Tech
Interview: Differentiating with AI in pet care | Computer Weekly
Over the past year, Kate Balingit has been leading the digital health initiative at Mars Nutrition, reporting to the company’s pet care chief information officer, where she is focused on commercialising and deploying artificial intelligence (AI) through the Mars pet nutrition brands. These include well-known pet foods brands such as Pedigreee, Iams, Royal Canine, Sheba and Whiskas.
“Even though we’re building tech products, Mars is a non-tech company,” says Balingit, whose official job title is Mars Petcare head of digital innovation. “We kind of abide by the same standards of scientific credibility and scientific rigour that apply to our primary business of food.”
A former Googler, who was also involved in Waze, Balingit joined Mars Petcare in 2022 to head up Whistle, the “FitBit for dogs” company Mars acquired in 2016 (see Career at Google) .
She says Mars Petcare has made a large commitment to digitising the pet care business. This includes everything from upskilling staff to digitising factories and its supply chain, as well as elevating the e-commerce experiences. Digitisation also covers emerging technologies such as using agentic AI for automating workflows and mining digital health data.
On the AI front, rather than rely on existing large language models (LLMs), she says the business is focused on building the computer vision algorithms itself: “We’re building image classifiers to detect signs of emerging health conditions and enterprise software components that enable us to create user experiences that can safely live on our brand digital properties. It comes down to differentiated assets – our proprietary data sets bootstrap an image database and then we work with vets to label the images and train the algorithm.”
She says these algorithms go through the same kind of scientific governance rigor as the food part of the business. “We do have to be able to say where we sourced our data. We’re also very explicit about publishing how we train the models.” This, she says, is a differentiator. “You don’t get a free pass just because you’re working with algorithms. At a non-tech company, you have to abide by the same quality standards that apply to the entire business.”
Among the challenges the company aims to address is how to build products and digital experiences that meet the unique needs of individual brands, individual business units and offers a unique differentiator. A lot of the work involves its data architecture for structuring all of the data that the company collects from pet parents who use the apps and applications the company develops.
“We’re working with emerging technologies like computer vision and trying to build products with a platform approach to enable us to repurpose these assets in different types of applications,” she says. “My team takes a very component-based approach. I don’t see us building products. Instead, we are building a series of capabilities.”
Digitising pet care
There are around 200 people working in the digital transformation organisation at Mars Petcare. Balingit’s role involves orchestrating initiatives across three core functions: science, data science and software engineering.
“The digital health initiative starts with science; we’re building scientific instruments,” she says. These algorithms are capable of detecting the emerging presence of health conditions in dogs. “I start by partnering with the global R&D [research and development] science function, which includes specialists in oral health, skin health, gut health and healthy ageing.”
The team put together a specification for the product, such as deciding on the symptoms of a health condition that the software and AI it produces will be able to detect. The data science team is used to build the algorithm to detect the health condition.
“In the case of a canine dental check, we’re detecting plaque, tartar and gum irritation. I work with our data science team to build the algorithm – we have to acquire the training data and we have to label it, then we build the computer vision models using Azure developer tools.”
The algorithm is made available via an application programming interface (API). Balingit then works with the software engineering team on the actual product experience. “It’s a truly cross-functional effort,” she says.
The software not only needs to meet the high standards associated with the brand, but a high bar is also set for the enterprise architecture, data security and data privacy. With these high standards, Balingit says: “Data science and software engineering can do something really special, which is to scale scientific understanding and put these capabilities into the hands of pet parents around the world through our biggest brands.”
Greenies is a recent example of one of the brands with an AI tool. “Our use of AI in the Greenies Canine Dental Check tool started with a pet parent insight. We know that 80% of dogs have signs of periodontal disease by the age of three, but 72% of pet parents think that their dog’s oral health is fine,” she says.
The team wanted to address this awareness gap among pet owners using AI to, as Balingit puts it, “make the invisible visible and help people to understand that their dog is experiencing an oral health issue.”
