Vaughn’s engineering and technology faculty and students attended The Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions (LACCEI) 2025 Conference at the Barcelo Hotel Reforma in Mexico City. Vice President of Academic Affairs Dr. Paul LaVergne, Engineering Department Chair Dr. Hossein Rahemi, Associate Professor Dr. Mohammed Benalla, Adjunct Professor

Dr. Aparicio Carranza and Associate Professor Khalid Mouaouya, and Vaughn students Jeniffer Guardia ’25, Karla Gutierrez ’25, Adam Marzak ’26, Jean De La Rosa ’25, Nia Nowell ’26 and Joshua Waithe ’25 attended.

Three of Vaughn’s student team papers were accepted for presentation and publication in the LACCEI 2025 international conference. “Voice-Controlled Wheelchair for Children in Underserved Regions,” by Karla Gutierrez ’25 and Jeniffer Guardia ’25 was awarded first place in the student paper session competition by LACCEI judges. The paper outlined the process of designing, developing, programming, building and testing a voice-controlled wheelchair for children in underserved regions.

The other two student papers were among the 10 finalists in the student paper competition. These were: “Implementation of Open Source AI to Create a Biometric Door Lock with a Raspberry PI,” by Adam Marzak ’26 and Jean De La Rosa ’25 that discussed research aimed at opening a knowledge barrier into software interface – the gap where human and machine interaction happens; and “Platform as a Service (PaaS) Private Cloud Implementation with OpenStack,” by Nia Nowell ’26 and Joshua Waithe ’25, that addressed implementation with OpenStack. OpenStack is a library of open-source software projects, developed to be integrated forming the foundations of cloud computing platforms for both private and public cloud distributions.