SJSU’s Rome Drori and Team Win First Place at Sushi Hackathon

On October 3, the second annual Sushi Hackathon took place at Stanford University.

Rome Drori, '26 Computer Science, was part of a group of four college students who formed the SushInnovation team. They took first place in the competition, receiving a cash prize of $30,000.

"I feel elated that we won. Personally I've had a rough start to the year - not school-wise but with other things," says Drori. "And so I really needed this win."

The Sushi Hackathon was co-hosted by GDX Co., Ltd., a Japanese digital transformation company, along with Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC). The event put out a call to college students and professional engineers up to 29 years old, inviting them to find ways of using generative AI to help solve challenges in the seafood and fisheries sector, while also focusing on sustainability and productivity.

Drori joined forces with friends who are currently students at other universities - Ethan Bernstein from UC Davis, and Anthony Furman and Kamran Hussein, both from UC Santa Cruz.

Drori and his friends entered the first Sushi Hackathon last year and finished second. At the time, they didn't really know what to expect and could only put in a few days to prepare.

"This time around, we presented better," says Drori. "This year, we took it a lot more seriously and asked ourselves: What are some things that we can do to really stand out?"

The SushInnovation team decided that to really be effective, they would have to know and understand the real-life challenges that fishermen face day-to-day.

"So we drove up to Half Moon Bay and interviewed fishermen," says Drori. "We learned typical things, like fishermen don't want to be told where to fish, fishermen don't want their business adjusted, fishermen aren't interested in SEO tools. The only thing they were complaining about was boat maintenance."

Drori and his teammates learned that about every three years, most fishermen ended up spending the total value of their boats on maintenance, just to keep their boats in good condition.

"So we thought, if we can make a solution that's pretty easy to plug in, it would check the whole sustainability box," says Drori.

The students ended up creating Polaris, a project centered around using AI to power boats while allowing fishermen to track problems with boat functionality in real time. By discovering a solution that would really make an impact in fishermen's lives, the team of four were able to stand out from all the other competition and secure the win.

As he finishes up his last year at San José State, Drori is also working for GDX, the Japanese company that co-hosted the Sushi Hackathon. At the beginning of college, Drori had set a goal to become fluent in Japanese. He has recently achieved fluency, which attracted the attention of GDX and prompted them to hire him as a machine learning engineer to work on development for companies like Onitsuka Tiger, Christian Dior and Panasonic.

"I've done things like customer purchase prediction and supply chain logistics for them, as well as work on automating internal processes," says Drori.

In the near future, the winners of the SushInnovation team plan on using a portion of their prize money to take a trip to China and Japan.