The release of Hulu’s excellent Predator: Killer of Killers proves that animation is well suited for the epic sci-fi franchise. While the Predator movies were loaded with plenty of violence, so much more delicious carnage was made possible through computer animation. There was more freedom to stage more elaborate locations, action sequences, and gallons of blood and guts.
This is the 10th article in our IT lifecycle management series, Delivering the tech that delivers for government.
Don’t mistake invention for innovation. It’s easy to do, BAE System’s Peder Jungck points out.
“The thing that’s changed is the pace of what I would call innovation, which is not necessarily the same as invention,” said Jungck, chief innovation and strategy officer for the intelligence and security sector at BAE Systems.
Right now, it’s an “incredible time” to talk about innovation and how capabilities available from three emerging technologies — artificial intelligence, autonomy and automation — can catapult how and how fast organizations meet their missions, he said during an interview with Federal News Network.
To illustrate that invention versus innovation idea, Jungck pointed to cloud. Sure, companies were developing and inventing technology solutions and refining how to manage data and compute. But the rapid move to cloud ultimately “was about a business model change. It was about really an innovative approach of who’s deploying capital,” Jungck said.
Today, emerging capabilities possible through AI, autonomy and automation are creating the opportunity for radically reinventing new business models across the classic triad of people, policy and technology.
For our series Delivering the tech that delivers for government, Jungck shared how BAE Systems sees that transformation shaping up and how the company is innovating its own enterprise technology to support innovation within federal agencies.
The demand signals have changed, he said. “If we look at our new administration, it’s talking about changing that risk equation … so that it’s not the government taking the risk of what might work.”
To that end, BAE Systems created a new organizational strategy, A3, to leverage AI, autonomy and automation to “transform the way our business is working going forward,” Jungck said. Through this new organization, “we’re connecting people. We’re connecting ideas. Those are critical in identifying the need and what might be the answer.”
Maybe that doesn’t seem radical, but it’s the infusion of these modern technologies that will fundamentally drive change and allow for innovation in real time, he said.
Jungck acknowledged that the government and federal systems integrators work in a process-oriented culture. While early narrow AI approaches and automation have improved many processes, it’s now time to apply AI, automation and autonomy collectively to reimagine them — and in multiple ways simultaneously, he said.
“It’s about how do you try a new, novel outcome? The scale of the AI can try things from a vast variety of means,” Jungck said. “It’s not just us having a human say, ‘Here’s how you do it.’ You can actually come up with, for the given equation, how best would you automate it? And if your process didn’t automate the same way every time, could it actually unleash something?”
For early iterations of automation, humans defined the process and then the ensuing automation followed a set pattern. But now, using large language models and autonomy — or agentic AI — it’s possible to quickly identify how people, policy and technology can achieve outcomes in entirely new ways.
For instance, consider the government’s work along the U.S. southern border, on a battlefield or in a security operations center.
Along the border, “there’s hundreds of miles of different types of situations,” Jungck said. “We do not have enough Border Patrol agents.” But could the use of autonomous vehicles and large language models help change how agents do their jobs?
Yes, Jungck said. By applying AI to continuous live inputs and existing data, agents could get real-time recommendations to help prioritize their activities and leave less critical work to automated capabilities and what he called a new era of digital labor. The goal: “How do you not just support a person, but how do you give them access to things to be able to say, ‘Hey, maybe you should go over here, maybe you should go there.’ ”
In battlefield, intelligence and cyberthreat scenarios, the use of AI, autonomy and automation similarly could help plot out responses to black swan events that right now are too expensive to test out, he said. “The team can explore, what would you do in those scenarios … that shouldn’t happen, but if it did? All three provoke a new outcome.”
All these efforts to speed innovation and mission delivery must happen against a backdrop of continuous cybersecurity evolution, and the move to zero trust aligns well with the desire to innovate iteratively, Jungck said.
“The great thing is, I believe our government understands how to do this,” he said. Getting to a zero trust world of managed identities, tagged data and end-to-end visibility remains an ongoing journey. The tricky part is that zero trust requires that organizations must continuously re-evaluate and improve their cyber practices, Jungck said.
But here again, AI, autonomy and automation can help organizations better manage the security of their IT enterprises.
“This is where the volume of data is at such a large scale, you can’t use humans to necessarily tag and do everything. That’s where we’re using the AI, the automation,” Jungck said.
The challenge is to keep ahead of adversaries who also are deploying AI tools — to spot vulnerabilities at velocity when a new patch or a new piece of software comes online.
“If we can’t make our cybersecurity defense run at the same velocity of the attackers, or faster, you’re never going to be able to go and defend this and be able to really take advantage of the data economy that we have,” he said.
Although Jungck offered that cautionary note on cybersecurity, he remains optimistic about the opportunities for innovation across government.
“There is an openness for, ‘Hey, how could we do this better?’ … And people are asking for, ‘How do I go faster?’ ” The resistance to change is diminishing as a desire for keeping pace on innovation is rising, Jungck said.
He also identified another critical reality. “From senior leadership all the way down, we’re digital natives, and the digital has caught up.”
Discover more stories about how federal systems integrators and government contractors manage their enterprise infrastructure environments in our series Delivering the tech that delivers for government, sponsored by Future Tech Enterprise.
To listen to the full discussion between BAE Systems’ Peder Jungck and Federal News Network’s Vanessa Roberts, click the podcast play button below:
Check out all podcast episodes of the Delivering the tech that delivers for government series.
The post Want to accelerate innovation? Focus on triad of people, policy and technology through lens of AI, autonomy and automation first appeared on Federal News Network.
July is the month you're supposed to get a break from your garden. With most of the planting already finished, you should be sitting back, enjoying a fresh berry margarita in the garden as your plants fulfill their destiny all around you.
But the cycle of summer gardening never truly stops, which means you also need to fit in some weeding and harvesting in between heat domes. Here's what you should focus on this month.
Take a daily lap around the garden (I try to do mine before the sun gets too high in the sky). Each morning, I do a circuit with my garden hod and a bucket. Take note of how things are doing and what needs more water or perhaps a fertilizer boost, and look for infestations. If you see a weed, pick it and chuck it into the bucket (spoiler: You'll see many weeds). If something needs to be harvested, add it to the hod. Top up your water features and bee stations and try to spend a few moments appreciating all the hard work over some raspberries or the last of the snap peas.
The headline for this month is bringing in irrigation, since it’s likely the first time this year you'll really need it on a consistent basis. As temperatures climb, it’s imperative to have consistent water at the root of your plants. If you do this, they will grow resiliently, forming strong roots and stems that won't need babying under shade.
Test your irrigation or watering systems if you haven’t yet and get them turned on. Check in for the first week or two and make sure the ground is getting moist about six inches under the topsoil, and adjust the water as necessary. It’s never too late to mulch to conserve water and protect plant roots. Remember that you want a nice thick layer of mulch—an inch isn’t going to do much—but make sure to keep that mulch away from the stems of your plants.
Most of the summer blooming flowers are “cut and come again” blooms. Your snapdragons benefit from a good chop; they'll branch and grow two blossoms in the same place. If you stay on top of your sweet peas, you might be able to stretch them into late July, but if they start to set pods, don't be afraid to pull them out to make room for another climbing vegetable or flower. You should be seeing the start of your echinecea, dahlia and daisies at this point of summer, so be sure to stay on top of deadheading so they last into fall. Some flowers, like sunflowers, are single bloom (they bloom only once, on one stem, so one chop and it’s over), so be sure you know which of your flowers are single bloom so you don't cut away the only bloom you'll get.
At some point around now, your peas will start going yellow and crispy from the bottom up. This just means it’s time to turn over the space for summer—hopefully you have some climbing beans or something else to go into the space. I use mine to plant green beans and sugar pumpkins, which will climb up the trellis and hang from the arches. Your spinach, boy choy, and spring broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage have all also flowered by now, so those spaces are ready to turn over for summer or fall as well. Consider bolt resistant lettuce, tomatillos, beans, cucumbers, melon or squash in their place.
Sometime this month, garlic is going to be ready to come out of the ground too. Wait for three or four brown leaves and then harvest with a hand spade (do not try to just pull them out of the ground). Your garlic needs to be dried in order for it to last until winter.
If you got potatoes into the ground in spring, you can start harvesting them as soon as the plants begin to flower. Use a spade to turn over the earth and then use your hands to find all the baby potatoes. You can let really tiny seed potatoes fall back into the bed, which will help it perennialize.
In the newly empty spaces, remember to keep succession planting going. Get seeds in routinely or plant starts from the nursery. If you go with seeds, you’ll need to work harder to keep them hydrated so they germinate once they’re in the ground.
It is berry season, so be sure you’re getting all of your berries harvested as they’re ready. Raspberries should be coming to an end, with blueberries in full swing. At some point this month, strawberries will be dunzo too, which means you can cut them back fully so they can focus on roots for next year instead of growing runners. (I run the lawnmower over them to accomplish this.)
You should have your fall starts started by the end of July, if you’re growing from seed. These starts won’t go in for a month or two, which gives you enough time to get a tray of seeds going now.
Some of the wildest illusions I've seen in a while
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