IBM has announced that artificial intelligence super-machine Watson will be trained to solve cyber-crimes, and will spend the next year working with eight selected universities to develop Watson’s AI to the point that detection of cyber-threats could be possible. That list includes California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; New York University; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC); the University of New Brunswick; the University of Ottawa and the University of Waterloo. The training attempt will consist of students annotating and feeding the system security reports and data, which will include information such as IBM’s X-Force library, 15,000 security documents, and other various intelligence reports that will be updated monthly.
The benefit of the project, if successful, is that Watson will be capable of processing “unstructured data,” which includes information tools such as blogs, articles, videos, reports and alerts, and means that can remain updated on the latest malware trends. Experts hope that the development will be a big step towards innovation in the cyber security field for the “good guys.”