Schrollar

I randomly messaged Niles. We were already working on something together and I wanted to join a hackathon. He was in. We thought of Gabe next, and even with other commitments he said yes. We didn't know who else to ask, so I took a long shot and invited Abby. She was super busy but she said yes too. Then Charles heard we were joining and wanted in. That's how admulto formed.

We did not read the submission specs. One hour before the initial deadline we realized we had to pass a slide deck. Scrambled, got it done, made it to the top 7. And then, because we apparently learn nothing, the exact same thing happened on the final day. Another deadline, another missing slide deck, another hour of panic. Somehow we still podiumed.

Schrollar was a research discovery platform built to feel more like social media than a library database. We ran a parallel search pipeline across multiple academic sources, ran LLM synthesis on top of it, and grounded every claim through NLI fact-checking. We spent a lot of nights in Aerie. We filmed a video. We had fun with it even when it was stressful, maybe especially when it was stressful.

2nd Runner Up. We didn't think we'd make it to the top 3. Looking back, I think the chaos actually helped. It kept things loose and we weren't overthinking it. Wouldn't have done it any other way.