South Plainfield Man Wins First Place In Statewide Tech Hackathon

SOUTH PLAINFIELD, NJ — A young man from South Plainfield just took home first place in a 24-hour tech "hackathon" held by The College of New Jersey.

The young man is Christopher Hausheer, who grew up in South Plainfield.

He is currently a student at Middlesex County community college. There, he and two other students, Kyrollos Girgis (of East Brunswick) and Dhruv Sethi (grew up in Edison) 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.

They also specifically designed the bag to be puncture-resistant and nimble.

“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. “I made iterative goals for myself and tested many prototypes, learning useful information each time to improve the final design.”

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

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

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.

All the young men 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 community college host its own tech hackathon one day.