Amelia Brust

NIH MedlinePlus Magazine • February 23, 2023

Loud and clear: What to know about hearing loss

Hearing loss affects approximately 37.5 million people in the United States ages 18 years or older. It affects one in three people ages 65 to 74 and nearly half of people ages 75 and older. But only about a quarter of those who could benefit from a hearing aid use one.

NIH MedlinePlus Magazine • January 13, 2023

Getting an accurate read on pulse oximeters

Pulse oximeters have been used in hospitals and doctors’ offices for decades. The small, painless devices measure blood oxygen saturation, which helps doctors decide how to treat patients. During the COVID-19 pandemic, which is in part a respiratory illness, over-the-counter oximeters became more popular for home-based use and were in increasing demand.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • August 25, 2022

Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s first CDO shares limitations, possibilities of AI

Artificial intelligence has many uses at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, from recognizing fraud patterns to interpreting unstructured data. CFTC’s mission is to watch out for manipulation of financial markets, and supervised machine learning can help. Cases of spoofing, cornering the market or position limits, for example, are messy in real life and difficult to spot.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • July 15, 2022

US Marshals Service ongoing IT modernization was sorely needed, program lead says

Now seven years on, the U.S. Marshals Service is modernizing its legacy systems to a cloud environment. Working with limited funding and a tag-team approach, the agency found a way to satisfy stakeholders and increase data access for mission areas.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • June 27, 2022

Current, former Hill staffers say centralized authority needed to modernize Congress

The upside to Congress’ decentralized nature is that innovation can come from anywhere. The downside is that coordinating those innovations is hard. Current and former Hill staffers say technology can and has solved many common problems for members of Congress, but they want to see members tap into more commercial-friendly platforms.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • May 10, 2022

Federal health tech leaders want to extract data for greater equity

Designing technology infrastructure with its target communities in mind increases the chances that those groups adopt it. That, in turn, fosters greater equity in health care systems — a recurring message at last week’s Health Innovation Summit 22 from ACT-IAC.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • April 28, 2022

Federal banking agencies trying to ensure AI, ML benefit most rather than the few

As artificial intelligence and machine learning deploy across financial sectors, federal government needs a way to ensure standards for stability and inclusion are followed. Measuring risks and setting benchmarks for emerging fintech is top of mind for agencies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Commerce Department.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • April 12, 2022

With cloud migration, Army learned valuable lessons on standardization, sizing, culture

When the Army started consolidating data centers in 2015-2016, based on goals from Office of Management and Budget, migrating to the cloud was a way to do that. Nevertheless, top Army leadership did not always understand.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • April 11, 2022

‘Don’t suffer in silence,’ federal IT leaders say on DevSecOps implementation

Federal IT shops are hungry for best practices on implementing DevSecOps, a practice and culture that has been around for years but was elevated to the surface as attention on network and access security heightened.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • April 8, 2022

LISTEN: Expect more shifts in IT procurement language to reflect sustainability goals

The General Services Administration sees a shift in contract obligation and business volume data where sustainability is concerned. Agencies increasingly rely on as-a-service models for enterprise IT infrastructure, requiring less owned physical infrastructure hardware.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • April 7, 2022

Data centers pose prime opportunity to cut federal electricity consumption

To meet the White House’s goal of a net-zero carbon emissions electricity sector by 2035 and a net-zero economy by 2050, a lot of levers in the private sector need to come into play. Thankfully, deployment of low carbon energy has intensified and the costs of solar panels and wind turbines have decreased.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • April 6, 2022

GSA’s new blanket purchase agreement focuses on scalable cloud solutions

The General Services Administration wants to be the prime destination or federal agencies’ cloud solutions. Now it’s launching a new blanket purchase agreement specifically for cloud technology.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • March 22, 2022

State Department shifting power to the end user as telework stays mainstream

Despite the scattered arrangement of State Department employees around the world, going to a remote and hybrid work environment during the pandemic was less challenging than IT officials expected. Home internet connectivity, including in developing or rural parts of the world, is stronger than it used to be and in fact, many growing economies bypassed the wireless era and made investments directly into wireless and LTE technologies.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • March 15, 2022

EPA wants digitization and enterprise solutions for a hybrid workforce post-pandemic

Telework enabled the Environmental Protection Agency to continue its work for the past two years. But the agency’s workforce was largely equipped with issued laptops and mobile devices well before the pandemic hit.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • March 8, 2022

DHS expands zero trust without adding end user challenges

The Department of Homeland Security expects around 70,000-80,000 employees work remotely any given day of the week. That fluctuates based on training, schedules and leave, while frontline workers have always been on site through the pandemic.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • March 1, 2022

Containerization, strategy and culture all central to DevSecOps, say federal tech leaders

Imagine building a home, a new foundation, beams and roof, then transferring all the equipment and appliances from the old home into the new structure, room by room. That adjustment will be hard, and some things are unlikely to fit in the new space.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • February 18, 2022

Security is the name of the game in DevOps, federal tech leaders say

Federal leaders in development operations have to contend with an array of user experience and mission needs. For the Smithsonian, that means ensuring its museum visitors and website users enjoy the collections.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • December 16, 2021

Recent travel guidance for using government devices gives best practices in unsecure countries

New guidance for anyone traveling overseas with a government device is out from the interagency Federal Mobility Group. And its members want feedback before the end of the year.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • December 3, 2021

Defense agencies let experience inform planning and programming

User experience has improved far faster in the private sector and for individuals than in the federal government, let alone in the military. But a pandemic-transformed world presents prime opportunities for Defense agencies to factor user experience into planning and programming.

FederalNewsNetwork.com • November 4, 2021

Defense cybersecurity leaders say partnership, consistency needed to uphold executive order

The Defense Department is not lacking when it comes to vocabulary around cybersecurity. But cyber leaders, especially from the Army, would like to see more shared use of that vocabulary and cross-domain implementation.