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There still are five major agencies without a permanent chief information officer. Among those agencies are the Defense Department, the Transportation Department and the Office of National Director of Intelligence.

That number was seven as of late June. But over the last few weeks, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Office of Personnel Management filled those key technology roles. In case you missed it, HUD named Beth Niblock, the former city of Detroit CIO, to lead its technology modernization efforts. And just last week, OPM removed the “acting” title from Guy Cavallo and made him its CIO. He had been acting since March when Clare Martorana moved from OPM to be the federal CIO.

These are among the most significant changes in the federal technology and acquisition community over the last few months.

But before we go deep into the state of agency CIOs, or for that

• A new project will search for alien civilizations and technologies using Earth-based telescopes.
• Researchers plan to look for unidentified aerial phenomena in the atmosphere that could be aliens.
• Harvard physicist Avi Loeb leads the project. He thinks the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua was an alien ship.

When the first interstellar object ever observed, ‘Oumuamua, careened past Earth in 2017, it seemed to be accelerating. That’s not what most space rocks do — which is in part why Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb says ‘Oumuamua was an alien spaceship.

Although most researchers agree that the object was a space rock — either a comet or piece of a tiny planet — Loeb thinks there are countless other objects like ‘Oumuamua whizzing by our planet, some of which could come from aliens, too. So he launched a program to find them. 

On Monday, Loeb announced an initiative called the Galileo

Astronomers have announced a new venture designed to advance humankind’s search for artifacts from extraterrestrial technological civilizations (ETCs) — The Galileo Project. The project aims to address the question “are we the smartest kids on our cosmic block?” Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, a co-founder of the initiative, said in a news conference about the big announcement today (July 26).

Loeb co-founded the ambitious project together with Frank Laukien, the chairman, president and CEO of Bruker Corp., a Massachusetts-based company that develops and manufactures science equipment. 

The international team worked with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts to design the project with one main goal in mind — “to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validates and systematic scientific research,” the researchers said in a statement.

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