Thursday, November 5, 2026
Stevens Institute of Technology
1 Castle Point Terrace, Hoboken, NJ 07030
University Center Building, Tech Flex Room
Conference Location (google street view not up to date)
Parking Garage Entrance, download parking pass here and please print and put in the dashboard of your vehicle.
Directions
Announcements
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Conference Overview
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Featured Speakers
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CRAFT Leadership Bios
Steve Yang, CRAFT Director, Associate Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology
Dr. Steve Yang is an Associate Professor of the School of Business at Stevens Institute of Technology. He holds a Ph.D. in Systems and Information Engineering from University of Virginia with concentration on Financial Engineering. Dr. Steve Yang is currently the Director of the Center for Research toward Advancing Financial Technologies established by Stevens Institute of Technology and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Steve Yang’s research has been focused on understanding markets’ irrationality and impact on trading, portfolio, risk management, and systemic risk using decision science tools such as Markov decision processes, reinforcement learning and other artificial intelligence (AI) methods. His research has been funded by NSF, DoD, IRRC, IAAER, CFTC, Accenture, KPMG, SWIFT, etc.
Mohammed Zaki, CRAFT Site Director, Professor and Department Head, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Mohammed J. Zaki is a Professor and Department Head of Computer Science at RPI. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Rochester in 1998. His research interests focus novel data mining and machine learning techniques, particularly for learning from graph structured and textual data, with applications in bioinformatics, personal health and financial analytics. He has around 300 publications (and six patents), including the Data Mining and Machine Learning textbook (2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2020). He has served as program chair for most of the major conferences in data mining and knowledge management, such as SDM, SIGKDD, CIKM and ICDM. He is currently serving on the Board of Directors for ACM SIGKDD - the special interest group on knowledge discovery and data science. He was a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Department of Energy Early Career Principal Investigator Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM and a Fellow of the AAAS.
George Calhoun, CRAFT Managing Director, Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology
Dr. George Calhoun is a Co-Founder of InterDigital Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: IDCC), which currently has a market cap of $1.5 billion. He was vice chairman of Geotek Communications and was chairman of the company’s joint venture with a branch of the Government of Israel. Dr. Calhoun was the chairman and CEO of Illinois Superconductor Corporation (AMEX: ISO), a public company focused on the application of high-temperature superconducting materials and advanced signal processing techniques.
Speaker Bios
Speakers to be announced.