edYou

Reading the same textbook line over and over again? edYou can help! Upload a PDF and you'll get back an annotated copy with relevant YouTube video links to help in your studies.

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Inspiration

Every college student has had an experience with a particularly boring section of a textbook. The ones where you find yourself reading the same sentence over and over again yet still not understanding the material. We were inspired by this feeling to create a tool that makes it easy to find useful videos relating to the content you are reading about.

What it does

edYou is a website and PDF tool that can annotate nearly any type of academic textbook or document with links to relevant YouTube videos on every page. All it takes to use is uploading a pdf of the file you want annotated and a short wait while our program parses and pulls key words from each page. You will then have the option to download a fully annotated copy filled with useful YouTube links.

How we built it

edYou is based on Python and the Django web framework. We also used html and css for page styling and the upload form. Among some of the libraries and technologies we used are Tika, PyPDF2, and Beautiful Soup 4 for parsing, the Google oauth and Youtube APIs for finding relevant videos, and a Google Cloud Compute Engine virtual machine for hosting our website (we are running Ubuntu 20.04).

Challenges we ran into

PDF parsing was by far the toughest challenge in developing edYou. The PDF file format is not intended to be as easy to edit as say a text or doc file. We ran into many issues with text being unreadable and a general lack of official support for PDF parsing in Python. We had to settle for a third party fork of Tika that had some improved functionality. In the end we were able to read most of the information from every PDF we uploaded.

Another issue that we are still trying to solve is the quota limit with the YouTube API. With our basic account we have a quota limit of 10,000. Every search takes up 100 quota points which means that until we are approved for a higher quote we can only complete roughly 100 searches per day. This is severely limiting and something we hope to fix soon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Completing a fully fledged project in less than two days was a really fulfilling experience. We ran into a lot of problems throughout the 36 hour period and we are proud of the ways in which we solved or worked around them.

What we learned

We learned a ton about what it takes to complete a full project in a weekend as well as how to find unique solutions to setbacks encountered during development.

What's next for edYou

The next features we need to implement are improving the annotation system to insert hyperlinks directly into the document and finding a way to increase our YouTube API quota limit.

Setup/How to Use

We ran into last minute issues with hosting using Google Cloud and as such have provided the following quick and easy setup guide if you want to run the website for yourself.

  1. Make sure you have a recent version of Python 3 installed.
  2. In the edyou-hackrice-11 directory run the following command python -m pip install -r requirements.txt (if you are on Linux or Mac you may need to switch python to python3)
  3. Next, navigate to the lib/tika-python-master directory and running the following commands in this order python setup.py build and python setup.py install
  4. You will also need a Java Runtime Environment on your computer. If you already have one installed then you should be good to go. If not visit https://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp and follow the very quick and easy installation steps there.
  5. Next navigate back to the top level directory and then to hackrice_thing/
  6. Finally run the following command: python manage.py runserver and you are good to go! You will be able to access the website at http://127.0.0.1:8000/

If you run in to any issues during this setup process feel free to reach out to me via email (edp2@rice.edu)

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