2023
Ask Hoku: AI Chat Assistant for UH Manoa
I worked on an AI assistant for University of Hawaii ITS questions during the Hawaii Annual Code Challenge, focusing on retrieval, crawling, prompt-safety, and reporting workflows.
Overview
I helped create Hoku to answer questions related to UH ITS and reduce help desk load. During HACC, I worked on the backend API, prompt-safety checks, data crawling, and database support.
What I built
I built an API service to handle prompt-injection checks, created a crawler that gathered data from more than 600 hawaii.edu websites, and helped manage the data layer for retrieval.
Security considerations
I helped limit conversation memory, enforce prompt length limits, use similarity thresholds before calling the model, constrain responses to provided context, cap token output, add response reporting, and include a Naive Bayes TF-IDF classifier trained on roughly 600 labeled prompt-injection examples.
Project images
