Investigating the applications of artificial intelligence in cyber security

Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides instant insights to pierce through the noise of thousands of daily security alerts. The recent literature focuses on AI's application to cyber security but lacks visual analysis of AI applications. Structural changes have been observed in cyber security since the emergence of AI. This study promotes the development of theory about AI in cyber security, helps researchers establish research directions, and provides a reference that enterprises and governments can use to plan AI applications in the cyber security industry. Many countries, institutions and authors are densely connected through collaboration and citation networks. Artificial neural networks, an AI technique, gave birth to today's research on cloud cyber security. Many research hotspots such as those on face recognition and deep neural networks for speech recognition may create future hotspots on emerging technology, such as on artificial intelligence systems for security. This study visualizes the structural changes, hotspots and emerging trends in AI studies. Five evaluation factors are used to judge the hotspots and trends of this domain and a heat map is used to identify the areas of the world that are generating research on AI applications in cyber security. This study is the first to provide an overall perspective of hotspots and trends in the research on AI in the cyber security domain.