IBM is teaming up with eight North American universities to further tune its cognitive system to tackle cybersecurity problems. Watson for Cyber Security, a platform already in pre-beta, will be further trained in "learning the nuances of security research findings and discovering patterns and evidence of hidden cyber attacks and threats that could otherwise be missed". IBM will work with eight US universities from autumn onwards for a year in order to push forward the project. The universities selected are 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 project is ultimately designed to bridge the cyber-security skills gap, a perennial issue in the industry.

What kind of person are you, really? What better way to find out than to ask someone who's not a person. As part of the NYCxDesign festival, IBM Watson painted me a portrait of who I really am deep down inside … on Twitter. IBM Watson is a computer program that parses natural language to analyze data. Different versions of Watson have gone on to become a doctor, a college teaching assistant, a world-class chef, as well as a Jeopardy!

It is no secret that much of the wisdom of the world lies in unstructured data, that is the kind that is not necessarily quantifiable and tidy. So it is in cybersecurity, and now IBM is putting Watson to work to make that knowledge more accessible. Towards that end, IBM Security has announced a new year-long research project through which it will collaborate with eight universities to help train its Watson artificial-intelligence system to tackle cybercrime. Knowledge about threats is often hidden in unstructured sources such as blogs, research reports and documentation, said Kevin Skapinetz, director of strategy for IBM Security. "Let's say tomorrow there's an article about a new type of malware, then a bunch of follow-up blogs," Skapinetz explained.

IBM Security announced Watson for Cyber Security on Tuesday, a cloud-based version of the company's cognitive technology that will focus on learning the language of cybersecurity. The project is working to improve security analysts' capabilities by automating the "connections between data, emerging threats and remediation strategies." IBM will collaborate with eight universities starting this fall to expand the collection of security data IBM has trained Watson with. With its Watson cybersecurity effort, IBM is working to automate threat intelligence, allowing a machine to make connections in data that humans are sometimes unable to find. As an added bonus, if the project proves successful, businesses could integrate Watson's cybersecurity into their security platforms, helping to bridge the cybersecurity skills gap. "Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cybersecurity jobs by 2020, we'd still have a skills crisis in security," said Marc van Zadelhoff, General Manager, IBM Security.

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Computing giant IBM has always had big plans for its brainy thinking computer named Watson. Since Watson beat human players at the TV game show "Jeopardy" in 2011, the company has given Watson a varied series of job assignments: Cancer researcher, fitness coach, customer service rep. It has even learned Japanese, designed dresses and provided the brain for a talking toy dinosaur. Now Big Blue says it will train Watson to fight cybercrime. The company says its security division will team up with a group of eight universities to teach the cloud-based computer, programmed to learn subjects in a manner similar to the human brain, on the complicated subject of cyber security.

IBM's Watson supercomputer hardly needs any more resumé-padding. It's already won Jeopardy, written a cookbook, and dabbled in revolutionizing healthcare. Today, IBM announced that Watson is taking its cognitive learning chops to the cloud, where it'll apply them to analyzing, identifying, and (hopefully) preventing cybersecurity threats. But first, it's going to have to learn. There are already plenty of computer-enhanced approaches to combating cybercrime, most of which involve identifying outliers or abnormalities--like when a user logs a few too many failed password attempts--and determining whether those constitute some sort of threat.

IBM and SK Holdings C&C, a South Korean IT services company, are planning to bring IBM's Watson cognitive technology language services to South Korean banking. The alliance, which includes training Watson to understand Korean, is designed to "dramatically accelerate" the adoption of cognitive computing throughout the region, giving South Korea-based developers a set of localised APIs and services they can use to help create their own applications and build new businesses. David Kenny, general manager, IBM Watson, says: "The South Korean marketplace is moving quickly to embrace the disruptive opportunities from next generation technology. Our strategic alliance with SK Holdings C&C will put cognitive services in the hands of more businesses and developers." SK Holdings C&C will run Watson and IBM Bluemix from its Pangyo Cloud Center, in support of universities, developers, and local businesses, across "diverse" industries including banking.

It's no secret that much of the wisdom of the world lies in unstructured data, or the kind that's not necessarily quantifiable and tidy. So it is in cybersecurity, and now IBM is putting Watson to work to make that knowledge more accessible. Towards that end, IBM Security on Tuesday announced a new year-long research project through which it will collaborate with eight universities to help train its Watson artificial intelligence system to tackle cybercrime. Knowledge about threats is often hidden in unstructured sources such as blogs, research reports and documentation, said Kevin Skapinetz, director of strategy for IBM Security. "Let's say tomorrow there's an article about a new type of malware, then a bunch of follow-up blogs," Skapinetz explained.

It's no secret that much of the wisdom of the world lies in unstructured data, or the kind that's not necessarily quantifiable and tidy. So it is in cybersecurity, and now IBM is putting Watson to work to make that knowledge more accessible. Towards that end, IBM Security on Tuesday announced a new year-long research project through which it will collaborate with eight universities to help train its Watson artificial-intelligence system to tackle cybercrime. Knowledge about threats is often hidden in unstructured sources such as blogs, research reports and documentation, said Kevin Skapinetz, director of strategy for IBM Security. "Let's say tomorrow there's an article about a new type of malware, then a bunch of follow-up blogs," Skapinetz explained.