Artificial Intelligence's Ultimate Challenge? Cyber Attacks

Have you heard the one about how our jobs are about to be snatched away by machines? Or how artificial intelligence will ultimately rise up against us? AI is a field full of tropes, many of which come from places of truth: AI is evolving at an incredible speed, and humans are teaching some AI to learn using the same basic model found in our own craniums. But for a more realistic take on the future of AI, look no further than the many software engineers and companies that have struggled to create an intelligent system that can identify cyber attacks. "We were trying to figure out what is the foundational problem--why do we have so many cyber attacks and data breaches that are going undetected?" says Kalyan Veeramachaneni, a research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the author of a paper released today titled "Training A Big Data Machine To Defend."