IBM is collaborating with eight universities to expand the collection of security data IBM has trained the Watson cognitive system with. 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.

Watson is learning the nuances of security research findings and discovering patterns and evidence of hidden cyber attacks and threats that could otherwise be missed.

IBM's collaboration with universities (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.) will start from this fall.

IBM’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.

Designed on the IBM Cloud, Watson for Cyber Security will offer cognition of security data at scale using Watson's ability to reason and learn from "unstructured data" - 80 percent of all data on the internet that traditional security tools cannot process, including blogs, articles, videos, reports, alerts, and other information.

In another effort to further scientific advancements in cognitive security, 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.