If Data is the New Currency, How Are We “Spending” It?

The government is at no loss for data. And, over the last decade, there has been a concerted effort to use that data more efficiently to improve decision making and service to the citizen. Chief Data Officers are in place across government to shepherd the changes in process and technology needed to achieve the goals set forth in the Federal Data Strategy.

Meeting the Plan to Plan

Department-level data strategies have been borne out of the federal guidance to mature data governance and infrastructure and publish those plans. In fact, the report "CDO Insights: 2021 Survey Results On the Maturation of Data Governance in U.S. Federal Agencies," found that 75 percent of respondents said they had started or completed five of the six action items named in the Federal Data Strategy 2020 Action Plan. The report found that constituting a data governance body (completed by 75%) was the least challenging action. Getting these bodies in place means that beyond department-level plans, some agencies are moving to making plans for critical subsets of data much like the State Department did for geospatial data.

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I See What You’re Saying. Natural Language Processing’s Role in our Digital World

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a computer science practice that aims to give computers the ability to understand text and spoken words in the same way humans can. NLP is a key feature of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as understanding the language that we use to "teach" computers is critical to evolving the accuracy of the AI tasks we are asking of them.

The most familiar application of NLP is speech recognition--taking the spoken word and converting it to text. Speech recognition also is part of any application that follows voice commands.To work properly, the technology has to be knowledgeable of accents and frequently understand context (semantics) to differentiate words with a similar sound but have various meanings or spellings. NLP is also closely tied to several tasks that work in the background of applications we use everyday, including spam detection, foreign language translation, virtual assistants, chatbots, social media sentiment analysis, and text summaries/abstracts for long documents.

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GovWhitePapers to Provide One Stop for Government Thought Leadership

GovWhitePapers has launched as a central hub for government employees and supporting industry to find the information they need to understand the government market's trends and offer solutions to its challenges. A sister-site to GovEvents.com, GovWhitePapers will serve the 100,000+ audience who have been using the centralized source for all government-related events.

"Eleven years ago we launched GovEvents as a gathering place for the government community to find events that would help them advance their careers as well as their agency missions," said Kerry Rea, president of GovEvents and GovWhitePapers. "With GovWhitePapers, we're giving this community more of what they want--content and current knowledge on the latest trends and technologies making government more efficient and effective."

The GovWhitePapers team has collected materials relevant to the government audience on topics as diverse as Artificial Intelligence, Citizen Experience, Cloud Computing, Acquisition, Cybersecurity, Healthcare, and more. GovWhitePapers' goal is to make finding educational and thought leadership content less tedious, allowing the government community to: Continue reading