“We’re very explicit about publishing how we train the models. You don’t get a free pass just because you’re working with algorithms”
Kate Balingit, Mars Petcare
The Greenies Canine Dental Check required a computer vision algorithm trained on more than 50,000 images of dogs. “We built an algorithm that was capable of taking a smartphone image to understand if the photograph is of a dog and, if it is, if it’s showing the dog’s mouth and its teeth are visible.” The algorithm then needs to analyse the image to determine whether the tooth has visual signs of oral disease.
When asked about the success in capturing teeth in a pet dog’s mouth, she says: “We always encourage caution. But when I’ve looked at the data, the average user captures about 10.2 teeth in the photo itself.” So, while it may seem a major undertaking for pet owners to attempt taking smartphone photos of their dog’s mouth with visible teeth, in Balingit’s experience, pet parents are “very capable”.
Another consideration is the level of accuracy. Balingit says: “No algorithm is going to be 100% accurate. A human is not 100% accurate. What’s really important is that we are not building a diagnostic device. Our goal was to build a health-screening instrument that could find visual indicators of an emerging disease.” As such, the level of accuracy it can achieve of 97% is good enough.
An approach to business AI
As Balingit notes: “AI is just top of mind for everybody right now.” Like many businesses deploying AI applications, she points out that the past two years have been “a whirlwind”, which means companies such as Mars Petcare need to figure out what they should be doing with AI.
“It’s important to be intentional about what we’re doing, and the key question for me is, ‘What do we at Mars Petcare have that an AI company in Silicon Valley doesn’t have? What are our unique assets and how do we build an AI innovation agenda on top of them?’”
Looking to the future and advances in digital technologies, Balingit believes the world of internet of things (IoT) sensors and AI offers a tantalising opportunity for the business and pet owners alike. While people talking to their pets like Dr Dolittle may seem a bit far-fetched, she says: “Our pets do talk to us with their movements, their facial expressions.” Inevitably, many pet owners may miss these subtle signs, but AI could offer a way to spot these.
Ballingit sees an opportunity to use sensor data to help quantify animal behaviour and then apply AI to translate the sensor data into something humans can understand. In a world where digital technologies have made people ever-more disconnected from the real world, tech innovation may one day offer a way for pet parents to have a closer relationship with their furry friends.
Tech
Lenovo’s Latest Wacky Concepts Include a Laptop With a Built-In Portable Monitor
Do you like having a second screen with your computer setup? What if your laptop could carry a second screen for you? That’s the idea behind Lenovo’s latest proof of concept, the ThinkBook Modular AI PC, announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Lenovo is never shy to show off wacky, weird concept laptops. We’ve seen a PC with a transparent screen, one with a rollable OLED screen, a swiveling screen, and another with a flippy screen. At CES earlier this year, the company showed off a gaming laptop with a display that expands at the push of a button. Sometimes, these concepts turn into real products that go on sale (often in limited quantities).
At MWC 2026, Lenovo trotted out three concepts. While it’s unclear whether any of them will become real, purchasable products, there’s some unique utility here, and a peek at how computing experiences could change in the future.
A Laptop With a Built-In Portable Screen
As someone with a multi-screen setup at home and a fondness for portable monitors, the ThinkBook Modular AI PC appeals to me the most. At first glance, it looks like a normal laptop. Take a look behind, and you’ll notice there’s a second screen magnetically hanging off the back of the laptop, like a koala carrying a baby on its back.
The screen is connected to the laptop using pogo-pin connectors, so you can use it in this state to display content to people in front of you, say, if you were making a presentation during a meeting. Alternatively, you can pop this second screen off, remove a hidden kickstand resting under the laptop, and magnetically attach it to the 14-inch screen so that you have a traditional portable monitor experience. (You’ll need to connect this to the laptop via a USB-C cable in this orientation.)
If you don’t have the desk space for that orientation, you can always remove the keyboard from the base and pop the second screen there—it’ll auto-connect to the laptop via the pogo pins, and you’ll be able to use the Bluetooth keyboard to type on a dual-screen setup that resembles the Asus ZenBook Duo. The whole system is a fantastically portable method of improving productivity on the go, and the laptop isn’t too thick or cumbersome.
