WASHINGTON – The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, announced today the launch of the Virtuous User Environment—“VirtUE”—program to improve the way users interact with their daily computers to protect an organization from cloud-based security vulnerabilities. “The commercial cloud and the numerous innovative technologies that it is spawning offers computer security professionals the ability to recreate a user environment that is fundamentally more secure than current workstation and virtual desktop offerings while still being accessible and affordable,” says IARPA program manager Kerry Long.

WASHINGTON – The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, announces today the UG2 Prize Challenge for unmanned aerial vehicles, gliders, and ground data entries. The challenge aims to advance the analysis of images collected by small UAVs by improving image restoration and algorithm performance.

WASHINGTON – The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, announced the winners of the functional Map of the World—“fMoW”—Challenge, a competition that called for contestants to develop automated techniques to accurately categorize points of interest from satellite imagery. There were 69 participants, “solvers,” who competed for a total $100,000 prize purse; the top three developers Open Sourced their solutions that can be used to further improve geospatial computer vision efforts. First through fifth place winners were comprised of both industry and academia.

In a Town Hall with the ODNI workforce yesterday, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Sue Gordon announced the findings of a comprehensive review of the agency, initiating a roughly 100-day transition period as the first step in implementing ODNI’s Transformation.

I would like to thank outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for his service to our country. I was honored to serve and work with him, and I wish Rex and his family well.

I also would like to thank CIA Director Mike Pompeo for his Intelligence Community service and to congratulate him on his pending nomination to serve as Secretary of State. I wish the very best for him as he assumes the important role of Secretary of State. I look forward to continuing to work with him in this new role.