Over 16 months ago, Pfizer achieved a historic scientific moonshot -- the unprecedentedly swift development and authorization of a novel vaccine for a novel virus using methods that hitherto had not been used in approved drugs at scale. Throughout the pandemic, nearly every public research supercomputer pivoted to some form of Covid research, but the pharmaceutical giants were characteristically cagey about their use of advanced technologies for vaccine and therapeutic development. At a session held during Nvidia's GTC22 this week, Joe Ucuzoglu, CEO of Deloitte, spoke to Lidia Fonseca, executive vice president and chief digital and technology officer for Pfizer, about the company's use of HPC and AI in the development of its groundbreaking vaccines and therapeutics for Covid-19. Ucuzoglu opened the session -- a fireside chat titled "Pfizer's AI-enabled transformation" -- by lauding the "fastest development of a novel vaccine in history" and calling Pfizer a "poster child for the full promise of AI to society." He then continued by asking Fonseca how Pfizer is driving technology innovation in its value chain.

Is the age of intelligent machines bringing gender equality nearer or turning back the clock? Gemma Lloyd, co-founder of Work180, an Australia-based international jobs network for women, is proud of her engineering team in which women outnumber men. She just wishes there were more female engineers generally. "If there aren't enough women in the mix, the products won't be as good as they could be, and they certainly won't be what society wants -- because women are 50 per cent of society," she says. The lack of female technologists -- only 22 per cent of artificial intelligence professionals globally are female, for instance -- is a frustration for many gend er equality advocates.

The second edition of DES Digital Business World Congress (DES2017), the world's largest international forum on digital transformation, will take place in Madrid (IFEMA) over the 23, 24 and 25 May. International experts in Cyber-security, the Internet of Things (IoT), AI, Cloud, Blockchain, Big data and analytics and leadership, diversity and talent in the new age of digitalisation will be present at the event. Companies including Accenture, Fujitsu, IBM, Wipro, LinkedIn, Mediacloud, Microsoft, EMC, Everis, Google, HP Enterprise, Huawei, Intel, T-Systems, Vmware, Berepublic, Altran, CA Technologies, Dynatrace, Ericsson, FHios, Improove, Konica Minolta, Lenovo, SAS, Schneider Electric, Seidor, Siemens and UST Global have already placed their trust in DES Digital Business World Congress as a meeting point for digital transformation. The world's largest digital transformation congress will once again bring together the knowledge of more than 450 international speakers on subjects such as Digital Leadership, Cloud, IoT, Cyber-security, Big Data and Analytics, as well as up-and-coming technologies such as Blockchain, AI and Robotics, in an international congress with a total of more than 120 hours of conferences. Alex Tapscott, co-author of'Blockchain Revolution: How the technology behind Bitcoin is changing money, business and the world' will set forth the theory of how Blockchain will lead to a new landscape of development in areas as diverse as health, education, government and public administration, finance and business.