This week, our team and the Preswald team have presented our group projects in class. Click to see the details!

Preswald

Arnav, Josh, Jared, and Jack presented their contributiosn to Preswald, a data visualization tool whose interface is mostly in Python. Though it may look like a weird combination at first sight, I believe this project is of great potential, because the impact of data science projects and research is more and more dependent on demonstration (i.e., visualization via a website). However, many data scientists are only fluent in Python or R and have limited programming experience in frontend languages like JavaScript. Therefore, Preswald provides a compiler from Python to JavaScript, which perfectly fits the needs of data scientists. The organization behind this project, StructuredLabs, is a rather new company, hence it’s not long since the project was established, and there are some issues with it:

1. features: currently the project provides little room for customization and the users can only choose from several predefined themes.
2. community: the maintainers have not created mature community rules for the project. Consequently, the PRs in the community are abundant but discussion is inactive, because lots of people submit PRs without claiming the issue or engaging in the discussion, and they are either employed by StructuredLabs or making effort to get employed by StructuredLabs, creating a very strange community atmosphere. In fact, the Claiming an Issue section in CONTRIBUTING.md was not added until 3 or 4 weeks ago. Therefore, it takes more time for the community to become a mature one.

But overall, I find the project a very interesting and important one. The work of my colleagues is also impressive.

Huggingface (Our Presentation)

This week, our team introduced our contributions to Huggingface transformers and datasets as well. I have talked so much about our contributions in previous posts and want to be brief in this one, highlighting only 2 points:

1. I believe the main focus of the presentation is not about the technical details of the contributions or the project itself, but the best practices to interact with the community, and that’s what I did in the presentation.
2. In the Q&A section, I noticed my colleagues have great interest in contributing to AI projects as well! Huggingface is definitely a project with great impact in the AI community but it also requires some knowledge in this field. If anyone is interested in contributing to this project or AI in general, feel free to discuss with me!