Cyber AI Technologies Hub
A Cyber-AI technologies hub where companies and academia collaborate on the advancement and demonstration.
The Cyber-AI Technologies Hub is a consortium of eight R&D intensive cyber security companies. These companies are willing to invest in AI-based security technologies and build leading edge capacity that will drive growth in their companies and benefit the NI economy.
The consortium
The consortium includes many market-leading companies developing products that service a global export market and represents a good cross-section of the products and services within the broader cybersecurity market.
CSIT has worked with consortium partners since 2019 to co-create a collaborative R&D lead growth strategy for the cybersecurity sector in the region. That work has included 1:1 consultations alongside a series of four, professionally-facilitated, workshops with the companies in January 2021 to further develop the proposal to the UK Government to support this significant, place based intervention, which is aligned to commitments in the New Decade, New Approach agreement.
Our aim
Our aim has been to identify a series of strategic R&D projects in the companies that allow AI-based security techniques to enrich feature sets and influence product roadmaps. The nature and implementation of the research and innovation projects is based upon previous CSIT experience in collaborating with cybersecurity companies in Northern Ireland, across the UK and further afield. They involve improving the performance of a vendor cybersecurity tool by incorporating cyber-AI technology.
The Technology
The technology can be pre-existing CSIT IP or can be developed during the project. Incorporation of cyber-AI technology ultimately results in an increase of productivity and cost-effectiveness of security analysts in the end-user processing chain.
In terms of implementation, the projects involve CSIT post-doctoral researchers, engineers and PhD students being embedded in the collaborating companies’ IT infrastructure. This enables them to work closely with the company engineers developing the tool of concern, as well as providing access to company proprietary data required for training of the Cyber-AI technology.
Benefits
Through the associated skills development and knowledge transfer, the intention is that the companies will grow larger teams around these projects in Northern Ireland as move that work up the value chain to drive economic impact in the region.