The NCWIT Pioneer Award recognizes technical women whose lifetime contributions have significantly impacted the landscape of technological innovation, amplifying the importance of capitalizing on the diverse perspectives that girls and women can bring to the table. Pioneer Award recipients also serve as role models whose legacies continue to inspire generations of young women to pursue computing and make history in their own right. The 2016 winner of the NCWIT Pioneer Award is Cynthia Solomon.

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Innovation is more than something that occurs within small startups. Established companies are now installing Innovation Centers of their own to encourage creativity. At a time when input from women technologists is crucial to success, we have organized a conference to answer this need. In the ABI.NYC - Women Entrepreneurship Summit for 2016 we have combined relevant skills and subjects for an event in which entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, research and products of women technologists will facilitate an exchange to foster personal and professional growth. To further the optimum progress of women's scientific communities we have paid special attention to inclusivity.

If there is one argument for a lack of women in positions of leadership that really make me frustrated it is the false belief that there just aren't enough qualified women. Wrong. If you aren't finding qualified women to lead your team, department or company; then you aren't looking in the right places. Emily Peck has written article entitled Stop Saying There Are No Qualified Women for the Huffington Post that offers a little more scientific understanding into the dilemma.

The Human Brain Project (HBP) is planning an online release event (30 March) to present the first components, services and tools of its 6 ICT Platforms to the scientific community (platforms on Neuroinformatics, Brain Simulation, High Performance Analytics and Computing, Medical Informatics, Neuromorphic Computing and Neurorobotics.) More info will be made available on the HBP website in due time.

EU funding of research projects in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) area over the period 2007-2013 (under the 7th EU Framework Programme, FP7) had a strong added value, according to two studies, which fed into the Commission's evaluation of the programme. More specifically, the studies found that EU-funded ICT projects produced output of a higher quality than the world average, and generated a world-leading level of scientific articles.

Last summer, Jacky Alcine learned just how biased computers can be. Alcine, who is African-American, took a bunch of pictures with friends at a concert. Later he loaded them into Google Photos, which stores and automatically organizes images. Google's software is able to group together pictures of a particular friend, or pictures of dogs, cats, etc. But when it labeled a picture of one of Alcine's friends, who is also African-American, it left him speechless. "It labeled it as something else. It labeled her as a different species or creature," says a horrified Alcine. Because it's so cliche he doesn't even want to say what creature it was. "I kind of refuse to. By saying that, I kind of reinforce the idea of it." I'm not going to reveal which animal it labeled his friend. But it also happened to others with dark skin. Alcine isn't buying that it's just some weird technical glitch. "One could say, 'Oh, it's a computer,' I'm like, OK ... a computer built by whom? A computer designed by whom? A computer trained by whom?" Alcine's conclusion is that there probably weren't any black people on the team that designed Google Photos. Google says it did test the product on employees of different races and ethnicities and it has apologized for what happened. The company says it's still early days for image labeling technology, and it's working to improve it. Alcine's experience is one of many strange biases that turn up in computer algorithms, which sift through data for patterns.

Virtual reality is the next big thing in video gaming, and the women who've made an early start in this burgeoning technology say they want to lead its growth. The technology industry has had a poor track record attracting and retaining women, especially in technical jobs. Video game development faces particular challenges: the raw conversation on video game culture that's mushroomed on the Internet has targeted female game developers critical of violent or sexist portrayals of women in games.

Photos of Women Meteorologists, Hydrologists, Oceanographers, Climate Scientists, dedicated to celebration of Women's day.

Seven global engineering and tech companies (IBM, Intel, General Motors, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cummins, Caterpillar, and Johnson Controls) are piloting re-entry, paid internship programs for people who have taken career breaks of two years or longer. These organizations plan to offer some of these interns permanent positions when the 12-week program ends.

NSF announced its intention to hand out small grants later this year to dozens of institutions to test novel ways of broadening participation in science and engineering. Winners of the 2-year, $300,000 pilot grants will be eligible to compete next year for up to five, $12.5 million awards over 5 years. NSF is calling the program INCLUDES. (The acronym stands for a real jaw-breaker: inclusion across the nation of communities of learners of underrepresented discoverers in engineering and science.) The underrepresentation of women and minorities in the scientific workforce is a problem that has persisted for decades despite many well-meaning federal initiatives. NSF Director France Cordova has spoken repeatedly about her intention of moving the needle on the issue since taking office in March 2014. And this initiative, totaling roughly $75 million, could well be the signature program of her 6-year term.