A doctor in India has performed a series of five percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures on patients who were 20 miles away from him. The feat was pulled off using a precision vascular robot developed by Corindus. The results of the surgeries, which were successful, have just been published in EClinicalMedicine, a spin-off of medical journal The Lancet. The feat is an example of telemedicine, an emerging field that leverages advances in networking, robotics, mixed reality, and communications technologies to beam in medical experts to remote locations for everything from consultations to surgical procedures. Telemedicine, which could decentralize healthcare by distributing doctors into local communities virtually, could ease shortages of nurses and doctors and potentially cut healthcare costs.

A doctor in India has performed a series of five percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures on patients who were 20 miles away from him. The feat was pulled off using a precision vascular robot developed by Corindus. The results of the surgeries, which were successful, have just been published in EClinicalMedicine, a spin-off of medical journal The Lancet. The feat is an example of telemedicine, an emerging field that leverages advances in networking, robotics, mixed reality, and communications technologies to beam in medical experts to remote locations for everything from consultations to surgical procedures. Telemedicine, which could decentralize healthcare by distributing doctors into local communities virtually, could ease shortages of nurses and doctors and potentially cut healthcare costs.

AI might be a hot topic but you'll still need to justify those projects. UPS and FedEx anticipate delivering close to 1 billion packages in the next few weeks. Moving that much merch quickly and accurately would be impossible without the recent automation revolution in the logistics industry. Robotics technology developed by Kiva has enabled Amazon to fulfill orders same-day in many locations. Though human workers still play a vital (albeit controversial, according to recent reports) role in the picking, packing, and palletizing that go into dispatching goods to your doorstep, there can be no question that we're getting ever-closer to a so-called lights-out shipping warehouse, one in which all the workers are robots.

With the deluge of reports lately on how robots are replacing humans at everyday tasks, you may think the end of the world, at least for a certain category of human workers, is nigh. Indeed that may well be the case in certain professions. The Associated Press, for instance, has a team of robots that generates 3,000 news reports about the quarterly earnings releases of companies. This Japanese hotel that I wrote about recently is staffed entirely with robots. The paralegal may soon be a position of the past as law firms commission bots to sift through vast reams of legal information and synthesise them.

LISBON, PORTUGAL: Artificial intelligence (AI) will one day take on decision making and planning, freeing up enterprise employees for more creative roles. Speaking at the Web Summit 2016 technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal on Tuesday, the executive said that the "robotic enterprise" is closer than we think -- with some roles already well on the way to being ran almost exclusively by machine learning (ML), AI and algorithms. One of today's biggest opportunities for IT to make an impact is by automating business processes, manufacturing, repetitive tasks, and more. Volkswagen has a total of three centers and research labs dedicated to researching AI applications and "taking AI into a completely different environment," according to the CIO. Each of these centers is working not only in the creation of connected car solutions, but also in developing AI systems for speeding up corporate processes -- all of which eventually becomes public domain. Hofmann says there are five main "stages" Volkswagen uses to define the application of AI technology in the enterprise market.