MIT AI Researchers Make Breakthrough On Threat Detection

Researchers with MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) believe that can offer the security world a huge boost in incident response and preparation with a new artificial-intelligence platform it believes can eventually become a secret weapon in squeezing the most productivity from security analyst teams. Dubbed AI2, the technology has shown the capability to offer three times more predictive capabilities and drastically fewer false positive than todays analytics methods. CSAIL gave a sneak peek into AI2 in a presentation to the academic community last week at the IEEE International Conference on Big Data Security, which detailed the specifics of a paper released to the public this morning. The driving force behind AI2 is its blending of artificial intelligence with what researchers at CSAIL call "analyst intuition," essentially finding an effective way to continuously model data with unsupervised machine learning while layering in periodic human feedback from skilled analysts to inform a supervised learning model. "You can think about the system as a virtual analyst," says CSAIL research scientist Kalyan Veeramachaneni, who developed AI2 with former CSAIL postdoc Ignacio Arnaldo, who is now a chief data scientist at PatternEx.