IBM has selected the University of New Brunswick as one of eight universities in North America to help adapt its iconic Watson cognitive technology for use in cybersecurity.

The blue-chip tech company and university announced the partnership on Tuesday. Under the agreement, computer science students at UNB and the other universities will help Watson process and analyze massive amounts of cybersecurity data, including 20 years of security research, details on 8 million spam and phishing attacks and more than 100,000 documented vulnerabilities.

The New Brunswick government and tech community has identified cybersecurity as one of the segments in which the province can excel. The announcement is the latest example of this strategy taking shape.

“This is a tremendous opportunity for the University of New Brunswick that fits well with our proud and productive partnership with IBM,” said UNB President Eddy Campbell in a statement. “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. We’re a best-kept secret no more.”

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The other universities in the program are the University of Ottawa, the University of Waterloo, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; New York University; and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

“We’re pleased to take part on this project with IBM,” said Ali Ghorbani, dean of computer science at UNB. “We’ve been working hard with IBM for years on solutions to the growing threat of cybersecurity. This project with Watson has tremendous potential to be a game-changer.”

The project is part of a pioneering cognitive security project to address the looming cybersecurity skills gap. It will help to train Watson on the nuances of security research findings and discover behavior patterns and evidence of hidden cyber-attacks and threats that could otherwise be missed. IBM efforts are designed to improve security analysts’ capabilities using cognitive systems that automate the connections between data, emerging threats and remediation strategies.

IBM said it chose UNB because of its long collaboration with the university on cybersecurity research, stretching back more than 15 years. And in 2011, the firm purchased Q1 Labs, a Fredericton security software firm that was born at UNB. IBM also has a long record of hiring UNB graduates.

“Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cybersecurity jobs by 2020, we’d still have a skills crisis in security,” said Marc van Zadelhoff, General Manager, IBM Security. “The volume and velocity of data in security is one of our greatest challenges in dealing with cybercrime. 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."