Federal agencies' response efforts to Hurricanes Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico was hampered by imperfect address data for the island. In the aftermath, emergency responders gathered together to enhance the utility of Puerto Rico address data and share best practices for using what information is currently available.

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), one of the twenty-seven institutes and centers at the NIH, recently deployed Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to automate the process by which it receives and internally refers grant applications. This new approach ensures efficient and consistent grant application referral, and liberates Program Managers from the labor-intensive and monotonous referral process.