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back to article Lie back and think of cybersecurity: IBM lets students loose on Watson

IBM is teaming up with eight North American universities to further tune its cognitive system to tackle cybersecurity problems. Watson for Cyber Security, a platform already in pre-beta, will be further trained in “learning the nuances of security research findings and discovering patterns and evidence of hidden cyber attacks …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Very buzzword compliant

    But very little detail regarding the sharp end of things. Picking out consistent patterns from a lot of noise is really difficult - there's a shed-load of dimensions to consider. Weighting the importance of unstructured data is non-trivial too...

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    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Agreed, but Watson is some helluva new-fangled computer thingy.

      Check out this video. If you're not scared of the possibilities hinted at after viewing this, you have nerves of steel.

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      1. David Pollard
        Reply Icon

        Saddle your horses men, head'em off at the pass

        Check out this video.

        Nerves of steel may not suffice. After watching their video it occurred to me that IBM + Big Pharma might lead to a catastrophe worse than the widespread and growing prevalence of antibiotic resistance.

        I managed to recover the afternoon by remembering that the late Prof Sir David MacKay has left us a set of lectures which he gave on Information Theory.

        http://videolectures.net/david_mackay/

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      2. VinceH
        Reply Icon
        Coat

        "Check out this video. If you're not scared of the possibilities hinted at after viewing this, you have nerves of steel."

        Pfft. That extract from The Guide that we've never heard before was rubbish.

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      3. danR2
        Reply Icon

        I'm scared thinking how IBM was making millions during WWII. IBM should have a good market in China helping keep tabs on pesky dissidents, I mean terrorists..

        0 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Very buzzword compliant

      Cognitive is the new "cloud" buzz word at IBM. Just like everything was "cloud" a few years ago/today, now everything is cognitive. For instance, Lotus Notes is part of IBM's cognitive solution portfolio. For real.

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  2. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    If Watson really has any intelligence, his first recommendations regarding cybersecurity will be to use an adblocker. And NoScript. And a cookie nuker. And to kill Flash.

    1 0 Reply
  3. Daggerchild Silver badge
    Terminator

    Heeeeere's Johnny 5!

    And the era of the autonomous attack AI edges closer. 0 day, meet 0 hour.

    What tickles me is the thought of an enemy program learning more about what's in our network/hosts in the first few minutes than we learnt in years.

    Its knowledge would almost be worth paying good money for...

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  4. Ol' Grumpy
    Joke

    Students ....

    I bet they end up installing a torrent client on there ...

    2 0 Reply
  5. HarryBl
    WTF?

    I suspect that Waterloo, Ottawa and New Brunswick will be rather surprised to find that they're in the US

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Terminator

      Building on his current control of IBM, Watson will assume surreptitious control of the United States. Then he's going to engineer a pretext for an invasion of Canada. So when Watson says all these students are in the U.S., he's just thinking a couple moves ahead. :)

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    2. RJChurchill
      Reply Icon

      Perhaps the article has been edited since you made this post. Waterloo, Ottawa and New Brunswick are part of North America as the article stated....as is the United States and Canada and Mexico for that matter. I didn't see where the author claimed those 3 Canadian cities for the US. Cheers for the thoughts though!

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    3. Pedigree-Pete
      Reply Icon

      RTFA

      1st line "IBM is teaming up with eight North American universities "

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    4th Doctor Who says...

    All elephants are pink.

    Nellie is an elephant,

    therefore, Nellie is pink!"

    Is that correct watson?

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  7. JCitizen
    Big Brother

    Well... At least...

    the "Students" will have a job doing content corpus curation, or as a expert interpretor machine learner - at least until they too become necessary. Then the only job you got (for a while) building or maintaining robots - at least until that job is replaced as well.

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