RedPandas

About

For the last few years, we've noticed that data science is rapidly becoming a necessity in collegiate research even in non-technical fields - whether it's a bio lab or a sociology research group, students across the board are increasingly being expected to be to use and manipulate data without formal technical training. We noticed that even when the data-science tools themselves are understood, more technical operational requirements - such as cloud hosting and model deployment, are a major bottlenecks in the efficacy of research groups, as they often struggle to move projects past the local filesystem.

Red Pandas is a platform that makes data accessible to all. Users can import data, manipulate/visualize it, and share their results all from an easy-to-use web-based platform. We also integrated a GPT-based code generator in our text editor so that even those with no programming experience can use the platform as well.

Use Cases

Hosts data science workflows without users ever having to interact with a cloud provider!
Enables those with experience to write python and manipulate data from an easy-to-use code editor
Novices can build code using GPT-3 without formal programming experience
Can share entire projects (data + scripts), unlike any other platform.
Iterative programming experiences that minimizes the monotony of Jupyter notebooks.

How we Built It

CLI in Go for uploading even the largest datasets
Frontend in Next.js React
Interpreter in a Rust docker image that executes the Python provided by a user

Challenges We Ran Into

Rust's (lack of) interoperability and the many many challenges that came with that
Poor documentation for many of the libraries we used
Maintaining good security-standards throughout the development process
Assigning and delegating tasks efficiently so that our final product would be finished in time
Docker build times
General doziness
Food Poisoning (Thanks Rosslyn Chipotle)

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

Teaching 2 team members Go entirely during the hackathon
Architecting and decomposing a multi-faceted solution under a significant time constraint.
Our journey as teammates and friends over the course of HoyaHacks