Bridget Mintz Testa

Posts by Bridget Mintz Testa

US Government agencies often face a Catch-22 trying to adopt innovative technologies: Procurement rules designed to promote fairness can effectively preclude federal buyers from seeing – or influencing – developments that could eventually help agencies work more effectively.

The Defense Department and intelligence agencies, of course, have been fueling innovative technologies on their own for decades. But as commercial markets have exploded with new ideas, and learned to bring those ideas to market with greater speed, government agencies increasingly find themselves racing to keep up with innovations in the commercial sector. Keep reading →


Managing any large project is a challenge. Imagine managing a project involving 15 different groups, spread across multiple university labs across the country, dealing with massive amounts of information.

This is the challenge facing the National Human Genome Research Institute, a part of the National Institutes of Health, which launched the third iteration of the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project early in October. Keep reading →

When the White House announced which of more than 700 applicants would become Presidential Innovation Fellows last month, it also gave a subtle endorsement to a concept pioneered by a small, but growing nonprofit organization called Code for America.

Founded by Jennifer Pahlka in 2009, Code for America has been helping to bring experts and entrepreneurs from the private sector to work together with public sector leaders and inject a dose of innovative ideas into government services. Keep reading →

OPM Director John Berry administers oath to inaugural members of Presidential Innovation Fellows program following introduction by Federal CTO Todd Park and CIO Steve VanRoekel.

The White House introduced 18 incoming members of the Presidential Innovation Fellows at a ceremony in Washington on Thursday who will work as volunteers on five projects with innovators from within the federal government. Keep reading →

E-mail, the World Wide Web, social media, and the cloud have led to outdated privacy laws that have left federal officials perplexed about how to collect and use information about citizens, even those suspected of crimes.

The Government Accountability Office’s latest of several reports on the issue recommends Congress act to update federal law to align with modern technologies. Keep reading →

One of the many extraordinary aspects of NASA’s successful landing of the Curiosity rover onto the surface of Mars Aug. 5 was ensuring the spacecraft had the information it would need to make its own decisions in the final moments of its descent without any help from mission controllers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. And at least some of the credit can be attributed to the advanced work of two earthbound high performance computing systems called Nebula and Galaxy.

“What’s most nerve-racking is that the first time Curiosity goes through the whole landing sequence is on Mars,” said Ben Cichy, JPL’s chief software engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory, which includes the Curiosity rover and its scientific instruments. “By the time we heard about it, it was already over.” Keep reading →


Computers can’t simulate the Earth’s ever-changing climate in real time, the interaction of the human heart with each of thousands of different drugs, or the tiniest details of a nuclear weapon’s detonation.

But that could soon change. Keep reading →

Personal identity verification cards required for all federal employees and contractors will now be easier to use and more secure thanks to new draft standards just released by National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The changes incorporate the latest round of comments and revisions aimed at updating the original 2005 standard. “In 2011, we had our first draft,” said Hildegard Ferraiolo, a computer scientist with NIST. “We got about 1200 comments.” Keep reading →

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has just released the draft of recommendations for addressing mobile device security. Among other points, the draft document recommends implementing centralized management technologies for both organization-issued and personally-owned mobile devices.

The update is considered timely and important due to the dramatic increase in the last two years of smartphone and tablet penetration, the variety of mobile devices and the pressure from employees to use their own devices. Keep reading →

It’s no surprise that recent reports of NASA’s shift from OpenStack — and open source cloud computing — in favor of a commercial platform stirred some chatter in and around the federal space.

After all, NASA officials foresaw open source cloud computing’s potential and invested in the new phenomenon back in 2008, when it was still just a shimmer on the horizon. Keep reading →

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