GenAI Remains Top Focus for Public Sector IT Leaders

Government agencies are increasingly leveraging generative AI to address mission-critical challenges in areas like health care and cyber resiliency.

At AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas this week, several federal organizations, including the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), the State Department and the National Intelligence Community, showcased how emerging AI technologies are reshaping their operations.

GenAI Supports Critical Health Challenges

ARPA-H received $2 million dollars in credits from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help launchpad awardees from four of ARPA-H’s Sprint for Women’s Health (SWH) effort address critical unmet challenges in women’s health using AI.

“Women make up nearly half of the world’s population, and yet they remain underrepresented and understudied in medical research,” said Worldwide Public Sector VP Dave Levy at the event.

The awardees will use the credits to tackle an extensive list of issues that impact women’s health, including cancer, cardiovascular and reproductive health. Solutions to these health challenges include biomarker research, diagnostics, therapeutics, devices and digital health.

AWS also is partnering with the National Cancer Institute to launch the Cancer AI Alliance. Four NCI centers will partner with AWS and other AI technology leaders to use responsible AI with center data. By deploying AI at scale across these centers, the alliance aims to accelerate innovation in cancer discovery and treatment.

Deputy Assistant to the President for Cancer Moonshot Dr. Danielle Carnival said the partnership will help prevent 50%, or roughly 4 million, cancer deaths within the United States by 2047.

“We need to bring the urgency of what a patient and a family feels when they get that diagnosis to how we deliver solutions. We need to unite around a common cause, break down silos, share knowledge and drive progress,” said Carnival.

Carnival added that the administration has secured funding for technological advances that will assist with things like early detection of cancer and rare diseases, testing water quality, and access to health screenings.

“Many people think of the [21st Century Cures Act] funding that delivered $1.8 billion at the National Cancer Institute … but there were also significant investments and policies in there that are now being executed and implemented by the new Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy to improve patient access to health data, to decrease information blocking and improve data standards and exchange,” said Carnival.

Carnival said access to AI and other emerging technologies will be crucial for the healthcare and public health sectors to deliver the best patient care. With the help of AI, Carnival hopes to close health disparity gaps especially those related to cancer.

“We need to make sure that we continue to move forward on prevention and on providing care,” said Carnival. “We need to protect and grow ARPA-H and the National Cancer Institute. We need to continue to drive data access and interoperability.”

State Department Tests GenAI

The State Department tested an AWS Bedrock-powered GenAI chatbot internally to help employees search and retrieve information listed in the 20 volumes of the Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM) and associated handbooks.

Howard Peng, division chief in State’s Office of Application and Design Delivery, said during a panel that the chatbot was an experimentation, and it is not a functioning application. Peng added that the department followed all regulations for experimentation.

“We actually trained our original model with the [U.S.] Munitions List in the very beginning to see what the ingestion process would look like,” said Peng.

Since the documents are always evolving, Peng said the chatbot needed to ensure efficiency and move quickly. His office also wanted the chatbot to only retrieve information based on the documents, meaning that the GenAI application wouldn’t pull information from other datasets and could cite where the information it retrieved is located within the documents.

“It was quite a journey to shift from Mechanical Turk, the very manual ways of curation of our own data,” said Peng. “The governance issue, I think, this is the key part. Not only is it explainable — is it transparent, and will it stop itself … and say ‘I don’t know, there is no text found on this.'”

GenAI Aids Cyber for Intelligence Community

The National Security Agency (NSA) is also focusing on integrating AI and emerging technologies into current architecture. NSA CIO Scott Fear said during the event that the agency is “similar to everybody else” as they look at how to secure systems and lower barriers of entry for new technologies.

“We are in the process of bringing online new data centers for our work. But as far as cloud and AI, we’re very similar to everybody else in the world,” said Fear. “We are looking at all of the emerging technologies as a means for us to do our mission better. We are looking at large language models; we’re looking at the cloud environment.”

Fear added that resiliency, from cyber to physical, is also a point of discussion. Whether there is a cyberattack or a hurricane, Fear said resiliency needs to be built in to prevent wasting the billions of dollars designated to create resilient environments.

“Your mission systems have to be there when they’re needed. Resiliency is baked into every discussion,” said Fear. “Our relationship and our movement into the cloud is a big part of that.”

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been working to improve cyber resiliency in cloud environments, specifically in shared cloud environments. CIO La’Naia Jones said the agency is looking to integrate AI holistically into the enterprise.

“We’re looking at some of our own data, overlaying with automation and governance that may be, in order to provide the mission,” said Jones. “It goes without saying that everything that we do must have the data provenance, and we must be able to share how we came to that.”