Advances in Secure Knowledge Management in the Artificial Intelligence Era

Excerpt

Knowledge management and preservation started thousands of years ago from cave paintings, representing words by pictures, later moving to books through the invention of paper and printing in the 15^th century (Wallace, 2007). Later with the development of computing systems, knowledge/information was stored in the form of computing documents. In the first decade of the 21^st century there was an explosion of volume, velocity, and variety (3V) of data. In addition to the storage cost, extraction of information/knowledge was non-trivial and thus required the evolution of knowledge management tools. In the 2^nd decade the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution started. Scientists started to work with big data to efficiently and effectively deal with the 3Vs. Data is scanned and AI software is used to extract knowledge/information. AI has revolutionized every sphere of life (OED Online, 2021; Russell & Norvig, 2010; Nilsson, 2014). For example, healthcare has changed because of image recognition, natural language processing, language modeling, as well as neural machine translation. Although use of AI for knolwedge management is still in the nascent stage, it is important to note that along with knowledge extraction, security and privacy protection are paramount. Secure Knowledge Management (SKM) deals with the science of security in the collection, organizing, and dissemination of knowledge. Hackers and malicious actors, either sponsored by an adversary state, a competitor, or those working independently, are always on the lookout for weak spots in knowledge management systems to perpetuate passive and active attacks which may range from activities leading to information theft to extortion via ransomware. Hence, security systems must avert malicious activities perpetuated on host systems that archive the important information. …