SOURCES SOUGHT
D -- RFI for Data Science and Analytics with Agile DEVSECOPs
- Notice Date
- 7/12/2017
- Notice Type
- Sources Sought
- NAICS
- 541511
— Custom Computer Programming Services
- Contracting Office
- Department of Homeland Security, Citizenship & Immigration Services, USCIS Contracting Office, 70 Kimball Avenue, Burlington, Vermont, 05403
- ZIP Code
- 05403
- Solicitation Number
- HSSCCG-17-I-00019
- Archive Date
- 8/10/2017
- Point of Contact
- Kaitlin Robert,
- E-Mail Address
-
Kaitlin.Robert@uscis.dhs.gov
(Kaitlin.Robert@uscis.dhs.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- Data Science and Analytics with Agile DEVSECOPs Notice Type: Sources Sought/Request for Information Posted Date: Wednesday, July 12, 2017 Response Date: Wednesday, July 26, 2017 by 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) NAICS Code: 541511 Synopsis: 1. RFI Announcement This Request for Information (RFI) is issued solely for informational and planning purposes and does not constitute an Invitation for Bids, Request for Proposal, or Request for Quotations. The purpose of this RFI is to understand the landscape of vendors, including both those that currently hold contracts on government vehicles and those that do not, that can provide the type of service outlined below. In accordance with FAR 15.201(e), responses to this notice are not offers and cannot be accepted by the government to form a binding contract, nor do they affect a potential respondent's ability to respond to any future synopsis/solicitation which may or may not follow or restrict the government's eventual acquisition approach. Additionally, the government will not provide reimbursement for any information submitted in response to this RFI. Respondents are solely responsible for all expenses associated with responding to this RFI. Respondents will not be notified of any results derived from a review of the information provided; however information gathered may be utilized for future technical and acquisition purposes. 2. Background The U.S. Citizen Immigration Services (USCIS) Office of Information Technology (OIT) has a need for information regarding forward-thinking, modern Development, Security and Operations (DEVSECOPs), specifically in association with Big Data, Analytics, PersonCentric, Entity Resolution and Machine Learning. These services would be provided to build, enhance, and support systems in large cloud environments, specifically Amazon Web Services (AWS), but potentially other cloud environments as well, such as Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. This request does not extend to services provided by or in vendor hosted private cloud environments. Information is requested about services that would be delivered using agile practices, a microservices approach and using a Continuous (code) Integration/Continuous Delivery Pipeline and Open Source tools. The objective of potential future contracts or vehicles is to provide DEVSECOPs and Analytics Services across the enterprise and within DHS to support the mission. Future USCIS contract needs include deep data science, big data and analytics expertise, including but not limited to, machine learning and entity resolution. The primary purpose of this RFI is to identify sources that currently have staff that could meet the needs of these potential future requirements. 3. Questions to Industry 1) Discuss the size, scope, complexity, and number of IT projects (both federal and non- federal) your company has supported within the Data Science/Big Data/Data Analytics realm, using Agile processes and a DEVSECOPs CI/CD model in a cloud environment. Specifically, discuss projects developed using pure open source technology in AWS or comparable cloud environments (e.g. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud); specifically, these projects should be in production environments, not development or experimental in nature. The government is most interested in projects where your company acted as the prime contractor and developer. If your company has this experience in which it performed at least 30% of the work or provided at least 15 personnel, this experience can also be listed but must be noted, including your company's specific role in the project (e.g., DEVOPs engineers, Developers, PM support, etc.). Open Source technologies used must include, at a minimum, at least one from each category below. a. Programming Languages i. Java ii. Ruby iii. Go b. Microservices i. Databases 1. Postgres 2. MongoDB 3. Cassandra ii. Containerized Services Platforms 1. Docker 2. Openshift 3. Cloudfoundry 4. Other Container Technology iii. Message Streaming Platforms (does not include Enterprise Service Buses like TIBCO) 1. Kafka 2. Other c. CI/CD Pipeline Automation i. Jenkins ii. Chef iii. Packer iv. Terraform d. Data Science Tools i. EMR ii. Hadoop iii. HIVE iv. R v. Spark vi. Python vii. Apache Drill viii. Other 2) Describe your company's current resource pool and specific experience as the prime contractor, or performing at least 30% of the work or providing at least 15 personnel, providing DEVSECOP with Data Analytics/Big Data and Data Sciences in AWS using the above listed technologies. If this information is already included under Question 1, this is sufficient. 