The Wrap: NSF Chief Pleads for AI, Quantum; Gauging AI Election Threat; New DISA Boss

Welcome to The Wrap for Monday, August 5!

From the newsroom at MeriTalk, it’s the quickest read in Federal tech news. Here’s what you need to know today:

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NSF Chief Pleads for AI, Quantum Funding

If the U.S. wants to avoid playing catch-up with the world like it’s doing now with domestic semiconductor capacity, it needs to start pouring more resources into artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing technologies. That was the pointed message on Friday from National Science Foundation (NSF) Director Sethuraman Panchanathan , who said at a CSIS event that the U.S. must act now to significantly ramp up its investments in AI and quantum in order to “leapfrog” other nations.

“To realize the full scale of what we really intend to do as a nation, it requires significant investment,” Panchanathan said. “We need … appropriations because we cannot lose time.” He continued, “this is something that NSF is intensely focused on, I call it intentionality with intensity … but we need those resources, and done in a very timely way so that we can actually outcompete and outperform.” Referring to the CHIPS and Science Act’s $52 billion of funding to reestablish domestic advanced semiconductor-making capacity, the NSF chief said, “in semiconductors, we are trying to put on the Band-Aids for something that we lost a couple of decades ago.” He added, “we should never get ourselves in a position of having to put on any Band-Aid for AI or quantum or biotech or advanced manufacturing.”

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Gauging AI Election Threat

The U.S. Department of Justice is surveying the election interference front and seeing potential misuse of AI tech – along with ongoing efforts by foreign adversaries to sow distrust and confusion about election processes – as among the most pressing concerns leading up to the November elections, according to Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco who talked about the threat landscape on Aug. 2 during an address to the American Bar Association in Chicago. Monaco called the misuse of AI “perhaps the most disruptive and novel threat to our democratic process,” and said it’s possible that a range of harms could result. Those include threatening election workers, allowing bad actors to hide their identities, providing “new avenues to misinform and threaten voters through deepfakes that contain altered video or cloned audio,” and?fostering “new methods to recruit and radicalize with incendiary social media content and online harassment and hate.” On the plus side, Monaco also talked about the actions that Federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies are taking to counter those threats, and said, “we have confronted challenging periods before and persevered.”

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New DISA Boss Approaching

The Senate on July 31 voted to confirm the nomination of Army Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton to become the new director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), succeeding Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner as DISA chief and as commander of the Joint Force Headquarters - Department of Defense Information Network (JFHQ-DODIN) . President Biden announced the nomination of Stanton in June. Last Friday, Gen. Stanton cleared the way for the move by handing over command of the U.S. Army Cyber Center of Excellence (CCoE) to Maj. Gen. Ryan Janovic, who previously served director of operations for U.S. Cyber Command .

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Air Force Cyber Chief

Elsewhere on the military cybersecurity landscape, Lt. Gen. Thomas Hensley officially took command of the United States Air Force ’s information warfare command on Aug. 1, following his nomination by President Biden in May to lead the 16th Air Force (Air Force Cyber). Air Force Cyber is the service branch’s integrated information warfare organization, and its creation is the result of one of the first in a series of reorganizations across the military to address the disparate functions of information warfare. Hensley succeeds Lt. Gen. Kevin B. Kennedy, who is retiring after more than 34 years of service.

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Once again, let’s “call IT a day,” but we'll bring you more tomorrow. Until then please check the MeriTalk breaking news website throughout the day for the latest on government IT people, process, and policy. And finally, please hit the news tip jar [with leads, breaking news, or simply your two cents] at [email protected].