Digital manufacturing firms to join ‘Machine Intelligence Garage’

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The first companies to join the program are the digital manufacturing start-ups Intellisense and Predina, the digital health start-ups Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems and GTN, and natural language processing start-up Bloomsbury AI.

With joining the program, the companies will be receiving access to computational power from partners including Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Graphcore, and Nvidia.

Other collaborators include SpiNNaker, the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Hartree Centre, EPCC, and NVIDIA.

Having surveyed approximately 10% of all UK AI and machine learning start-ups, Digital Catapult’s recent Machines for Machine Intelligence report found that more than half are constrained in their growth by access to computation power – with a single training run for a machine learning system potentially costing upwards of £10,000.

‘Machine Intelligence Garage’ will reportedly run for three years. The programme is delivered by Digital Catapult as part of the CAP-AI project and is part funded through the European Regional Development Fund and an Innovate UK grant.

Dr Marko Balabanovic, chief technology officer at Digital Catapult, said: “Machine Intelligence Garage is part of a broad programme at Digital Catapult to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence technologies across UK companies and industries, with particular applications in areas like digital manufacturing or the creative industries where there are potential large gains in growth and productivity.

“Members of the first cohort have been carefully selected for their innovative use cases in AI, ethical values and ambition.

“We’re confident that their journey with the Machine Intelligence Garage will provide them with the support, expertise and compute resource they need to reach their full potential.”