI. Those biases may be unintended, but programmers will need an “appropriate sampling of data,” whether for criminal justice or financial systems.

“You can have the best algorithm and if you don’t have quality data or sufficient data, unbiased data, then no algorithm will be unable to overcome that,” Persons said. “And conversely if you have great data but your algorithm isn’t good or the weighting factors are wrong in various things then that also can compound things.”

To avoid that, Persons said agencies should create an AI testing environment that fosters innovation, can be contained and takes ethical risks into account.

Persons said those who conduct AI tests for federal agencies should ask themselves what is the goal and what ethical norms need to be reinforced, he said.

“This isn’t something you just take and throw right into mission operations right away,” he said. “You need to have a robust research development and testing environment. And that’s entirely possible in today’s computational world.”

— TIMOTHY PERSONS, CHIEF SCIENTIST, GAO

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

13

DoD Strategy for AI has Implications Ranging from Intel to Business Reform

BY JARED SERBU

T

here are a myriad of organizations in DoD that have a major interest in developing and using artificial intelligence but, until now, no coordinated strategy across the department to share lessons and avoid duplication of effort. That’s beginning to change, officials say.

The realization of the need for such a strategy set in last fall, when, as part of the process of developing the 2018 National Defense Strategy, DoD research leaders began to assess the specific AI and machine learning projects that were already underway throughout the department.

“We were surprised by the breadth that this area has expanded, because everybody has a way to use artificial intelligence — they can envision it,” Mary Miller, the acting assistant secretary of Defense for research and engineering told the House Armed Services Committee last week. “We started doing weekly meetings with people within the Department of Defense, over 40 organizations, over 150 people typically in any given week, that come to talk about what they are doing and how they are investing in what their needs are. Through this effort, we have been trying to shape an understanding of what we are spending our resources on and then trying to organize those efforts into something that would apply to National Defense Strategy and where we need to go.”

The unclassified version of the strategy offers few specifics about DoD’s precise ambitions for AI, other 14

than to say the department plans to make more investments in the field “including rapid application of commercial breakthroughs, to gain competitive military advantages.” The spending is part of an overall $18 billion increase for science and technology spending DoD requested in its 2019 budget proposal.

But Miller said the development of the new AI roadmap is being organized along several lines of effort, including developing a workforce that understands AI, employing it to improve the military’s command and control systems, conduct intelligence analysis and find ways to team humans with machines in pursuit of a given mission.

She said the ultimate goal is to increase the military’s lethality, but that doesn’t mean the strategy won’t consider ways to use AI in back-office business areas.

“The more we can save through our business reform, the more we can spend on achieving and attaining that lethality that he desires of the Department of Defense,” Miller said. “So we’re looking at, how do you apply AI to not only training and education, but finances, the medical field, and what we do in contracts acquisition and legal activities?”

The development of a new strategy for AI is far from the first time the department has publicly raised it as a major priority. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and “human-machine teaming” were major cornerstones of the “third offset” strategy DoD officials

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

first embarked on in 2014 amid concerns that the U.S. military was at risk of losing its technological edge to potential adversaries, including Russia and China.

But military officials have been speaking in increasingly worried tones about the prospect of other nations making critical advances in AI before the U.S. does, and then applying them to warfighting.

“Simply put, I would characterize it as what you may roughly know as a revolution in military affairs,” Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, President Trump’s nominee to be the next commander of U.S. Cyber Command said at a confirmation hearing earlier this month. “I mean, this is a game changer for our adversaries if they get to artificial intelligence, if they get to quantum computing before we’re there. This is why it’s so critical that we continue our research, continue our work towards it.”

“What’s especially worrisome is that China in particular does not have the same bureaucratic impediments the U.S. does when it comes to transitioning new technologies from the private sector or academia into military use, said Rear Adm. David Hahn, the chief of naval research. That’s a fact of life in all areas of technology development, not just when it comes to machine learning and AI,” he said.

“There are no structural impediments. They’ve lubricated their system to a point where if a direction is given to move it, it goes,” Hahn said. “By design, we don’t enjoy that same kind of streamlined system, and I’m not saying we need to change our design in the manner China has.

But we certainly do need to think through how we’re going to do this differently so that the great work that’s done on the S&T side

of the business — and that we see every single day in our personal lives – when it comes time to apply it to naval warfighting or the joint fight, we’ve got good pathways to get it there. That’s the part that worries me: our ability or inability to move at speed.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the chairwoman of the House Emerging Threats and Capabilities subcommittee said she intends to introduce legislation later this week that’s meant to begin that thinking process, and force a new look at how the U.S. government is organized to “understand and leverage AI.” “Russia has increased their basic research budget by nearly 25 percent, and the Chinese have nationallevel plans for science and technology, as well as an approach to lead the world in artificial intelligence by 2030,” she said. “All of these signs point to top-down, government-driven agendas that provide resources and roadmaps for strategic collaboration between industry, academia, and civil society. These efforts could propel Russia and China to continue to leap ahead in many technology sectors, but adversarial dominance is not a forgone conclusion.”

China in particular does not have the same bureaucratic impediments the U.S. does when it comes to transitioning new technologies from the private sector or academia into military use...

That’s the part that worries me: our ability or inability to move at speed.”

— REAR ADMIRAL DAVID HAHN, CHIEF OF NAVAL RESEARCH

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

15

EXPERT EDITION

16

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

FEDERAL NEWS RADIO EXPERT EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY