Federal CIO Clare Martorana currently has a data call out to several Federal agencies asking them how they are currently using artificial intelligence (AI), their current AI use cases, and what AI work they have in production, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program manager.
Amanda Mitchell, program manager for DHS’ AI/ML Integration and Transformation program, said at a Feb. 16 Association For Federal Information Resources Management (AFFIRM) event that the data call stems from President Trump’s 2020 Executive Order (EO) 13960 on promoting the use of trustworthy AI.
“[The data call is] to make sure that we’re sharing what we’re doing within the AI/machine learning (ML) realm, and to actually share across agencies and to the public, so that they know we’re doing: hence making it trustworthy,” Mitchell said.
The trustworthy AI EO was signed by President Trump in December 2020, just over a month before he left office. The EO seeks to clarify Federal guidelines on what constitutes trustworthy AI, as well as set definitions for some ethical AI principles. Additionally, the EO authorized the creation of a database of Federal AI use cases, which, presumably, the AI data from agencies will be used to help populate.
“This is really interesting because I think this is about the first time we’ve done something like this,” Mitchell said. “There are other data that we have collected across the agency that people do report out what they’re doing with AI, but this will be AI focused.”
“This is going to definitely open up what is everybody doing, especially within DHS,” she said. “And I’m really excited to see what the Federal CIO is going to do, as well, so that we can start really leaning on each other for these partnerships because we’re finally getting to see what everybody else is doing.”
Mitchell said DHS will have collected its data by the end of February, and then will dive into the analytics portion of the task. Once DHS has its data back from across the agency’s offices, it will then cross-reference that with previously reported AI use case data to find any gaps or blind spots and reach out to the individual offices within DHS to ask any follow-up questions before sending the data off to the Federal CIO.
