The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched an effort to better protect warfighters from infectious microbes that are resistant to antibiotics. DARPA said Friday that its Harnessing Enzymatic Activity for Lifesaving Remedies or HEALR program seeks to design and deliver medical countermeasures to treat microbial infections that stem from multi-drug resistant organisms.

HEALR will leverage cellular science to further understand how to address and neutralize MDR microbes. The agency plans to post a broad agency announcement soon on the beta.SAM.gov website.

“HEALR presents the opportunity to identify drugs that are safer, more effective and better address drug resistance and bacterial infections than existing therapeutic modalities,” said Seth Cohen, who manages the HEALR program.

Rajeev Dolas, acting director of the office of organizational policy and governance at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), said employees are using attended bots on their laptops as part of USPTO’s robotic process automation effort, Federal News Network reported Friday.

He said during a panel discussion at an Advanced Technology Academic Research Center virtual conference the agency plans to integrate “intelligence behind automation” and put the bots running on staff’s devices to a “centralized” platform.

“Eventually, we want to take them off of the users’ computers, and take them and put them in a centralized area where we can properly govern the execution of these bots,” Dolas said. “We want to make sure that there’s appropriate logging and authentication mechanisms put in place, as well as governance for ensuring that the bots are not running amok and doing things they should not be doing."

The U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) plans to deploy an analytics-based “operator” that will bring sensors, communications and internet of things (IoT) capabilities to the tactical edge, C4ISRnet reported Saturday.

James Smith, acquisition executive at USSOCOM, said at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference last month that the Hyper Enabled Operator technology is meant to analyze, synthesize and communicate information in the battlespace in near-real time.

USSOCOM is seeking commercial-off-the-shelf technologies to support the Hyper Enabled Operator, which also covers elements such as compute kits, software-defined architecture, human-machine interfaces and beyond-line-of-sight communications.

“What we’re trying to do is not necessarily increase physical performance, but it is in that cognitive domain,” said Col. Ryan Barnes, who leads the command’s Joint Acquisitions Task Force for the new program. 

“We’re looking to put the [IoT] and data analytics on an operator at the edge so he can make more informed decisions faster. And we are looking to do that in the classic partner nations for internal defense, unconventional warfare scenarios."

USSOCOM is also looking to partner with industry for its related “Automate the Analyst” effort under the SOFWERX innovation arm this month, according to Smith.

Technology leaders from government and industry have offered their views on who should lead artificial intelligence development efforts and Chakib Chraibi of the Department of Commerce’s National Technical Information Service said he thinks data scientists should oversee those efforts, Nextgov reported Friday.

“The data scientists will be able to give you an insight into how bad it will be using a machine-learning model” if ethical issues are not considered, Chraibi, chief data scientist at NTIS, said Thursday during a panel discussion at an Advanced Technology Academic Research Center virtual summit.

Chraibi also recommended the adoption of a five-phased approach to help manage ethical questions during the AI development process: awareness; identification of the algorithm’s specific intent; design of the platform; analysis of data and methods for unwanted biases; and continuous monitoring of outcomes.

Anil Chaudhry, director of AI implementation for the General Services Administration’s AI Center of Excellence, said he believes a program manager should be in charge of leading teams when it comes to creating ethical AI platforms.

“It’s got to be a strong program manager with common sense—that’s really what you need,” Chaudhry said. “The data scientist wants to really take a risk and the compliance person wants no risk. And, somewhere in there, the program manager has to balance that in order to deliver a capability.”