The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and IBM [IBM] announced plans Tuesday for a multi-year collaboration to create a new laboratory applying cognitive computing to cybersecurity.
The Accelerated Cognitive Cybersecurity Laboratory (ACCL), to be placed in UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology, will use analytics and machine learning to apply cognitive computing while also exploring specialized computer power optimized for the new intensive computing workloads.
IBM said that with the ACCL the company and UMBC will explore new ways to use the cognitive technologies–which can digest, learn from, and reason over large amounts of structured and unstructured data–to help cybersecurity professionals get an advantage over cyber attackers.
J.R. Rao, the director for security research at IBM, said the problem stems from the massive amount of security data that cannot be processed by traditional systems.
“By exploring the intersection of cybersecurity and cognitive technology, we can leverage that untapped pool of data and evolve the way security professionals and technologies work together to help overcome cyber threats.” Rao said in a statement.
Anupam Joshi, director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity and chair of computer science and electrical engineering at UMBC, is set to head the ACCL. The partners expect the rest of the team will include members of the faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and software engineers.
The UMBC researchers will collaborate with IBM’s scientists to push the research frontiers and develop “technology that will be able to, with a human analyst in the loop, detect, analyze and mitigate sophisticated threats quickly,” the company said.
“UMBC faculty, and students in the College of Engineering and Information Technology are excited to expand our work on global scientific and cybersecurity challenges in collaboration with world class partners like IBM,” Julie Ross, dean of the UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology, added.
IBM also noted the research at ACCL will be conducted using IBM and OpenPOWER technology. The IBM Power Systems, a type of server planned for use at the ACCL, are going to be infused with technology from the OpenPOWER Foundation. This makes these computer systems suited for cognitive and advanced analytics workloads, the company said.
Researchers will also receive technical development and support from IBM Systems Group.
The OpenPOWER Foundation was founded in 2013 by IBM as an open technical membership organization based on the POWER computing architecture.