NeurIPS 2019 exploration App with Streamlit

NeurIPS 2019 Explorer App

Since I know about streamlit, I always want to try to build something with it. So I end up building a little app for exploring the papers of NeurIPS 2019, which has a crazy number of accepted papers this year — 1428 papers.

You can find the code here: https://github.com/noklam/NeurIPS2019Exploration

Introduction

The creation of the app is not so complicated, I spend most of the time parsing the data (especially during the creation of the app they have updated the site so I had to re-write some script to parse the data. ). Another big portion of time was spent to figure out the dynamic of streamlit and make it work.

Streamlit was great, it gets most of the thing to work without much thinking. But they also got room to improve, for example, the rendering of the table and text is not consistent. They have multiple ways to display text, and if you are mixing them it end up with some no so good formatting, which you also do not have an easy way to config at the moment.

Another pitfall is that you don’t have the option to configure columns width of dataframe, so I end up having to use the static table (which looks a bit weird) instead of the dynamic table (which truncated the text and result in awkward horizon scroll).

In the end, it is still a great library and I am sure they will improve quickly. It is fun to build this. Please let me know if you found bugs or you have any suggestions.

p.s. At the time I build this app they change their site continuously, so it only covers the Posters but not the tutorial and workshops, I will add them back soon.

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