Addressing the growing Autonomous Vehicle (AV) market, Cheetah RAID is releasing a ruggedized, compact server designed to sit under a seat or in the trunk. The Cheetah RAID Prowler is powered by a 3.6GHz 8-core or 16-core processor, with up to 128GB memory and four NVMe drive bays housed in hot-swappable canisters supporting up to 120TB on the new Intel P5316 SSDs. Addressing the growing Autonomous Vehicle (AV) market, Cheetah RAID is releasing a ruggedized, compact server designed to sit under a seat or in the trunk. The Cheetah RAID Prowler is powered by a 3.6GHz 8-core or 16-core processor, with up to 128GB memory and four NVMe drive bays housed in hot-swappable canisters supporting up to 120TB on the new Intel P5316 SSDs. However, being a high-performance rugged server/JBOF, the Prowler can be used in applications that need to capture a lot of data at a high rate of speed in a harsh environment, including military and surveillance and Media/Entertainment. Prowler was designed explicitly for edge-data-capture use cases, such as autonomous vehicle research, surveillance monitoring, media and entertainment production, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. The Prowler is built to meet MIL-STD-810F, MIL-STD-810G, and MIL-STD-461F specs with the latest technology on the market today, including PCIe GEN4, MIL-spec grade locked down internal components, and tamper-proof features.

Most people find it a pain to receive parcels in wide time slots like, say, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., so when delivery startup Paack offered a service in which everyone could narrow that window down to one hour, with no extra charge, it had a challenge on its hands. The startup's routing engine worked but needed to be more efficient. Enter Prowler.io, a Cambridge, U.K.-based machine-learning startup that bills itself as a decision-making platform for any company with complex problems to solve. Paack's contact at venture firm Balderton in London introduced it to Prowler in February 2018, and within months its delivery vans and trucks were being coordinated by an intelligent, digital simulation. With the beta test over, Paack's CEO, Fernando Benito, sees a potential benefit to his bottom line. Some of his startup's deliveries are now 15% more efficient, he tells Forbes.

Everyone's had that coworker, the one who never asks for help even when fully out of their depth, unaware of their own incompetence. But what happens when your colleague isn't a human suffering from Dunning-Kruger but artificial intelligence? That's a question Vishal Chatrath has had to consider as the CEO and co-founder of Prowler.io, an AI platform for generalised decision making for businesses that aims to augment human work with machine learning. "The decision-making process can be quite similar [across different businesses], if abstracted at a low-enough level," he says. "In some cases, the decisions are fully automated, in some cases, there's a human in the loop. Keeping a human as part of the process is partially because of a lack of trust in machine-based decision making, but it's also an admission by Chatrath that we remain in the early years of AI. Such systems aren't perfect, and likely never will be, and one failing of AI is it doesn't inherently understand its own competency. If a human worker needs help, they can ask for it -- but how do you build an understanding of personal limitations into code? "In both crashes, the commonality was that the autopilot did not understand its own incompetence," Chatrath says. Prowler.io built an awareness of incompetence into its system, teaching its AI to not only understand its limitations but to forecast when it's going to reach a situation where it has no experience or background. "Then it gently taps the human on the shoulder, so to speak, for the human to take control," he says. The system can learn from those interactions, and after enough training may eventually be able to stop asking for help. Such limits to AI could be placed by regulators, as is the case in the financial industry where levels of risk are carefully weighed, or by the business itself. The fourth consideration is how are we even sure the AI is asking the right questions. "There is no cookie cutter answer to these," he says. If there's a 10 per cent chance a logistics scheduler is wrong, and a lorry is therefore a bit late, that's okay. If there's a 10 per cent chance that shape in front of a driverless car is a human, the car should stop -- the risk are too high for any uncertainty. "Rather than doing stupid things like running someone over, it brings the human into the [process]," Chatrath explains, as it's been told when the risks are too high for it to screw up. That's important, says Taha Yasseri, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science, because while we can delegate decision making to machines, we can't delegate responsibility. "The ultimate responsibility in implementing the decisions made by machines are on us," he says. In practice, whenever the expected accuracy of a human is higher than a machine, it is practically justified to use human judgment to overlook machine decisions."

