Vaughn College Hosts the Sixth Annual International Conference on Digital Technologies and Applications

Researchers from Across the World Convened in Queens to Discuss Digital Methods and Theories Impacting the World

QUEENS, N.Y., Oct. 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Vaughn College hosted the sixth annual International Conference on Digital Technologies and Applications (ICDTA) on Friday, October 9 and Saturday, October 10. The two-day hybrid conference focused on the intersection of digital technologies, soft computing and intelligent systems, and how it impacts the world. Serving as a bridge between high-level engineering and practical business applications, the conference drew researchers from across the world from more than 30 different countries, both in-person and online.

"Hosting the conference at Vaughn College significantly elevated the institution's global academic presence while providing students with invaluable professional growth," said Dr Sanaa Faquir, assistant professor in Vaughn's engineering and technology department. "By bringing top researchers and industry pioneers directly to campus, the college established indexed publication ties and opened the door for future institutional partnerships and research grants." Dr. Faquir, who served as a conference moderator, also helped organize the event.

Two plenary sessions made up the in-person section of the conference on October 9. The morning plenary session featured guest speakers Wayne J. Levin, president and chief executive officer of Predictum Inc., Canada, and Dr. Philip Ramsey, vice president of data science and training at Predictum discussing how bad research costs the United States economy several billion dollars every year and steps that can be taken to reverse the trend. The plenary session concluded with guest speaker Dr. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, principle research scientist at IBM, discussing efficient LLM inference—the process of using a trained large language model to generate output text, code or data from an input prompt without changing the model's learned weights.

The afternoon plenary session began with guest speaker Dr. Lobna A. Said, professor at Nile University, discussing hardware-efficient FPGA accelerators—hardware circuits built on a field-programmable gate array that speeds up scientific computing tasks by executing them directly in parallel custom logic—for a machine learning-based time-series. The session concluded with Dr. Amir Toliyat, assistant professor of information systems and informatics at City University of New York City-College of Staten Island, speaking about responsible AI for marketing decision support.

Online participants heard both panels on October 9 and oral sessions on October 10 covering multiple topics regarding both AI and the digital transformation of the workplace, how AI is impacting healthcare, business, marketing, education, aviation and several other fields, and the digital transformation of supply chains, health, education, energy, power grids, government and power sectors.

VAUGHN COLLEGE: Founded in 1932, Vaughn College is a private, nonprofit four-year college that enrolls more than 1,600 students in master's, bachelor's and associate degree programs in engineering, technology, management and aviation on its main campus in New York City and online. The student-faculty ratio of 18 to 1 ensures a highly personalized learning environment. Ninety-five percent of Vaughn College graduates, 71 percent in their field of study, are employed in professional positions or choose to continue their education within one year of graduation. The institution serves many first-generation college students and is recognized by the US Department of Education as a Hispanic-Serving Institution. In a study conducted by The Equality of Opportunity Project, and reported in The New York Times, Vaughn was ranked number one in upward mobility nationwide. For more information on Vaughn College visit http://www.vaughn.edu.

SOURCE Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology