This week, I made significant progress in frontend design and usability. I used bootstrapping to make formatted input and output design which is particularly ideal for responsive designs where CSS is more ideal for layouts that require more flexibility (also used in our web application). I also worked towards building secure database access. In order to do so, I sanitized user inputs and outputs to prevent SQL injections and executable JavaScript attacks. It is important to validate and catch any potential malicious user input as well as encoding the output to stop malicious inputted data from users that would trigger any questionable behavior from the web browser. This was motivated primarily by the ethics discussions in which privacy was of utmost importance for our team and we now know how big of a responsibility it is in regards to out capstone project.
Another thing I looked into was web sockets and improving its speed, efficiency, and syncing functionalities. There was a big issue with a loop that caused extremely slow access time to the database. Going back to the previous discussion, security concerns that arise with this API include cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, and injection attacks. Input validation is also a huge part of preventing this types of attacks. I defined data types for expected input structure so there are constraints on user input messages for instance on our globals page where users can make posts. I added a lot of data to the database to simulate a real-world use case which includes images of all types that I gathered and gave Steven for his ML training dataset from the previous week. This included around a couple thousand data points and values for the modeling.
Likewise, I worked with Steven in figuring out how to integrate ChatGPT API into the web design framework. We made a dummy prototype page to test if we could easily interface it with basic input and outputs using the API and also considering the user experience and interface design. Now there is a somewhat smooth communication on our framework between users and ChatGPT since we are considering more engaging interactions. The next step we look forward to working on more is to allow ChatGPT to recognize and analyze images which we will experiment with next week. With our sights set on this experimentation, we believe this propels our project towards even more functionality and are excited how this will pan out during our interim demo.