The refugee crisis is perhaps the single most challenging problem for Europe today. Hundreds of thousands of people have already traveled across dangerous sea passages from Turkish shores to Greek islands, resulting in thousands of dead and missing, despite the best rescue efforts from both sides. One of the main reasons is the total lack of any early warning-alerting system, which could provide some preparation time for the prompt and effective deployment of resources at the hot zones. This work is such an attempt for a systemic analysis of the refugee influx in Greece, aiming at (a) the statistical and signal-level characterization of the smuggling networks and (b) the formulation and preliminary assessment of such models for predictive purposes, i.e., as the basis of such an early warning-alerting protocol. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever attempt to design such a system, since this refugee crisis itself and its geographical properties are unique (intense event handling, little or no warning). The analysis employs a wide range of statistical, signal-based and matrix factorization (decomposition) techniques, including linear & linear-cosine regression, spectral analysis, ARMA, SVD, Probabilistic PCA, ICA, K-SVD for Dictionary Learning, as well as fractal dimension analysis. It is established that the behavioral patterns of the smuggling networks closely match (as expected) the regular burst and pause periods of store-and-forward networks in digital communications. There are also major periodic trends in the range of 6.2-6.5 days and strong correlations in lags of four or more days, with distinct preference in the Sunday-Monday 48-hour time frame. These results show that such models can be used successfully for short-term forecasting of the influx intensity, producing an invaluable operational asset for planners, decision-makers and first-responders.

Today, telepresence robots are priced for purchase or rent anywhere between 5,000 to 200,000, Chun says. While his research suggests the telepresence market is valued at 4 billion, he estimates that it's actually about half when factoring in conservative assumptions. Still, there is a lot of promise in the near future. Chun recorded 20 telepresence robot patents in 2014, and projected 36 patents for 2015. Additionally, the United States remains the dominant market, but Chun is seeing expansion in countries in Asia and the Middle East.

"Computer systems can automatically detect and interpret what is happening on video surveillance cameras; Siri allows anyone to have a personal assistant in their pocket; Watson has beaten two former champions on Jeopardy and Google driverless cars have driven over 500 000km accident-free. Modern technology is increasingly intelligent," says Suren Govender, Accenture Analytics MD. With the growing availability of sensors, better algorithms for data analytics and growing computational power, these intelligent technologies are becoming more prevalent and are being incorporated in everyday life and business. "The cognitive era is about thinking itself – how we gather information, access it and make decisions," notes Hamilton Ratshefola, country GM at IBM South Africa. Cognitive analytics engines have the ability to build knowledge and learn, they understand natural language, reason and interact more naturally with human beings than traditional programmable systems.

Farooq Bajwa still lives comfortably, up in the hills of San Juan Capistrano in a French chateau-style mansion with views of the Pacific. But his tech company, InfoSpan, and its bustling headquarters in an Irvine office park, are long gone. These days the income from three El Pollo Loco franchises bought two decades ago helps out. The Pakistani immigrant turned entrepreneur earned millions manufacturing computer components in the 1980s and 1990s, but he doesn't blame the dot-com bust for his change of fortune. Rather, he traces it back to a plan he had early last decade for a new business: a text-based payment system that could be used throughout the developing world, particularly for migrant workers to send money home.

With Congress revisiting how Pentagon units share authority under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, the intelligence agencies under the next presidential administration should likewise review their own unity of effort to become more agile and able to integrate, the top Defense intelligence official said Thursday. "The integration of intelligence of the past 15 years is a journey that is not finished," said Marcel Lettre, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, at a banquet for agency and industry professionals in the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance. "I hope the new administration finds clear progress from the last 15 years and takes it on with a mantle of seriousness, or even sees an opportunity to redouble the effort." Lettre, who was sworn in in December to preside over a 17 billion budget, eight components and 110,000 employees, said he also hopes the next administration will "institutionalize and make irreversible" the intelligence community's digital data sharing modernization effort known as the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (pronounced "eyesight"). "Key critical data sets are the coin of the realm for the intel community," he said.

