IBM finds a way to watermark AI's to protect them from theft and sabotage – Fanatical Futurist by International Keynote Speaker Matthew Griffin

What if machine learning models, much like photographs, movies, music, and manuscripts, could be watermarked nearly imperceptibly to denote ownership, stop intellectual property thieves in their tracks, and prevent attackers from compromising their integrity? Thanks to IBM's new patent-pending process, they now can be. In a phone conversation with analysts this week Marc Stoecklin, IBM's manager of Cognitive Cybersecurity Intelligence, detailed the work of several IBM researchers who've been busy trying to find new ways to embed unique identifiers, or watermarks to you and I, into neural networks. Their concept was recently presented at the ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS) 2018 in Korea, and might be deployed within IBM or make its way into a client-facing product in the very near future. "For the first time, we have a [robust] way to prove that someone has stolen an [AI] model," Stoecklin said.