From the early 1980’s, law enforcement agencies have turned to software technologies for help in identifying criminal profiles and suspects and in shaping new investigative capabilities such as digital forensics. Though some notable progress has been achieved since then, the complexity of both crimes and criminal investigations has also increased tremendously. The availability of large amounts of heterogeneous structured and unstructured data about criminal activities, and the uncertainty of the environments in which these activities occur brings forth both significant challenges and new opportunities for designing software that is intended to either defend itself against criminal attacks or to support the investigation of criminal activities.

The iRENIC workshop aims to explore the role of requirements engineering in the design of systems able to deliver better investigative capabilities and counter crime, for secure and safe societies. More specifically, iRENIC is intended to be a multi-disciplinary workshop that will bring together researchers and practitioners to identify new challenges, assess the status of RE approaches in tackling these challenges, create new opportunities for collaborations in this area, and to strengthen the frontier of RE research in this problem domain.