Lack of diversity, and specifically, gender diversity, is one of the key problems that both technological companies and academia are facing these days. Moreover, recent studies show that the number of female students enrolled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) related disciplines have been decreasing in the last twenty years, while the number of women resigning from technological job positions remains unacceptably high. As members of a higher education institution, we foresee that working towards increasing and retaining the number of female students enrolled in STEM disciplines can help to alleviate part of the challenges faced by women in STEM fields. In this paper, we first review the main barriers and challenges that women encounter in their professional STEM careers through different age stages. Next, we focus on the special case of the information theory field, discussing the potential of gendered innovation, and whether it can be applied in the Information Theory case. The working program developed by the School of Engineering at the University of Valencia (ETSE-UV), Spain, which aims at decreasing the gender diversity gap, is then presented and recommendations for practice are given. This program started in 2011 and it encompasses Bachelor, Master and PhD levels. Four main actions are implemented: Providing institutional encouragement and support, increasing the professional support network, promoting and supporting the leadership, and increasing the visibility of female role models. To assess the impact of these actions, a chi-square test of independence is included to evaluate whether there is a significant effect on the percentage of enrolled female students. The percentage of graduated female students in the information and Communications Technology Field is also positioned with respect to other universities and the Spanish reference value. This analysis establishes that, in part, this program has helped to achieve higher female graduation rates, especially among Bachelor students, as well as increasing the number of top-decision positions held by faculty women.

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are key disciplines towards tackling the challenges related to the Sustainable Development Goals. However, evidence shows that women are enrolling in these disciplines in a smaller percentage than men, especially in Engineering related fields. As stated by the United Nations Women section, increasing the number of women studying and working in STEM fields is fundamental towards achieving better solutions to the global challenges, since the potential for innovation is larger. In this paper, we present the Girls4STEM project, which started in 2019 at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Enginyeria de la Universitat de València, Spain. This project works towards breaking the stereotypes linked to STEM fields, addressing both boys and girls aged from 6 to 18, but especially trying to open the range of career options for young girls through interaction with female STEM experts. The goal is to spark girls’ interest in STEM disciplines from childhood, so that they become more self-confident in these areas. To achieve this goal, the project is built over three main actions: the Girls4STEM Family Talks, where students, families, and teachers participate; the Girls4STEM Professional Talks, where the target is a general audience; and the Initial Training Seminars for teachers. Short-term results are here presented, showing that aspects related to self-perception and perception from others (family, teachers) play a significant role. Moreover, these results also indicate that there may not be a general understanding of which disciplines are included in STEM.

The problem of designing Joint Power Control and Optimal Beamforming (JPCOB) algorithms for the downlink of a coordinated multi-cell W-CDMA system is considered throughout this paper. In this case, the JPCOB design is formulated as the problem of minimizing the total transmitted power in the coordinated multi-cell system, subject to a certain quality of service requirement for each user. In this paper, the performance of two JPCOB algorithms based on different beamforming approaches is compared over the coordinated multi-cell system. The first one, obtains local beamformers by means of the well-known virtual uplink-downlink duality. In contrast, the second algorithm implements multi-base beamformers, taking into account match filter equalizers at the receivers. Moreover, realistic system parameters, such as per-base station power constraints or the asynchronous nature of the signals arriving at the receivers, are taken into account. Simulation results show that the algorithm based on multi-base beamforming presents attractive properties, such as an inherent multi-base scheduling technique or a decreasing total transmitted power as the degree of coordination between base stations is increased. Index Terms-Coordinated multi-cell system, downlink multibase beamforming, multi-base scheduling techniques, joint power control and optimal beamforming algorithms.

In this paper, three joint processing schemes for the downlink are characterized and compared within a cluster of base stations. The motivation of this study is to analyze the performance of these schemes over the cluster area, as a first step towards designing an adaptive joint processing scheme supporting dynamic usage scenarios. Each one of the analyzed schemes, the centralized, partial and distributed joint processing approaches, requires a different amount of available channel knowledge at the transmitter side, inter-base information exchange and feedback from the users. In addition, these schemes show varying capabilities to serve the users depending on their location in the cluster area. Therefore, in a real scenario, an adaptive joint processing scheme encompassing the three schemes could be used by the cluster of base stations. Simulation results show that, assuming coherent transmission, the centralized joint processing scheme outperforms with 25% the partial joint processing scheme and with 50% the distributed joint processing approach in the cell edge when a backhaul-load weighted average sum-rate per cell metric is taken into account.

Abstract-In this paper, we address the problem of designing a joint scheduling and power control algorithm in a downlink coordinated multi-point (CoMP) cluster supporting CoMP joint transmission. The objective is to maximize the cell-edge throughput under per-point power constraints. By an analytical derivation, binary power control is proved to be the optimal solution for any given selected user group. Utilizing this analytical result, a centralized and a semi-distributed version of joint user selection and power control algorithms are proposed. Compared to algorithms without considering joint transmission and algorithms without considering power control, simulation results show that the proposed algorithms achieve a good tradeoff between joint transmission and interference coordination, which helps to improve the cell-edge performance.