2nd Place Award For Software At HackPrinceton Goes To Aaron Gokaslan '18 And Laura Shea '18
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on April 23, 2015
by Aaron Gokaslan '18
Brown CS students continue to distinguish themselves at hackathons nationwide. To read more on this topic, click here.
On April 12, 2015, Brown University students Laura Shea ‘18 (a computer science and math concentrator) and I (also ‘18, a computer science concentrator) came in second place in software at HackPrinceton. Our team, with fellow students Ergeta Muca and Anthony Lobko, designed a website to convert files into videos, which are then uploaded to YouTube. We pitched that this turns YouTube into free, unlimited cloud storage.
The website, which we’re calling Osiris, uses python, ffmpeg, x264, Django, and Amazon web services. Osiris--the Egyptian mythological figure--suffered the fate of having his body cut into several pieces, scattered throughout Egypt, and then put back together. As our website supports video hosting sites in addition to YouTube, users can symbolically scatter and retrieve data in a similar manner. The website is currently offline while we work on moving some of the heavy computation.
Laura and I met our teammates Ergeta and Anthony at the hackathon, and it was rewarding and enjoyable to work with new people. Coincidentally, I won an award in the fall with a different random team, and several of that team’s members ended up in the same computer lab as we did! To add to the parallelism, they won second place in hardware. All in all, the experience was unforgettable and adds to a successful Hackathon season for both Brown and myself.
