This section presents the 3rd Ada Lovelace Awards, which were presented in 2016/2017. The awards were aimed at university students in three disciplines: Bachelor's and Master's degree final projects, initiation to research and application development.

The winners and finalists are described below along with their winning work.

In Modality I 'Best Final Degree or Master's Thesis', the winner was Cristóbal López Montes, with his proposal entitled 'Telemonitoring and control of a drip irrigation system using solar pumping'. María Teresa Martos Velasco was runner-up for her proposal entitled 'Cloud infrastructure for use in bioinformatics'.

In Modality II 'Best software or hardware application', the winner was Álvaro Labella Romero, with his proposal 'AFRYCA: A Framework for the analysis of Consensus Approaches'. The finalist was Gregorio Soria Tirado, with his proposal 'An Augmented Reality System to visualize the underground infrastructure'.

Finally, in category III 'Best work of initiation to research', the winner was Alejandro Graciano Segura, for his work entitled 'Multilayer representation for spatial information in 3D GIS'.

The awards bear the name 'Ada Lovelace' in recognition of this British aristocrat, considered to be the first person to create a computer programme.