NEW CAPABILITIES AND CONCEPTS
a service or something else they can offer. For example, two current offerings include a real-time object detection tool for safe airfield management and an AI-based solution that detects anomalies in satellite videos. “Tose videos are then assessed for technical merit, and when we determine that they meet our standards, we publish those videos to our marketplace and label them ‘awardable,’ ” she said. “For indus- try, that means we created a platform for you to showcase your offerings, and that can be anything from mature solutions to early research and development, and for
the government, this is the part where we have to prove out the concept of ‘click and buy.’ ”
Del Coco explained that the assessment phase includes a team of experts from academia,
industry and government
who use a product called Valid Eval (See “Confidence Boost” in the Fall 2021 issue of Army AL&T magazine) to complete a very thorough evaluation of the video submission over the course of three to four days. Te team holds a consensus meet- ing at the end of the evaluation process
and will provide constructive feedback to a vendor not deemed “awardable,” which has been a huge hit so far. “Te comments we’ve gotten back from all of the vendors are that they’ve never had anything like this,” Del Coco said. “Tey’ve never had the government take this much interest in the company as we have taken with them, to ensure that they’re successful.”
Evangelista said the marketplace is a “post- competitive environment.” She likens it to a competitive playground that uses both FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation)
PODCAST PEOPLE
One of the Tradewind pilots involves an AI-focused podcast called “AI Proficiency: Turning Tomorrow Into Today,” for which Evangelista serves as de facto host. “One of our goals was to create digital content to increase acquisition workforce competencies related to AI, and that’s where the podcast comes in,” she said. One of Tradewind’s nonprofit innovation partners, the Advanced Technology Academic Research Center, manages the production of the podcast, and Evange- lista has been leveraging her own personal network to find guests since the November 2022 launch.
“I’m trying to bring interesting content and conversation around AI for the government workforce, but it could really apply to everyone,” she said. She aims to find guests representing a broad range of perspectives, and she said the team has planned a lot of interesting content related to non-FAR-based contracting strategies and pathways. “In general, it’s about improving AI liter- acy. The goal of this podcast pilot is to understand if it is a good idea to message this digital content through a podcast medium. It’s truly an experiment.”
The team released three episodes in December, and based on the feedback that they received, the most engaging content was about novel approaches to contracting. On that episode, “we talked a lot about OTA [other-transaction authority] and some of the reasons it is still underutilized, why people get scared about
CASTING A WIDE NET
Evangelista aims to create audio content on a wide array of AI-related topics for the Tradewind podcast. (Image by Tradewind)
using it and what are some of the challenges we see for adoption across the workforce,” she said. “We’ve gotten a lot of feedback on that type of content. We have data about the number of downloads, and there was a clear demand, based on my conversation with our nonprofit partner, that the non-FAR-based contracting topic seemed to be very engaging for people.”
https://asc.ar my.mil
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