3) Discuss your agile development experience implementing a machine learning micro- service as part of a Hadoop data lake and EMR cluster environment in AWS. Discuss experience in the specific context for entity resolution among biographic and biometric data in a production system, as well as activity pattern discovery. With respect to machine learning, the government is interested in your company's Artificial Intelligence (AI) experience, such as deep learning (neural networks) and other forms of supervised and unsupervised AI systems. 4) Discuss how your company's AI methods used mixed data type features, such as text, photo, and audio, and describe how each different type of data were handled as either discrete or integrated. 5) Discuss your company's capabilities and experience with Spark code development for testing and production circumstances, and how your company managed EMR cluster issues such as YARN or bootstrap errors and other difficulties with EMR setup and ongoing stability. 6) Discuss your experience as a prime contractor with building a production deep learning program (i.e. neural network) for entity resolution and its performance, in comparison to your experience as a prime contractor with more traditional entity resolution techniques, including but not limited to, logistic regression, random forests, Jaro-Winkler, double-metaphone, and IBM's GNR (Global Name Recognition) software. In particular, the government is interested in entity deduplication and augmentation (identity management) and vetting (searching) scenarios. 7) Discuss your company's experience as a prime contractor for researching entity resolution using statistical code in Spark, T-SQL, R, Python, SAS, and SPSS in the context of Amazon S3 (unstructured data), Hadoop, NoSQL, RDS, Oracle, MySQL, and MS SQL. 8) Discuss your company's capacity and experience with refining precision and recall with a biometric and biographic production system, including responses to policy concerns, ability to resolve an entity to a single response (no-duplicates) contexts, andwhat tools you built for staff to resolve duplicates, as well as how those tools were designed to update the production database. 9) Discuss the data architecture you employed with a production entity resolution system (identity management and vetting), and what the tradeoffs were in performance between the various architectures tested in development. 10) Build an AI (neural network) application using Google's dataset for document entity resolution (click here). Provide the code via GIT for review, login information to view a dashboard of statistics describing the application's performance (i.e. precision and recall, combined MAP rate), and some method of visualization that provides meaningful comprehension and interpretability to conceptual clusters and other data relevant towards understanding features of entities and data quality. Please provide the government with the credentials to access the code for review and testing purposes. 4. Response Instructions Interested parties should provide the following information: A. Vendor Profile: Please provide the following information: * Company name  * Please indicate if you are a large or small business, socioeconomic category and size of company (number of personnel and annual revenue).  * Identify which government contract vehicle(s) your company has a contract under or indicate none. If none, please indicate if your company is willing to apply for any.  * Name of contact person responsible for this RFI, including telephone number and email address. B. Interested parties are requested to respond to this RFI with responses to the questions in Section 3, including access methods for code in a publicly available repository in GIT for question 10. Responses should be submitted in Adobe PDF format via e-mail only to the Contract Specialist (see section 5), and are due no later than Wednesday July 26, 2017 at 12:00 PM, EDT. Responses should be no more than ten (10) pages. Proprietary information, if any, should be minimized and MUST BE CLEARLY MARKED. To aid the government, please segregate proprietary information. Please be advised that all submissions become government property and will not be returned. Reminder: This RFI is for informational and planning purposes and does not constitute an Invitation for Bids, Request for Proposals, or Request for Quotations. 5. Submission of Responses and Questions Questions regarding the contents of this RFI shall be submitted via email to: Contract Specialist Contact: Kaitlin Robert Kaitlin.Robert@uscis.dhs.gov
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