IBM chooses UNB as a partner in Watson cybersecurity project

The University of New Brunswick has been chosen by IBM as one of eight universities in North America to help it adapt its Watson cognitive technology for use in cybersecurity.

Computer science students at UNB and the other participating universities will help Watson process and analyze a large amount of cybersecurity data, including 20 years of security research, details on eight million spamand phishing attacks, and more than 100,000 documented computer security vulnerabilities.

"The fact that we are one of three universities in Canada to be chosen for this work speaks to our leadership role in cybersecurity research," said UNB president Eddy Campbell in a news release. "We're a best-kept secret no more."

Rizwan Ali, a masters of computer science student at UNB, said he was excited to have the opportunity to work on the project with IBM.

"This puts me squarely on the ground floor, working on something that truly has the potential to transform the cybersecurity battleground in favour of the good guys."

The University of Ottawa and the University of Waterloo are the other Canadian universities chosen by IBM. Also involved are five universities in the United States: California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; New York University; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

"We're been working hard with IBM for years on solutions to the growing threat of cybersecurity," said Dr. Ali Ghorbani, dean of computer science at UNB. "This project with Watson has tremendous potential to be a game-changer."

IBM describes Watson as a "technology platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data."

"The volume and velocity of data in security is one of our greatest challenges in dealing with cybercrime," said Marc van Zadelhoff, general manager of IBM Security. "By leveraging Watson's ability to bring context to staggering amounts of unstructured data, impossible for people alone to process, we will bring new insights, recommendations, and knowledge to security professionals, bringing greater speed and precision to the most advanced cybersecurity analysts, and providing novice analysts with on-the-job training."

In 2011, IBM purchased Q1 Labs of Fredericton, a security software firm that was born at UNB. The company and UNB have been collaborating on cybersecurity research for more than 15 years.