Security Artificial Intelligence Does Better With Human Experts

An artificial intelligence engine can do a much better job of detecting security threats when it has a little help from a human, according to Kalyan Veeramachaneni, principal research scientist, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. "Unsupervised learning is not enough," he said during a presentation at SWIFT's Sibos conference in Geneva. A security analyst can play a key role in identifying security threats that computers and data scientists might miss, because they aren't experts in security. Collaborating with PatternEx, a start up in the infosec space, Veeramachaneni set out to build an interactive system that would get feedback from a security analyst through a supervised learning model. "We are replicating what an analyst would say -- we call it the virtual analyst." The model captures the knowledge of a security analyst and tries to predict whether activity constitutes an attack, something he called an augmented system.