AlertNow wins Rep. Herb Conaway’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s Third District.
Rep. Herb Conaway has named Adi Khurana of Moorestown High School as the winner of the 2025 Congressional App Challenge in New Jersey’s Third District. Their app AlertNow is a real-time, low-cost, multimodal threat-detection system designed to identify gun threats in schools by combining audio and video AI models.
When asked what inspired the creation of AlertNow, Adi Khurana said, “The inspiration for creating this app came from the growing epidemic of gun violence in the United States, particularly its devastating impact on schools and young people. Each year, more than 45,000 people lose their lives to gun violence, and incidents in K-12 schools have risen sharply in recent years, with at least 83 school shootings reported in 2024. Firearms are now the leading cause of death for American children and teens.
‘Existing school surveillance systems rely heavily on human monitoring and typically react only after an incident begins. Commercial gun-detection technologies are costly and often specialize in just one modality, either audio-based gunshot detection or visual firearm recognition, leaving gaps in coverage and making them difficult for many schools to adopt at scale.
‘These realities motivated me to develop AlertNow as a proactive, accessible solution that leverages artificial intelligence to detect gun threats in real time and notify authorities immediately. The goal was to build a system that enhances school safety by integrating both acoustic and visual analysis, reducing response times, and providing a cost-effective option that can be deployed using existing school security infrastructure.”
The 2025 Congressional App Challenge marked another record-setting year for the program. A total of 394 Members of the U.S. House of Representatives hosted App Challenges in their congressional districts, the highest level of participation in the program’s history. More than 13,800 students from across the country participated, submitting over 4,600 original apps focused on real-world challenges ranging from health and accessibility to education, sustainability, and civic engagement.
The Congressional App Challenge is an official initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives that encourages middle school and high school students to learn to code, explore computer science, and build practical technology solutions for their communities. Each participating Member of Congress selects a winning app from their district, and winning teams are invited to showcase their projects to Members of Congress, staff, and industry leaders at the annual #HouseOfCode celebration on Capitol Hill.
The Challenge is proudly bipartisan and reflects a shared commitment to expanding access to STEM education and preparing the next generation of American innovators for the future workforce. The program is a public-private partnership made possible through funding from the Broadcom Foundation, AWS, Infosys Foundation USA, theCoderSchool, Apple, and others.
The 2026 Congressional App Challenge will launch in May, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.