The General Services Administration\u2019s new artificial intelligence community of practice wants to help agencies break through challenges they face in AI deployment as the federal government pushes for increased use of emerging technology, while grappling with related workforce and ethical challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking at GSA\u2019s \u201cAI in Federal Procurement\u201d event Jan. 29, Steve Babitch, head of AI portfolio at GSA\u2019s Technology Transformation Service, which helps agencies modernize IT, outlined several areas of work that GSA\u2019s AI community of practice plans to tackle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe want to be able to … create, collect, aggregate and share best practices, lessons learned and best use cases across the federal government,\u201d said Babitch, adding that they\u2019ve learned that there is a desire from leaders at other agencies to have a forum to discuss challenges and solutions from other agencies\u2019 projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here are some of the areas the community of practice will focus on:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Workforce: <\/b>Babitch, who heads the community of practice, said that the group wants to \u201cidentify and share perspectives of workforce development\u201d for AI. Workforce shortages challenge the government in areas from cybersecurity to data science and a similar problem in AI could affect the use of AI in projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf they don\u2019t understand these technologies at a deep enough level … it\u2019s far more difficult to implement these projects in an effective way,\u201d Babitch said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Identify gaps and find solutions: <\/b>Workforce, ethics, security, privacy are all issues that Babitch identified as gaps the community of practice will seek to fill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The community of practice will host quarterly sessions, along with more webinars, seminars, workshops and training to facilitate conversation. Part of that plan, Babitch said, would be to host speakers from across government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe want to be able to put them on stage, share their experience and then engage with the community in terms of sharing those lessons learned and best practices,\u201d Babitch said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Practice areas: <\/b>The community of practices wants to \u201ccodify\u201d areas of practice \u201cthat are most relevant or important,” like ethics or privacy, and form groups to identify specific challenges to solve, Babitch said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Use case sharing: <\/b>The new community of practice wants to build a \u201crepository or a library” of use cases, he said. Throughout the new group\u2019s engagement with agencies, it\u2019s heard that agencies want to see what others are doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Content: <\/b>Babitch said that the group wants to share different perspectives on \u201cissue topics\u201d in AI and circulate it throughout the federal community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
External engagement: <\/b>The community of practice wants to communicate with organizations outside of the federal government, including industry and academia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe welcome ideas in terms of places that we can, at minimum, become aware of and share that within the federal government community,\u201d Babitch said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The organization’s new leader spoke about what the group plans to do to increase artificial intelligence use in the federal government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":26812,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":31,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[106,31,110,14,33],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3242],"class_list":["post-12492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-it-cloud-report","category-it-networks","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"YNZULOUBNFEUZEOTN3YMZHNUE4","arc_canonical_url":"\/home\/2020\/01\/29\/whats-in-store-for-the-gsas-ai-community-of-practice\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n