Welcome back. It turns out that animal recognition poses a particularly complex challenge for AI developers. Facial recognition in the human context benefits from the fact that the structure of the human face is fairly consistent from person to person. Not so for dogs and cats. New algorithms have tackled that problem, opening a range of uses from finding lost pets to combatting rabies.

Also: The latest on the role of AI in the battle against the coronavirus pandemic.

Animal shelters around the country have begun using artificial-intelligence apps to identify lost pets and reunite them with their owners. Similar to the facial-recognition apps that identify people, these applications are helping shelters improve their reunification rates while costing them almost nothing, Elliot M. Kass reports for WSJ Pro. In many cases, the software is provided free by service organizations such as Finding Rover, an app that was developed in cooperation with researchers at the University of Utah. 

More complex than human facial recognition. Animal-recognition software is more sophisticated than its counterpart for humans, said Philip Rooyakkers, founder of Vancouver-based PiP the Global Pet Recognition Co.

“With people, the basic shape and location of their facial features are always the same,” he said. “That isn’t true for a cat and especially a dog.” Unlike with people, the ears on a cat can be closer together or farther apart, and the nose on a dog like a lab has a completely different shape than that of a pug.

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Another use: battling rabies. Researchers affiliated with Washington State University’s Paul G. Allen School for Global Animal Health are using PiP's software as part of a rabies-eradication program in Tanzania. The program, undertaken by the Tanzanian government in conjunction with the university, is funded by the National Institutes of Health and pharmaceutical maker MSD Animal Health, a division of New Jersey-based Merck & Co. The aim is to administer the first mass dog vaccination against rabies in Tanzania’s Mara region. According to the World Health Organization, rabies kills around 59,000 people each year, mostly in Africa and Asia, and more than 99% of the cases are due to rabid dogs.

Silicon Valley’s technology whizzes step in to help combat the fast-moving outbreak. They are trying to hack everything from disease modeling to elder care and medical-device manufacturing, The Wall Street Journal reports. 

Thousands of volunteers from the tech world have begun pitching in on hundreds of hastily assembled projects over the past two weeks. Some are developing apps, like one to deliver groceries to vulnerable elderly people. Others want to help get masks to doctors. One of the most ambitious projects, which Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman helped organize, aims to build a million low-cost ventilators in three months.

Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, put its DeepMind artificial-intelligence unit onto the task of finding a vaccine, and its Verily life-sciences research unit is working on virus detection. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is working with San Francisco hospitals to expand testing, and Facebook is donating reserves of 720,000 masks to health workers.

• The World Health Organization has partnered with tech companies including Facebook and Microsoft to organize a hackathon to promote  development of software that can be used to fight the coronavirus pandemic, CNBC reports. The #BuildforCOVID19 hackathon was announced on Tuesday and will begin accepting project submissions on Thursday, CNBC said. 

• The Israeli Defense Ministry is leading an effort to analyze the voices of coronavirus patients to spot symptoms of Covid-19, Reuters reports. An Israeli startup working on the research project is going to use a mobile app to sample voices, which will then be analyzed with AI to identify a unique “vocal fingerprint” of the virus, according to the report.
• On Wednesday, IBM said it would offer hyperlocal Covid-19 data on The Weather Channel app, weather.com and an interactive dashboard. Covid-19 is the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

President Trump said restrictions on economic activity could be lifted in some parts of the country but not others as his administration works to develop a plan for how Americans could return to work in a few weeks.(WSJ)

Write to Enterprise Technology Editor Steven Rosenbush and Pro AI Deputy Editor John McCormick.

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