U.S. Border Patrol Agents in the Yuma, Ariz., sector intercepted drugs being smuggled into the U.S by small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) in two separate incidents between April 29 and May 3. In one incident, agents seized about 463 grams of Methamphetamine from a sUAS. In another incident, individuals in Mexico launched a drone that entered U.S. airspace and dropped multiple packages that responding agents containing 11 kilograms of cocaine that agents were able to intercept. “There were no specialized technologies used in the discovery of these events,” a Customs and Border Protection spokes person tells HSR. “This was just good observation skills by Border Patrol agents.”
The Department of Homeland Security Office of the Chief Information Officer plans to award WidePoint Integrated Solutions Corp. a one-year $65 million contract extension under the Cellular Wireless Managed Services (CWMS) effort. WidePoint is the incumbent for the services and DHS is developing a new acquisition strategy to recompete the CWMS ordering vehicle as an open market acquisition.
The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate has awarded Cignal LLC a $142,464 Phase 1 contract to create high-fidelity synthetic data used to train artificial intelligence. The award, made under the Silicon Valley Innovation Program’s Object Recognition and Adaptive Algorithms in Passenger Property Screening, will allow Virginia-based Cignal to enhance its working prototype and training workflow product, Workbench, to generate high-fidelity synthetic training data for Advanced Technology X-Ray systems and synthetic volumetric data for computed tomography applications. The result will be a high-volume data source for labeled baggage for seamless, unsupervised, and continuous artificial intelligence model training.