The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is whipping out its wallet to secure open-source software, according to National Cyber Director Harry Coker, Jr.

Speaking at the DEF CON 32 conference in Las Vegas this month, Coker announced the Open Source Software Prevalence Initiative, which will pull from $11 million in funding under the $1.2 trillion infrastructure act passed by Congress in 2021.

“We know that open source underlies our digital infrastructure, and it’s vital that, as a government, we contribute back to the community as part of our broader infrastructure efforts,” Coker told the audience.

As CIO Dive noted, Coker’s office recently released a report calling for the federal government to incentivize wider usage of and education in memory-safe programming languages, especially with respect to translating older code.

Read the rest here.—TM

Business agility is the overarching goal for many an org, and AI could be one of three keys to achieving it. The other two? Automation and low-code development. (Actually, there’s one more: caffeine. But you knew that.)

To discuss the finer points, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is hosting a webinar covering how AI, robotic process automation (RPA), and low-code/no-code platforms on AWS can help enhance efficiency and simplify tasks.

Guest industry leaders from Forrester and leading AWS partners will showcase how you can power your digital transformation with these three keys. Talk about unlocking boosted performance.

All you have to do? Register here.

If you’re hoping a well-crafted prompt and a large language model can save you from sifting through 54,000 hospital reports, don’t throw out your staple remover just yet.

Columbia University findings published on August 13 in JAMA Network Open revealed that a large language model (LLM)—a computational model that understands and generates text—couldn’t outperform a simpler text-recognition option known as “text-string” search.

More troubling, according to the report’s lead researcher: The LLM couldn’t replicate its findings.

“It’s no guarantee that if you repeat the experiments, you’re going to get the same results,” Kathryn Burford, postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, told IT Brew. “And that’s a major, major problem for scientists.”

The study:

• Paperwork. The researchers used OpenAI’s computational model, ChatGPT-4, to peruse notes from 54,569 emergency-department visits. The goal: Find patients in the dataset who wore helmets before experiencing their bike, scooter, or hoverboard-related injuries.
• Not not helmet. LLMs had trouble identifying negations, according to the report, including terms like “without a helmet,” “w/o helmet,” “and “unhelmeted.” “The LLM often hallucinated and was consistent in replicating its hallucinations,” the team concluded.
• String theory. The large language model did not surpass text-string search, a code-based detection of human-researched phrases (like “unhelmeted”) in large datasets. According to the study, the LLM had “moderate to weak agreement with a simple string search method,” unless the prompt contained all human-labeled text strings.

Read more here.—BH

When hackers set their sights on a blood bank, the stakes aren’t just high, they’re life or death.

The nation saw that firsthand after a ransomware attack on July 29 against Florida-based blood bank OneBlood disrupted patient care, delayed elective procedures, and prompted the bank to tell more than 250 southeast hospitals to temporarily activate critical blood shortage protocols.

The hack knocked some of OneBlood’s systems offline, forcing staff to manually perform normally automated steps like blood labeling, according to a press release, which significantly slowed down deliveries to hospitals. In response, blood banks nationwide scrambled to send supplemental blood and platelets, an effort that the Association for the Advancement of Blood and Biotherapies (AABB) coordinated. As of August 8, business was back to normal and those supplemental shipments were no longer needed, the press release said. But the industry isn’t out of the woods yet.

Rewinding. The hack is one of three recent major worldwide attacks on life-sustaining supply chains, like blood banks, a joint threat bulletin by the American Hospital Association and the nonprofit Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center stated.

Keep reading on Healthcare Brew.—CC

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