Father-son duo creates cybersecurity tool

A collaboration between an 11-year-old East Northport boy and his IBM inventor father has given voice to cybersecurity tools using that company's Watson artificial intelligence system. In November, Mike Spisak, whose title is chief transformation architect and master inventor, IBM Security, was joined by his son, Evan, as he worked in his basement "laboratory." Spisak was seeking to apply artificial intelligence tools to the problem of cybersecurity. He was typing to a "chatbot" -- a computer program that simulates human conversation -- in the hope that it could develop into a tool that could provide cybersecurity answers to IBM's corporate clients. That's when Evan, inspired by J.A.R.V.I.S., the AI assistant of comic book and movie hero Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, piped up: "Dad, why can't you talk to it with your voice?"