Queens, New York – October 13, 2026 -- Vaughn College hosted the sixth annual International Conference on Digital Technologies and Applications (ICDTA) on October 9 and 10, drawing researchers from more than 30 countries to a hybrid event on digital technologies, soft computing and intelligent systems.
Plenary speakers from Predictum and IBM open the in-person program on October 9
The morning plenary featured Wayne J. Levin, president and CEO of Predictum Inc., and Dr. Philip Ramsey, the company's vice president of data science and training. They argued that bad research costs the US economy several billion dollars every year and outlined steps to reverse the trend.
Dr. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, principal research scientist at IBM, closed the session with a talk on efficient large language model (LLM) inference. Inference is the process of generating text, code or data from a prompt without changing the model's learned weights.
Afternoon session covers FPGA accelerators and responsible AI in marketing
Dr. Lobna A. Said, professor at Nile University, presented hardware-efficient FPGA accelerators for a machine learning-based time-series application. These circuits speed up scientific computing by running tasks in parallel custom logic.
Dr. Amir Toliyat, assistant professor of information systems and informatics at CUNY College of Staten Island, closed the day speaking on responsible AI for marketing decision support.
Online sessions on October 10 span aviation, healthcare, energy and supply chains
Remote participants followed both panels on October 9 and oral sessions on October 10. Topics included AI in healthcare, business, marketing, education and aviation, plus the digital transformation of the workplace, supply chains, energy, power grids and government.
Organizers cite indexed publication ties and potential research grants
Dr. Sanaa Faquir, assistant professor in Vaughn's engineering and technology department, moderated the conference and helped organize it. She said hosting the event raised the college's global academic presence and created indexed publication ties. She added that it opened the door to future institutional partnerships and research grants.