IBM and Canadian universities to teach Watson computer to fight cyber crime

IBM wants its Watson computer system to learn how to fight cyber crime and it's asking eight leading universities, including three in Canada, for help. Watson -- IBM's question answering computer system -- was originally designed to compete (and win) on the television quiz show Jeopardy, but the technology has since been used on other problem-solving projects. Now IBM is launching Watson for Cyber Security -- a cloud-based version of their cognitive technology -- that will be trained over the next year to examine threats of cyber crime. Caleb Barlow, vice-president of IBM Security, said it is becoming increasingly difficult for security staff to deal with the growing number of cyber threats. "Your average enterprise is dealing with 200,000 incidents a day that they've got to dig through. Human beings simply cannot look at all of that data," he said.