Student's App Helps Organize Remediation of Lead Pipes for Water Supply
A recent graduate in computer science played a small but important role in fixing the city of Newark's problem of lead in its public water supply.
The student, Sammy Faraj, did his part by developing a database and mobile application for Newark-based Roman E&G Corp., which needed to organize photographs of where its workers were replacing outdated lead pipes with modern copper ones for the city government’s remediation project.
Company managers there were organizing thousands of pictures manually, with several dozen for each home showing details such as the location, original pipes, repairs, new pipes and all manner of photographic documentation required in the city contract. Without automatation software, the process would take much longer and cost more, as Roman’s staff would have been bogged down in documenting their work instead of actually doing it.
The problem needed a custom solution, and Roman already employed several NJIT alumni, so in August 2019 project engineer Mark Mattheiss emailed Baruch Schieber, chair of the Department of Computer Science, looking for help. Schieber then asked his professors to recommend someone, and Faraj was the right answer.
In September, "I got an email from [Schieber] and he was basically saying that he had this opportunity come up at an engineering firm. It was a simple project," Faraj explained. "I was not going to turn the opportunity down. I reached out immediately to the company ... The fact that a professor would recommend me, it felt fantastic and I appreciated it a lot."
"They wanted to use Dropbox APIs and maybe create a little web app. Once I actually got to them, I realized what they wanted was a little bit more elaborate. I'm still in contact with them today, constantly updating the site for them," Faraj said. (APIs are the software industry term for application programming interfaces, which is code that lets third-party developers connect their own software to the original product.)
Faraj at the time was working with Verizon for a group capstone project. His role was front-end design in Javascript, which used similar methods to those Roman needed. "It was easy to get both of them done simultaneously," he said. "I had creative free will on the project and could use any framework that I wanted. I chose React. It's a Javascript framework developed by Facebook used for web app development. I wanted to learn it anyway."
Faraj graduated in December from Ying Wu College of Computing with a degree in computer science and a minor in applied math. He now works as a software engineer in the Seattle area, but his project remains helpful today and he provides periodic updates.
"We're still using it. It's working very well for us," said Mark Mattheiss, a project engineer at Roman E&G, located in the city's Lower Broadway neighborhood just two miles north of NJIT. Roman's contract lasts for another year, so the code will have a long shelf life.
Earlier testing showed that the city's water problem did not affect the NJIT campus, but Faraj said that he and plenty of other resident students, along with their families, reacted with concern. "The problem did come up a couple of times. I do remember getting emails about the water frequently, being in the dorm rooms some days and having to use the drinking fountains ... I ended up getting a Brita filter," he said.
Faraj said he eventually wants to transition out of corporate life and into a startup environment. "I ultimately want to start a company at some point," he said, "And see where that takes me. For the time being I'm just collecting knowledge and expertise in my field."