In a blitzkrieg attack that took place over 12 hours in late 2012 and early 2013, criminals stole 45-million (U.S.) from two banks by hacking into credit card processing firms in India and the United States, then withdrawing money from ATMs in 27 countries. "In the place of guns and masks, this cybercrime organization used laptops and the Internet," New York attorney Loretta Lynch said at a news conference. "Moving as swiftly as data over the Internet … they became a virtual criminal flash mob, going from machine to machine, drawing as much money as they could, before these accounts were shut down." The mob infiltrated credit card processing firms, stole prepaid Visa and MasterCard debit card account numbers issued by the banks in the Middle-East and programmed them with extreme balances. The account numbers were emailed or texted to cohorts on the ground, who used a device to encode the account numbers onto the magnetic stripes of dummy cards.

When will the technology arrive that makes you obsolete in your current job? It's no idle question, and one that none other than Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took up this week in remarks to hundreds of Seattle technology and business leaders. We'll explore his comments, a new offering from Textio, the media's failures in covering the presidential primaries; have some fun with drones, Star Wars, Disney's Frozen, and STEM education; and wash it down with a cold home brew in this edition of Xconomy Seattle's Week in Review: He shared his view of Microsoft's unique culture, and how that gives the company an advantage. One aspect is Microsoft's global mindset, which Nadella, born in Hyderabad, India, talked about in a personal way. "I wouldn't be CEO of Microsoft if it was not for Microsoft's technology being a global force," Nadella said.

Still in the depths of sleep, I reach out and grab it, knocking a cold cup of coffee over the unread mountain of books on my bedside. I swear loudly, mop up the mess with one hand and look blearily at the message on my screen. It's from Otis, 27, who I have apparently just matched with on Tinder: "Hey sexy like ur curls. Wanna come over n get naked and I'll show you my curls." There is no denying that the pursuit of love in the 21st century has become littered with digital landmines. There are now more than 91 million people around the world on dating apps – and most of that is thanks to Tinder.

At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Jandy Tomy, Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations. With me today on the call are Robert Apatoff, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Becky Sheehan, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, please remember that, during the course of this call, management may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Federal Securities Laws that address the Company's expected future business, financial performance, and financial condition. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different than those expressed in our forward-looking statements. In addition to the Company's reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, please refer to the text in the Company's press release issued today for a discussion of the risks and uncertainties associated with such forward-looking statements. Also, please note that, on today's call, management will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, and free cash flow. The Company believes these non-GAAP financial measures provide useful information for investors. Please refer to today's press release for definitions and calculations of these non-GAAP performance measures, as well as reconciliations of the non-GAAP performance measures to the Company's GAAP financial results. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Robert Apatoff, President and Chief Executive Officer. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I will provide a brief overview of our business highlights, integration efforts, and strategic and operating initiatives. Following my comments, our CFO Becky Sheehan will review our financial results and outlook for 2016 in more detail. Finally, I will provide a few closing remarks, and then we'll open up the call to take your questions.

Merging beliefs requires the plausibility of the sources of the information to be merged. They are typically assumed equally reliable in lack of hints indicating otherwise; yet, a recent line of research spun from the idea of deriving this information from the revision process itself. In particular, the history of previous revisions and previous merging examples provide information for performing subsequent mergings. Yet, no examples or previous revisions may be available. In spite of the apparent lack of information, something can still be inferred by a try-and-check approach: a relative reliability ordering is assumed, the merging process is performed based on it, and the result is compared with the original information. The outcome of this check may be incoherent with the initial assumption, like when a completely reliable source is rejected some of the information it provided. In such cases, the reliability ordering assumed in the first place can be excluded from consideration. The first theorem of this article proves that such a scenario is indeed possible. Other results are obtained under various definition of reliability and merging.