IBM's Watson for Cybersecurity puts a new face on machine learning

IBM Watson may be able to win "Jeopardy!" The IBM Watson for Cybersecurity beta program launched this week with 40 partners around the world in an effort to help security analysts make better, faster decisions from vast amounts of data, but experts say this is the same promise offered by many other products. IBM said Watson for Cybersecurity will feature natural language processing that can help it to "understand the unique language of security." "The truth is a lot of security vendors today are attaching '[artificial intelligence]' or'cognitive' to a number of products that are really just advanced analytics or machine learning, which are also important elements that can help in the fight against cybercrime," Diana Kelley, executive security advisor for IBM Security, told SearchSecurity. "What Watson will bring to the equation that is unique is the ability to digest vast amounts of both structured data as well as all of the intelligence that exists in natural language, like blogs, white papers and research reports. For example, there are around 10,000 security research papers published each year, and 60,000 security blog posts published every month."