{"id":6596,"date":"2017-02-13T06:21:28","date_gmt":"2017-02-13T14:21:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/02\/13\/news-415\/"},"modified":"2017-02-13T06:21:28","modified_gmt":"2017-02-13T14:21:28","slug":"news-415","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/02\/13\/news-415\/","title":{"rendered":"Tony Stark Has Jarvis. And Now IBM Has Havyn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Brian Barrett| Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2017 10:00:29 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Last October, 11-year-old Evan Spisak wandered down to his father\u2019s basement workshop to help out on a weekend project, a time-honored tradition in homes across the country. But Evan\u2019s father, Mike, is an IBM master inventor. And what they came up with was no birdhouse or pinewood derby car. It was Havyn, a homegrown voice assistant that taps into IBM\u2019s enormous cybersecurity infrastructure, putting Watson\u2019s AI smarts at their literal beck and call.<\/p>\n

While Spisak likens his creation to Tony Stark\u2019s \u201cJarvis\u201d AI assistant, the shortest path to understanding its importance isn\u2019t though comics mythology. Think of Havyn, instead, as a highly specific analog to Amazon\u2019s Alexa voice assistant. Instead of connecting users to Spotify or online shopping carts, it helps fight cyberthreats. <\/p>\n

And while Havyn may have started as spare-time tinkering, a dozen analysts at IBM\u2019s X-Force Command Centers—the G.I. Joe<\/em> name the company gives its security operations hubs—in Atlanta, Boulder, Poland, and Costa Rica are already testing it in the real world.<\/p>\n

Some fathers and sons bond over football. Some like to cook. Evan and Mike Spisak invented an interface that could help fundamentally improve how cybersecurity works.<\/p>\n

Origin Story<\/h3>\n

The Havyn project started, appropriately enough, with a question.<\/p>\n

That fall weekend, Mike showed Evan IBM\u2019s \u201cSecurity Services Virtual Analyst,\u201d a fancy name for a Watson-based chatbot capable of fielding basic queries through the keyboard. As a kid growing up in the age of Siri might, Evan wondered why the need for all the typing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy can\u2019t you talk to it,\u201d Evan asked. As it turns out, you could. And with relative ease.<\/p>\n

The Spisaks bought a Raspberry Pi<\/a>—a $35 microcomputer—along with a 7-inch touchscreen interface that doesn\u2019t cost much more. He and Evan then raided Bluemix, IBM\u2019s cloud platform, for pre-existing \u201crecipes\u201d of code to give their experiment some basic functionality. That, along with some tinkering with specific dialog, was enough to get a generalized voice assistant up and running. Giving it cybersecurity bona fides was simply a matter of tapping into IBM\u2019s cloud-based cyber threat intelligence platform, X-Force Exchange. <\/p>\n

\u201cNow all of a sudden we were able to ask questions about cybersecurity, and get answers,\u201d says Spisak.<\/p>\n

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