Most people find it a pain to receive parcels in wide time slots like, say, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., so when delivery startup Paack offered a service in which everyone could narrow that window down to one hour, with no extra charge, it had a challenge on its hands. The startup's routing engine worked but needed to be more efficient. Enter Prowler.io, a Cambridge, U.K.-based machine-learning startup that bills itself as a decision-making platform for any company with complex problems to solve. Paack's contact at venture firm Balderton in London introduced it to Prowler in February 2018, and within months its delivery vans and trucks were being coordinated by an intelligent, digital simulation. With the beta test over, Paack's CEO, Fernando Benito, sees a potential benefit to his bottom line. Some of his startup's deliveries are now 15% more efficient, he tells Forbes.

Most people find it a pain to receive parcels in wide time slots like, say, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., so when delivery startup Paack offered a service in which everyone could narrow that window down to one hour, with no extra charge, it had a challenge on its hands. The startup's routing engine worked but needed to be more efficient. Enter Prowler.io, a Cambridge, U.K.-based machine-learning startup that bills itself as a decision-making platform for any company with complex problems to solve. Paack's investors at Balderton in London introduced it to Prowler in February 2018, and within months its delivery vans and trucks were being coordinated by an intelligent, digital simulation. With the beta test over, Paack's CEO, Fernando Benito, sees a potential benefit to his bottom line. Some of his startup's deliveries are now 15% more efficient, he tells Forbes.

Most people find it a pain to receive parcels between wide time slots like 8am and 5pm, so when delivery startup Paack offered a service where everyone could narrow that window down to one hour, with no extra charge, it had a challenge on its hands. The startup's routing engine worked but needed to be more efficient. Enter Prowler.io, a Cambridge, UK-based machine-learning startup that bills itself as a decision-making platform for any company with complex problems to solve. Paack's investor at Balderton in London introduced it to Prowler in February 2018 and within months, its delivery vans and trucks were being coordinated by an intelligent, digital simulation. With the beta test over, Paack's CEO Fernando Benito sees a potential benefit to his bottom line. Some of his startup's deliveries are now 15% more efficient, he tells Forbes.

The burgeoning AI industry is still focused on perception – recognising images, understanding speech, helping robots touch. But far greater benefits will come when AIs can make good, principled decisions based on those perceptions.

Cambridge AI decision making platform, PROWLER.io, will be centre stage in California in May as the award-winning startup holds a provocative thought leaders' summit. Business Weekly's newly crowned Startup of the Year is bringing together a cohort of great minds to push the frontiers of AI thinking for a one-day event in Palo Alto on May 9. Founder and CEO Vishal Chatrath says it will be the first of many such think tanks talking about "AI taking decisions – leaving today's discussions about perception and classification in our wake." Chaired by David Rowan, editor-at-large of WIRED magazine, the event is designed, in Chatrath's words, "to share bold provocations on the future of AI." Guests will be drawn from academia, big tech, government, complexity theory, finance, gaming, quantum, safety tech and regulation. Speakers will give a 15 minute talk, ending with "a bold provocation around decision making and AI. "We are deliberately curating a wide-ranging agenda for the first of an annual event series for PROWLER.io," said Chatrath.

Prowler.io CEO Vishal Chatrath and I are talking about artificial intelligence in a room called Maria. The meeting room, which forms part of Prowler's bright and buzzing Hills Road offices, doesn't have consciousness as far as I'm aware, but is named in honour of one of the main characters in Metropolis, a 1927 film which depicts an early vision of the rise of the machines. In it, Maria sees her likeness transferred to a robot, which leads an uprising to destroy the titular Metropolis. It's one of several nods to sci-fi at Prowler HQ – the firm's boardroom is called Skynet – but the company, which is being tipped by many as the Next Big Thing to emerge from the Cambridge cluster, has its sights set firmly on using AI to solve real-world problems.

Prowler.io CEO Vishal Chatrath and I are talking about artificial intelligence in a room called Maria. The meeting room, which forms part of Prowler's bright and buzzing Hills Road offices, doesn't have consciousness as far as I'm aware, but is named in honour of one of the main characters in Metropolis, a 1927 film which depicts an early vision of the rise of the machines. In it, Maria sees her likeness transferred to a robot, which leads an uprising to destroy the titular Metropolis. It's one of several nods to sci-fi at Prowler HQ – the firm's boardroom is called Skynet – but the company, which is being tipped by many as the Next Big Thing to emerge from the Cambridge cluster, has its sights set firmly on using AI to solve real-world problems. Vishal explains that these problems could be, well, just about anything.