Tech
The 5 Big ‘Known Unknowns’ of Donald Trump’s New War With Iran
More recently, Iran has been a regular adversary in cyberspace—and while it hasn’t demonstrated quite the acuity of Russia or China, Iran is “good at finding ways to maximize the impact of their capabilities,” says Jeff Greene, the former executive assistant director of cybersecurity at CISA. Iran, in particular, famously was responsible for a series of distributed-denial-of-service attacks on Wall Street institutions that worried financial markets, and its 2012 attack on Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s Rasgas marked some of the earliest destructive infrastructure cyberattacks.
Today, surely, Iran is weighing which of these tools, networks, and operatives it might press into a response—and where, exactly, that response might come. Given its history of terror campaigns and cyberattacks, there’s no reason to think that Iran’s retaliatory options are limited to missiles alone—or even to the Middle East at all.
Which leads to the biggest known unknown of all:
5. How does this end? There’s an apocryphal story about a 1970s conversation between Henry Kissinger and a Chinese leader—it’s told variously as either Mao-Tse Tung or Zhou Enlai. Asked about the legacy of the French revolution, the Chinese leader quipped, “Too soon to tell.” The story almost surely didn’t happen, but it’s useful in speaking to a larger truth particularly in societies as old as the 2,500-year-old Persian empire: History has a long tail.
As much as Trump (and the world) might hope that democracy breaks out in Iran this spring, the CIA’s official assessment in February was that if Khamenei was killed, he would be likely replaced with hardline figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And indeed, the fact that Iran’s retaliatory strikes against other targets in the Middle East continued throughout Saturday, even after the death of many senior regime officials—including, purportedly, the defense minister—belied the hope that the government was close to collapse.
The post-World War II history of Iran has surely hinged on three moments and its intersections with American foreign policy—the 1953 CIA coup, the 1979 revolution that removed the shah, and now the 2026 US attacks that have killed its supreme leader. In his recent bestselling book King of Kings, on the fall of the shah, longtime foreign correspondent Scott Anderson writes of 1979, “If one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French, and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”
It is hard not to think today that we are living through a moment equally important in ways that we cannot yet fathom or imagine—and that we should be especially wary of any premature celebration or declarations of success given just how far-reaching Iran’s past turmoils have been.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly bragged about how he sees the military and Trump administration’s foreign policy as sending a message to America’s adversaries: “F-A-F-O,” playing off the vulgar colloquialism. Now, though, it’s the US doing the “F-A” portion in the skies over Iran—and the long arc of Iran’s history tells us that we’re a long, long way from the “F-O” part where we understand the consequences.
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.
Tech
This Backyard Smoker Delivers Results Even a Pitmaster Would Approve Of
While my love of smoked meats is well-documented, my own journey into actually tending the fire started just last spring when I jumped at the opportunity to review the Traeger Woodridge Pro. When Recteq came calling with a similar offer to check out the Flagship 1600, I figured it would be a good way to stay warm all winter.
While the two smokers have a lot in common, the Recteq definitely feels like an upgrade from the Traeger I’ve been using. Not only does it have nearly twice the cooking space, but the huge pellet hopper, rounded barrel, and proper smokestack help me feel like a real pitmaster.
The trade-off is losing some of the usability features that make the Woodridge Pro a great first smoker. The setup isn’t as quite as simple, and the larger footprint and less ergonomic conditions require a little more experience or patience. With both options, excellent smoked meat is just a few button presses away, but speaking as someone with both in their backyard, I’ve been firing up the Recteq more often.
Getting Settled
Photograph: Brad Bourque
Setting up the Recteq wasn’t as time-consuming as the Woodridge, but it was more difficult to manage on my own. Some of the steps, like attaching the bull horns to the lid, or flipping the barrel onto its stand, would really benefit from a patient friend or loved one. Like most smokers, you’ll need to run a burn-in cycle at 400 degrees Fahrenheit to make sure there’s nothing left over from manufacturing or shipping. Given the amount of setup time and need to cool down the smoker after, I would recommend setting this up Friday afternoon if you want to smoke on a Saturday.
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