"ISIS terrorists in Samer Al-khateeb's ↗ home country of Iraq ginned up mobs on social media to pull in recruits, watch violent propaganda videos and launch coordinated attacks on enemies via Twitter. Now Al-khateeb, an assistant professor of computer science, design and journalism at Creighton University, has received a three-year, $585,000 grant from the Air Force to learn more about how social media mobs form and succeed." - Omaha World Herald (2022)
Within my time on the Mobs Research Team, I had the pleasure of designing databases, back-end routing, security functionality, and utilizing APIs for a better user experience.
One of the things that the research group wanted to focus on was interactivity between the user and the data that was being studied.
Therefore, I was tasked with creating a simple chatbot interface. It didn't need to be as complex as ChatGPT, but it was important for the user's question to be recognized and they would be taken to the proper input page.
This was done with a simple calculation of how many words were shared between the actual question and the user's input, divided by the number of unique elements in each set.
The result was a blazing fast and simple chatbot that integrated seamlessly into our application.
This project was my first large-scale foray into database design. We needed a solution that would be flexible, secure, but also capable of scaling as the application grew.
Since the application was based around Flask, the decision was made to use MySQL since it integrated nicely.
User data was collected and stored within our database in order to support a smooth experience when using the application.
Due to the nature of Flask, rendering webpages is handled with routes.
My responsibility was to create routes that allowed the user a simple workflow while also being capable of handling large data queries.
Due to the nature of the data that we were handling, security was top of mind. This meant jumping through hoops with salting and securing connections.
One of my favorite things that I worked on was the usage of the SendGrid API to send users a password reset link.
This was some of my first experience working with APIs in an engineering setting, so this was invaluable experience.
The end result was a seamless experience for the user that meant they could reset their password without any hassle.
