IBM Launches Cognitive Cybersecurity Lab In Baltimore

BalticServers_data_center

IBM is partnering with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) to create the Accelerated Cognitive Cybersecurity Laboratory (ACCL), which will be housed within the College of Engineering and Information Technology at UMBC. The Lab will use Watson technology to improve cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity threats are growing in both volume and sophistication. This issue is compounded by a growing shortage of security professionals, expected to reach 1.5 million unfilled positions by 20201. With the ACCL, IBM and UMBC will explore new ways to apply cognitive technologies – which are able to digest, learn from, and reason over vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. The collaboration is the first of eight university partnerships that will work on cognitive computing.

Starting this fall, IBM will work with leading universities and their students to further train Watson on the language of cybersecurity, including: California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; New York University; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC); the University of New Brunswick; the University of Ottawa and the University of Waterloo.

At UMBC, the lab will be headed by Anupam Joshi, director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity and chair of computer science and electrical engineering at UMBC. He will be joined by a team of faculty members, graduate and undergraduate students, and software engineers.

The ACCL research will be conducted on IBM and OpenPOWER technology. The IBM Power Systems being implemented in the ACCL at UMBC are infused with acceleration technology from the OpenPOWER Foundation.In addition, researchers will receive technical development and support from IBM Systems Group.

Watson for Cybersecurity is currently in development and will use its data analytics capability to understand intelligence documents, unstructured data, and other signals to find new patterns and create new warning systems for security professionals.