Sean Gleason

Data is critical for a global connected U.S. Army, but as the service ingests data from disparate sources and battlefields all over the world, Army leaders want to ensure it is not inundated with data that it cannot use. “There’s too much damn data out there, and we can’t overload our warfighters and our leaders with too much data,” Army Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Young Bang said at an AUSA Cyber & Information Advantage Hot Topic event earlier this month. Michael Diorio, senior vice president of global operations at Dataminer, added that data can be collected from sources as diverse as sensors, tweets, videos, photos, audio broadcasts or transponders. As billions of data points are ingested to one location, the totality of information can give a clear picture of a location or event. “It’s been talked about for years that data is the oil, but at the same time, there wasn’t necessarily the technology to really analyze all this data, look at causal inference and then correlations. And so what we do with our large language models and foundation models is really look at the strength of signal that is happening around an event,” Diorio said.

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Intellisense Systems, Inc. has been awarded an AFWERX Strategic and Tactical Funding Increase (STRATFI/TACFI) contract by the United States Air Force to further advance its Integrated Weather Observation System (IWOS®). Addressing the most pressing weather challenges for the Department of the Air Force, the IWOS consolidates over a dozen key weather parameter sensors into a single, ruggedized, and innovative interlocking cylindrical design. A smaller, man-portable, tactical meteorological observing system (TMOS), the IWOS design enables end users to customize the system and monitor the exact weather parameters they need.  🔗 Find out more >> https://hubs.la/Q02xJHPk0 “The IWOS will soon be the most widely used tactical weather station for the Air Force. It supplies warfighters with a ruggedized, high-fidelity weather sensing solution in an innovative, small form-factor package.” - Christian Veeris, Vice-President of Corporate Business Development at Intellisense Systems. Read more on the Defense Advancement website. #weather #air #sensors #technology

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Must watch for anyone in UK and NATO Defence capability development, especially in the operational space: US Army - Enabling Modern Software Development and Acquisition Practices. Defence capability is data and software driven - established practices are outdated and WILL be changed. On 11 March the US Army published its directive to modernize its Software Development and Acquisition Practices. This is a really good insight into the logic and content of the directive which I highly recommend. "This policy represents a significant effort to comprehensively adjust our legacy software development processes in line with private sector best practices. These changes will fundamentally reshape how we develop and acquire software, making us more agile and innovative.” The Directive seeks to move Army practices away from waterfall and requirements driven practices (still at the core of most military software acquisition processes despite talk of agile) into a user led development through initiatives such as: high level capability needs statements, digital capability Centres of Excellence, agile testing and Authority to Operate (ATO). Adopt today!! #defencetransformation #digitaltransformation #multidomainoperations #MargaretBoatner #EdBarker

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In the Defense Department’s science and technology community, for example, investment lines are organized around portfolios of capabilities, such as electromagnetic warfare, communications, or command and control. The approach gives more flexibility to support a wide variety of development efforts. But on the acquisition side, the funds are tied to a particular program, limiting the ability to bring in commercial technologies more quickly. “The S&T set up their investment lines as portfolio lines. As soon as you get to the acquisition side, it’s like, ‘You’re building an F-35 and here is the PE for you to build an F-35, that’s it,'” Dave Tremper, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for acquisition integration and interoperability, said during the at the NDIA emerging technologies conference on Thursday. “The important subtlety there is that if you go to the S&T community, there’s a year of execution discretion on some of that portfolio investment. So if you go in and you say I need a new EW prototype, the portfolio PEs allow you to start investing in a new EW prototype based on the portfolio structure of the PEs.” “There is a conversation going on in the department right now about portfolio-based acquisition, which would start to line up more closely and I can move money between those programs. That’s a conversation that has been stimulated by Congress. The authorizers have asked the department to look at portfolio-based acquisition which would get you to that point where I can make dynamic changes in how we invest in acquisition programs between programs.”

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