“The Department of Veterans Affairs is working to up its artificial intelligence capabilities, while also providing guidance to other agencies throughout the government from lessons learned.”
“Speaking Dec. 5 at the GovernmentCIO AI and RPA in Government event, the VA’s Director of Artificial Intelligence Gil Alterovitz said the agency recently finished an AI tech sprint that benefited both the department and industry…”
“The VA made data for the three-month sprint available to companies to see how companies can use that department data to develop AI tools. In the department’s recent tech sprint, the AI chief said it completed one project that matched more than 9 million veterans with clinical trials and experimental therapeutics, which also paired millions of Medicare beneficiaries with the trials. During that project, the VA learned that the natural language processing component couldn’t properly read large numbers in their numeric form, reading numbers like ‘1,000,000′ down to the individual numbers.”
“David Maron, a statistician at the VA, said at the same event that the tech sprint undertaken at the VA is key to better the push-pull relationship between industry and federal agencies…”
“The way the VA cleans and maintains its data now is a far cry from a few years ago, when he would manually going through databases to clean up data, Maron said. But AI, still in the early stages of adoption by the federal government, comes with its own challenges, such as the issue Alterovitz mentioned regarding natural language processing. Alterovitz said that the VA plans to publish the list of barriers his agency ran into during the tech sprint…” Read the full article here.
Source: How the VA’s tech sprints benefit its relationship with industry – By Andrew Eversden, December 10, 2019. Federal Times.
