A program designed by MIT to battle hackers is example of effective artificial intelligence and human collaboration. South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol puts the first stone against Google's artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo.

In the ongoing battle against cyber attacks, a man-machine collaboration could offer a new path to security. To keep up with cyber threats, the cybersecurity industry has turned to assistance from unsupervised artificial intelligence systems that operate independently from human analysts. But the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., in partnership with the machine-learning startup PatternEx, is offering a fresh approach. Their new program, AI2, draws on what humans and machines each do best: It allows human analysts to build upon the large scale pattern recognition and learning capabilities of artificial intelligence. The industry standard right now is unsupervised machine learning, CSAIL research scientist Kalyan Veeramachaneni, who helped develop the program, says in a phone interview with The Christian Science Monitor.