The Buzz with ACT-IAC

This week, join the Buzz for a journey to the distant past of 2011. Over a decade ago, ACT-IAC's ELC Conference featured a keynote from Steve VanRoekel, who served as Federal CIO from 2011-2014. In his presentation, entitled "Our Moment", VanRoekel discussed the federal IT priorities of the day, the opportunities to involve the private sector in improving government services, and wh...

Welcome to  “How Government Built This,” a six-part podcast and blog post series developed by the Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service Office of Financial Innovation and Transformation (FIT) in collaboration with The Buzz with ACT-IAC. This week, host Jesrael Lopez is joined by Dr. Michael Valivullah, Chief Technology Officer at the US Department of Agriculture. Michael's...

This week, The Buzz presents a follow-up from last month's episode exploring the basics of digital services in Estonia. In this episode, we'll hear more about e-Estonia from someone who had a significant role in building it. Taavi Kotka helped expand Estonian e-governance when he became the nation's first Chief Information Officer in 2014. He was subsequently named European CIO of t...

Artificial Intelligence technologies continue to develop in leaps and bounds with each passing year, and their impact on our lives will only become more salient as these tools increase in complexity and variety. Though AI applications have the potential to revolutionize nearly every sector of the economy, they also carry significant risks that will require careful thought and intentional design to...

This week, The Buzz with ACT-IAC presents a session from the 2022 Emerging Technology and Innovation Conference. This panel features a discussion among agency CIO's and industry leaders about how emerging AI tools are being used to manage data and guide decision making, as well as the limitations of AI in the government sphere. Speakers: Lexy Guenther (Moderator) - VP & CTO, Civil Enterpr...

After a storied, four-decade career in federal IT, Deputy Federal CIO Maria Roat retired in March of this year. Maria spent 25 years in the Navy and Naval Reserve, then served in leadership roles in an array of federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Small Business Administration and the Department of Transportation. Few can claim the breadth of professional experience...

On the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, south of Finland and west of Russia, lies the nation of Estonia. Since gaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, this tiny-but-mighty country has embarked on one of the most successful IT modernization efforts in the world. In less than 30 years, Estonia has gone from technological desert to fully digitized society, in which 94% of residents regul...

This week, The Buzz with ACT-IAC presents a discussion about the many pieces of successful digital transformation -  cultural change, new software and technologies, service design and more - from leaders in the Federal IT community who have undertaken these changes first-hand. This episode is hosted by Ben Kutil , Director for Technical Solutions at Ad Hoc, with guests Christopher Corpuel, Co-Foun...

Software development and hardware manufacturing has become increasingly globalized over the last 10 years. A single application can contain hundreds, or even thousands, of software components sourced from just as many vendors located all over the world. And each one of these components presents a potential entry point for attack. As evidenced by the Solar Winds hack, the lack of transparency in ou...

Earlier this year, the United Nations Development Program released a special report entitled “New Threats to Human Security in the Anthropocene”, which details some of the unique, large-scale issues faced by human society in the 21st century. These are problems that require collective, comprehensive action. Unfortunately, such action has been difficult to achieve. A reason for this is the global d...

Last year, the Biden Administration issued a series of executive orders directing federal agencies to study and measure the effectiveness of government programs - both for program recipients and the federal workforce that implements them.  This difficult, but necessary, work involves gathering both qualitative and quantitative data, analyzing it, and taking a critical eye to the processes that gov...

Y2K, also known as the Millennium Bug, was a computer error predicted to cause widespread systematic issues when internal dates changed from  12/31/99 to 01/01/00. Despite apocalyptic fears and doomsaying in the years leading up to the new millennium, the year 2000 arrived with no major catastrophe. Planes didn't fall out of the sky. Banks didn't fail. The American public now commonly re...

This week, the Buzz presents another session from one of our recent in-person events. The 2022 Emerging Technology and Innovation Conference took place from May  22-24, and explored how new technologies are introducing new opportunities and impacting government services and the citizen experience. Quantum computing is a nascent technology that proposes to harness the quantum properties of subatomi...

This week, The Buzz presents a session from ACT-IAC's 2022 Health Innovation Summit, which took place in person on May 5th. This panel explores how health records can be more easily shared and within our federal health ecosystems, how interoperability can improve care for patients and make processes more efficient, as well as looking at some challenges and trends in health data exchange. Spea...

Here at ACT-IAC, we are all about looking at ways that technology can help solve our nation's most intractable problems. While technological development can and does shape and disrupt the way we live, it is rare to see new technology intentionally designed to serve the economically vulnerable.  And that's what makes Propel different. Propel develops simple software  primarily for low-inc...

Last week, ACT-IAC held its 5th annual Health Innovation Summit – an event which explored the evolution of healthcare systems and technologies. Of course, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic looms large over every discussion in the healthcare sector, and understandably so, as it has revealed the strengths and weaknesses of our health systems as only a true crisis can. To talk more about how the Fe...

As the past couple of years have underscored, much of our modern society is organized around the internet. From work, to interpersonal communication, to news media, to leisure - over 80% of US adults use the internet every day, averaging almost 7 hours per day.   There is a growing concern in both government and civil society that the internet is not operating as it should. Two of the most common...

For those outside of the acquisitions community, the practices, policies and processes of federal procurement can seem quite impenetrable. But given that the US Government spent more than $665 billion on contracts in 2020, it is not a subject to be ignored. To that end, The Buzz with ACT-IAC  presents: Demystifying Procurement - a series designed to take you through the ins and outs of this comple...

Voting is one of the most powerful and direct ways that the average citizen can participate in our nation's governance. Between local, state and federal government, there are over half a million elected positions in the United States, and each one of those positions requires a complex system of administration to ensure a free, fair and secure election in which all voters can make their voices...

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is a rapidly-growing sector that seeks to use distributed ledger technologies (like cryptocurrencies) to move traditional financial services away from centralized institutions (like banks) and onto the blockchain. Advocates of DeFi say that by removing intermediaries, banking and financial services will become simpler, and more secure. But are they right? Will DeFi...

Year after year, the United States experiences larger, more frequent, and more destructive wildfires as a result of a changing global climate. These disasters, although a natural part of our ecosystem, have become an increasingly disruptive force that endangers human lives and livelihoods. To combat this growing threat, researchers at the WIFIRE Laboratory at the University of California San Diego...

In February of this year, the DOJ made the largest financial seizure in the department's history - $3.6 billion worth of cryptocurrency that had been stolen from the Bitfinex crypto exchange nearly 6 years earlier. They traced the laundered money through a complex web of currency swaps, darknet markets, and fiat bank accounts, all of which led them to arrest NYC-based couple Heather Morgan an...

In case you missed it, The Buzz presents a keynote session from ACT-IAC's most recent Digital Transformation Summit. Jennifer Ewbank, Deputy Director of Innovation at the CIA, discusses the digital threat landscape and how digital innovation is enabling CIA’s success against America’s most daunting national security challenges. This recording also includes a Q&A moderated by Sam Cottrell...

Last week, The Buzz explored some of the complexities of ensuring affordable, reliable internet access to all Americans - as well as how the 2021 Investment Infrastructure and Jobs Act looks to improve this. This week, The Buzz gets some perspective from someone who played a key role at the federal level in overseeing the regulation and development of modern broadband infrastructure - Tom Wheeler...

Last November, after much deliberation and negotiation in the house and senate between congressional Democrats and Republicans, President Biden finally signed the $1.2 Trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This is an enormous, comprehensive piece of legislation that touches nearly every sector of the US economy – including the Internet. And that’s why we at ACT-IAC are talkin...