Beta production deployments to begin later this year

IBM Security (NYSE: IBM) today announced Watson for Cyber Security, a new cloud-based version of the company’s cognitive technology trained on the language of security as part of a year-long research project. This is part of what IBM calls “a pioneering cognitive security project to address the looming cybersecurity skills gap.”

To further scale the system, IBM plans to collaborate with eight universities to greatly expand the collection of security data IBM has trained the cognitive system with.

The universities include: California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; New York University; UMBC; the University of New Brunswick; the University of Ottawa and the University of Waterloo.

Students will help train Watson on the language of cybersecurity, initially working to help build Watson’s corpus of knowledge by annotating and feeding the system security reports and data. As students work closely with IBM Security experts to learn the nuances of these security intelligence reports, they’ll also be amongst the “first” in the world to gain hands-on experience in this emerging field of cognitive security, according to IBM

This work will build on IBM’s work in developing and training Watson for Cyber Security. IBM currently plans to process up to 15,000 security documents per month over the next phase of the training with the university partners, clients and IBM experts collaborating.

The company’s X-Force research library will be a central part of the materials fed to Watson for Cyber Security. This body of knowledge includes 20 years of security research, details on 8 million spam and phishing attacks and over 100,000 documented vulnerabilities.

IBM efforts are designed to improve security analysts’ capabilities using cognitive systems that automate the connections between data, emerging threats and remediation strategies, the company said.

To Collaborate With University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) on Cybersecurity, Also

UMBC today also announced a multi-year collaboration with IBM Research to create an Accelerated Cognitive Cybersecurity Laboratory (ACCL) in the College of Engineering and Information Technology. Faculty and students working in the ACCL will apply cognitive computing to complex cybersecurity challenges to build upon their own prior research. They will also collaborate with IBM scientists and leverage IBM’s advanced computing systems to add speed and scale to new cybersecurity solutions.

“This collaboration will allow our students and faculty to work with IBM to advance the state-of-the-art in cognitive computing and cybersecurity,” said Anupam Joshi, director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity and chair of computer science and electrical engineering, at UMBC, who will lead the ACCL at UMBC.