Belgian prime minster Charles Michel's recent drive to promote the country as a positive place for investment is understandable after recent terrorist activity in Brussels, but it seems he may have missed an opportunity. Right on his doorstep, in the northern Belgium coastal town of Oostende, he has a company programming and selling robotsthat help humans dance, sing and learn new skills. The global robotics market is expected to be worth 1.5bn ( 1bn) by 2019 and although currently dominated by projections for industrial robots, demand for business and consumer robotics is expected to grow seven times faster than in manufacturing. "Belgium is Belgium," says Tommy Deblieck, co-founder of QBMT Solutions, the company behind the Zora social robot. "The government has a digital agenda and we said: 'What about robotics?' The only answer we got was: 'Oops, we forgot about that.'"

The problem is that if robot labor is cheaper and more reliable than human labor, why bother with the latter? The payback period for industrial robots (the time it takes for their extra costs to be paid off) is falling sharply. For a welding robot to be used in a Chinese factory, for example, the period has fallen from 5.3 years in 2010, to 1.7 years in 2015, say analysts from Citi. By 2017, they say it could be as low as 1.3 years. And more robots in factories equals fewer jobs for humans.

Animals normally get time to adapt to human change. Agriculture took thousands of years to spread and alter landscapes. Cities, too, were generally built up over hundreds of years, with nearby species figuring out how to adapt or at least move away from them. Drones are new, and while animals haven't yet had time to adapt to the small flying unmanned vehicles, they often react defensively, and with anger. Researchers from Duke University found this out when monitoring the elephant population in Gabon.

Here are this week's top stories in fraud and big data technology: Thanks to its huge network of users, Sprint has access to vast amounts of user data. Three years ago it established subsidiary Pinsight Media to investigate ways of capitalizing on that data. Since then it has gone from serving zero to six billion ad impressions per months, based on "authenticated first party data" which it alone has access to. The fact that plain passwords are no longer safe to protect our digital identities is no secret. For years, the use of two-factor authentication (2FA) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a means to ensure online account security and prevent fraud has been a hot topic of discussion.

ETFdb: The Magha CGI 30 index consists of large-cap U.S. equities with an average market cap of about 150 billion. Furthermore, the index is said to comprise socially responsible holdings. What determines if a company is socially responsible or not based on your methodology? In other words, what is the criteria for a company to be included in the index? All corporations give back in some way or another.

Patients in the most remote regions of the world may soon be casting their eyes skyward for medical supplies. Delivery company UPS is backing a start-up using drug-dropping-drones in Rwanda to transportlife-saving blood supplies and vaccines. Rather than sending supplies by road, firms are looking to the skies to get the medical supplies to where they are needed, with the automated air deliveries 20 times faster than by land. Delivery company UPS is backing a start-up using drones in Rwanda to transport life-saving blood supplies and vaccines. UPS will provide 800,000 ( 554,000) to a partnership including Gavi, agroup providing vaccines to developing countries, and robotics companyZipline International for drone flights in Rwanda startingin August.

Everyone seems to have an idea for making them useful--Amazon wants to use them for deliveries, Facebook sees them beaming the Internet to remote areas--but so far it all seems so very outlandish. A California startup called Zipline has a practical plan to use the devices for good. Later this year the company, working with UPS and vaccine distributer Gavi, plans to deploy a fleet of drones in Rwanda, where the machines will deliver medical supplies. The goal is to see 15 autonomous aircraft flying out of a centralized hub make 150 deliveries each day to 21 medical stations throughout the western half of the country. The Rwandan government, which has embraced drone technology and recently approved remarkably progressive guidelines for its use, is working with Zipline to measure the success of the venture.

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.