Engineering for Impact: How Jude Surin Builds Physical AI to Improve Lives

Jude Surin grew up in a family of nurses, surrounded by people who dedicated their lives to showing up for others. While his career path diverged, that deep-rooted ethic of service became his compass as he forged his own way forward.

During his senior year of high school, Jude brought that service mindset into his AP Computer Science Principles class, where he built a web-based tool that helped students navigate university major selections. Completing the project marked a major turning point in how he viewed software. “I realized how deeply I loved using logic and problem-solving to create real impact,” he reflects, crediting the project with “sparking my passion for technology and analytical thinking.” What started as a high school assignment quickly revealed that lines of code could be transformed into practical tools designed to serve others.

Jude officially joined the hacker community in 2021, welcomed and mentored by close friends on the ShellHacks e-board who introduced him to the world of hackathons. Experiencing ShellHacks 2023 showed him firsthand how these events unite students, professionals, and employers - inspiring him to return in 2024 to build his first project, Haven. Driven by the reality that tens of millions are displaced annually by natural disasters, Jude and his team created a privacy-focused platform designed to streamline crisis response by connecting evacuees with emergency shelter and supplies via interactive mapping powered by the Google Maps API and Gemini API.

The experience gave him newfound confidence and a drive to create tech with real-world impact - he followed that ambition to 305 Hackathon. There, his team created HoverFly - an aerial intelligence platform that delivers AI-powered threat detection and geospatial analytics for precision agriculture. Their ambition paid off as the project swept four distinct awards: First Place, Engineering - Hextronics Challenge, Most Innovative, MLH: Best Use of Gemini API, and Best Use of Auth0.

For Jude, these high-pressure build environments became the ultimate testing ground for personal and technical growth: “Hackathons forced me to ship imperfect ideas, to iterate in hours not months, to absorb failure without ego, and to collaborate across disciplines.” This rapid prototyping ethos was put to the ultimate test at TreeHacks 2026. His team built 4sight, an autonomous biometric decision-support system that monitors real-time smartwatch and smart-glasses data to detect cognitive risk and intervene before individuals act. They won the Best Use Cloudflare Developer Platform track and $100K in credits. "It's the accomplishment I'm proudest of," explains Jude. "We proved a genuinely novel, hard idea: proactive AI intervention from live biosignals actually works, and we did it end-to-end in under two days."

Jude channeled his technical momentum into high-impact software engineering roles, interning as a systems engineer at NASA during his freshman year before serving as an intern at Netflix, Amazon Web Services, and Nordstrom. In addition, he was an Apple Pathways Alliance Fellow before transitioning to his current position as a Machine Learning Engineer Lead.

“My journey in technology isn’t just a sequence of achievements; it’s a story built on purpose, ambition, and a desire to pay it forward.” Jude’s hackathon journey came full circle in 2025 when he returned to ShellHacks as a judge alongside engineering professionals from Netflix. Through hackathons, Jude discovered how code could amplify both capability and character. “Technical growth gave me leverage. Hackathons gave me identity.” As President of Google Developer Groups at Florida International University and an executive board member for INIT FIU, he has organized technical workshops in AI and web development. “I strive to make the community a place where others feel empowered to grow, build, and belong.” Grounding his work in a philosophy of continuous adaptation and empathy, Jude strongly believes that “Evolution and change is constant. To love is to be changed.”

Jude is currently pursuing his Master of Science in Computer Science, specializing in Machine Learning at the Georgia Institute of Technology, laying the groundwork to lead physical AI innovation and empower people to achieve their fullest potential. Jude’s journey reflects a constant dedication to service, technical curiosity, and community empowerment. “I did not enter tech with inherited access. I built access,” Jude reflects. “And once I built it, I made it visible.”