<div>Large datasets related to Indiana’s Education and Workforce development are used by various demographics such as stakeholders and decision makers in education and government, parents, teachers and employees of various companies to find trends and patterns in the data to better guide decision-making through statistical analysis. However, most of this data is scattered, textual and available in the form of excel sheets which makes it harder to look at the data from different perspectives, drill down and roll up the data and find trends and patterns in the data. Such data representation does not take into account the inherent characteristics of the user which can affect how well the user understands, perceives and interprets the data.</div><div>Information dashboards used to view and navigate between visualizations of different datasets, provide a coherent, central access to all data, and make it easy to view different aspects of the system. The purpose of this research is to create a new data visualization dashboard for visualizing education and workforce data and find which design principles are applicable while designing such a dashboard for the target demographic in the education and workforce domain. This study also aims at assessing how the introduction of such a data dashboard affects the work processes and decision making of stakeholders involved in education and workforce development in the state of Indiana.</div><div>User studies consisting of usability testing and semi-structured interviews with the stakeholders in education and workforce development in the state of Indiana is conducted to test the effectiveness of the dashboard. Finally, this research proposes how a regional map-based dashboard can be used as an effective method to design a data dashboard for education and workforce data for other states and other domains as well.</div>

<p>Highly intelligent and technically savvy people are employed to hack data systems throughout the world for prominence or monetary gain. Organizations must combat these criminals with people of equal or greater ability. There have been reports of heightened threats from cyber criminals focusing upon the energy sector, with recent attacks upon natural gas pipelines and payment centers. The Center for Innovative and Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources (CISTAR) working collaboratively with the Purdue Process Safety and Assurance Center (P2SAC) reached out to the Computer and Information Technology Department to assist with analysis of the current cybersecurity posture of the companies involved with the CISTAR initiative. This cybersecurity research project identifies the overall defensive cyber posture of CISTAR companies and provides recommendations on how to bolster internal cyberspace defenses through the identification of gaps and shortfalls, which aided the compilation of suggestions for improvement. Key findings include the correlation of reduced cybersecurity readiness to companies founded less than 10 years ago, cybersecurity professionals employed by all CISTAR companies and all CISTAR companies implementing basic NIST cybersecurity procedures.</p>

This study examined the level of trust of information on social media. Specifically, I investigated the factors of performance expectancy with information-seeking motives that appear to influence the level of trust of information on various social network sites. This study utilized the following theoretical models: elaboration likelihood model (ELM), the uses and gratifications theory (UGT), the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model (UTAUT), the consumption value theory (CVT), and the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) Model to build a conceptual research framework for an exploratory study. The research investigated the extent to which information quality and source credibility influence the level of trust of information by visitors to the social network sites. The inductive content analysis on 189 respondents’ responses carefully addressed the proposed research questions and then further developed a comprehensive framework. The findings of this study contribute to the current research stream on information quality, fake news, and IT adoption as they relate to social media.