Sphere

Technology has become a new form of social stratification.

Sphere is a social platform - a website that aims to make technology and education more accessible to underrepresented users.

This is done by matching volunteer tutors to grassroots, or underrepresented students based on analysing their needs and similarities using Cohere's natural language processing API.

On the Sphere platform, you can:

1. Sign up as a tutor or student, and get matched with the other based on similarities - an email is sent automatically from Sphere once a match has been formed.
2. Connect with other similar students in case of a lack of tutors.

Running the Program

Download the files and run the main.html file in the front-end folder.

Technical Documentation

The front-end is constructed with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

• main.html contains the main window GUI.
• student_form.html contains the student sign up GUI.
• tutor_form.html contains the tutor sign up GUI.
• sphere_cohere.html contains the social platform GUI.
• styles.css contains the style sheet.
• app.js contains JavaScript code to pass user input to the backend to be stored in the MySQL database.

The back-end is constructed using Python, SMPT, MySQL, BeautifulSoup and Cohere.

• Sphere_cohere.py parses user input from the front-end using BeautifulSoup. It also matches students using Cohere API's natural langauge processing capabilities. Lastly, it emails students and/or tutors in case of a match, using SMTP.
• Sphere_create_database.py creates the MySQL database when the program is initialized.
• Sphere_update_database.py updates the MySQL database when a user inputs data. It also has matching and notification capabilities similar to Sphere_cohere.py file.
• Sphere_use_database_to_input.py parses data from front-end using BeautifulSoup the first time any data is input.