NIST to Keep Focus on AI, Cybersecurity Under Biden, Advisory Committee Told
The National Institute of Standards and Technology plans to release a report soon on developing the vocabulary and measurements needed for “trustworthy” artificial intelligence, Eric Lin, NIST acting associate director-laboratory programs, told the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology (VCAT) virtual meeting Wednesday. The NIST advisory committee met for the first time under Biden.
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“This year has been just so extraordinarily outside of anyone’s expectations that we just keep making things up and figuring things out as we go,” said James Olthoff, associate director performing the nonexclusive duties of the NIST director. Olthoff said it’s not clear when NIST will have a permanent chief, noting that it took until October in the last administration. “We’re hoping for something sooner than that,” he said.
A report on bias in AI will be delivered by the spring, Lin said. NIST also plans an international campaign on AI standards in coordination with the White House, he said. The efforts on AI are “really important and aligned with the new administration’s priorities,” he said. NIST is also focused on the SolarWinds cyberattack (see 2102010063). “This was a high-profile, highly sophisticated cyberattack, with thousands of organizations affected, including the federal government,” Lin said. NIST apparently wasn’t attacked, he said. Given the focus on cybersecurity, “there’s a lot of work ahead of us here,” he said.
NIST’s year-old privacy framework has been downloaded more than 31,000 times, Lin said. NIST also worked on facial recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic, and technology is improving for recognizing faces with masks, he said.
VCAT member Vint Cerf cautioned against focusing too narrowly on AI or machine learning (ML). “It’s all software that we should be worried about,” said Cerf, Google chief internet evangelist. “Be concerned not only about AI and ML mechanisms but also about just plain old code, which we rely on on a daily basis and yet which doesn’t always work right because it has mistakes and bugs in it,” he said.
NIST works on testing software assurance tools and combinatorial testing of software, responded James St. Pierre, deputy director of the NIST Information Technology Laboratory.
The government is investigating what happened with the SolarWinds attack, said Allen Adler, HRL Laboratories' director-sensors and electronics lab. “There are going to be lessons learned from that,” he said: “Is NIST participating so that those lessons … could be applied to the NIST framework?”
Some NIST staffers have been involved, St. Pierre said. SolarWinds raises supply chain and identity management issues, he said. “We’re always looking at our cybersecurity standards, tools and guidelines,” he said. NIST doesn’t do classified work but gets information from other parts of the government, he said.
NIST is well regarded by Congress and keeps getting asked to take on new research, Jim Schufreider, director-congressional and legislative affairs, told VCAT. The FY 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, recently enacted by Congress over a veto by former President Donald Trump (see 2101030002), contains directions for new studies but no new funding, he said. “Funding is always the challenge,” Schufreider said. Members of Congress recognize “there’s a big gap between the expectations for NIST and the NIST budget, and it’s not getting any better,” he said.