College Student From Edison On 1st Place Team In Tech Hackathon

EDISON, NJ — A young man from Edison was part of a team that just took home first place in a 24-hour tech "hackathon" hosted at The College of New Jersey.

Dhruv Sethi grew up in Edison and he is currently a student at Middlesex College, the school said.

There, he and two other students, Christopher Hausheer, who grew up in South Plainfield, and Kyrollos Girgis, who grew up in East Brunswick, were joined by a fourth student, Shahnawaz Haque, who is enrolled at NJIT.

The team of four entered something they invented together: An inflatable, cylindrical-shaped robot, which they call the “Expand-a-Conda."

The young men said they were inspired by the tragic earthquakes in Turkey last year: After watching search efforts for people trapped in rubble, they came up with the concept for an airbag that could squeeze in and around surfaces of destroyed buildings.

The air bag uses heat-sensing technology to find trapped survivors. And they also specifically designed the bag to be puncture-resistant and nimble.

Their invention could be used to help find survivors after an earthquake or other natural disaster, car accident, tunnel collapse or terrorist attack.

“The collaborative energy was electric and the late nights blurring into early mornings were fueled by the thrill of innovation, pushing our skills in artificial intelligence, robotics and 3D printing to the limit,” said Sethi. “The hackathon wasn’t just about code, it was about pushing boundaries, learning from each other and making a significant societal impact.”

Hackathons are competitions where teams typically have 24 hours to build a product — entirely from scratch — that is useful to modern life.

The team took home first place in two categories: "Best Overall Hack" and "Best AI Application Built with Cloudflare." For their win, each young man received a state-of-the-art gaming monitor and a gold-plated winner badge.

“I have never created anything similar to this idea before, so I had to rely on my background as an engineering science major in problem solving and prototyping,” said Hausheer, from South Plainfield. “I made iterative goals for myself and tested many prototypes, learning useful information each time to improve the final design.”

“After it was all said and done, I was very pleased with our finished project,” said Girgis. “I would have been satisfied without the win, but it was well deserved for my team and me.”

All the students are members of the Computer Science Club.

“I cannot be any prouder than this,” said their faculty advisor, Middlesex College business and computer science professor Dhruv Chunawala. “My number-one goal is to make students ready for the real world. With the club, we always try to touch on the latest and greatest technology and how we can implement it to make the world a better place.”

With AI technology evolving each day, Chunawala admits that classroom experience can only go so far. That’s why he tries to have the Computer Science Club take part in competitions and real-world experiences. With almost 120 members, the Computer Science Club is the biggest club on campus. Chunawala also said he would love to see Middlesex College host its own tech hackathon one day.

Local Editor Carly Baldwin contributed to this report.