Anna Perini – författare

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Sciences, RCIS 2021, which was planned to take place in Limassol, Cyprus, but had to change to an online event due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference took place virtually during May 11-14, 2021. It focused on the special theme "Information Science and Global Crisis".

The scope of RCIS is summarized by the thematic areas of information systems and their engineering; user-oriented approaches; data and information management; business process management; domain-specific information systems engineering; data science; information infrastructures, and reflective research and practice.

The 29 full papers and 6 work-in-progress papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 99 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: Business and Industrial Processes, Information Security and Risk Management, Data and Information Management, Domain-specific Information Systems Engineering, User-Centered Approaches, Data Science and Decision Support, and Information Systems and Their Engineering. The volume also contains 13 poster and demo papers, and 4 doctoral consortium papers. In addition, two-page summaries of tutorials and research project papers can be found in the back matter.

This book is based on a symposium to celebrate Eric Yu, the inventor of the i* framework, held on the occasion of his retirement and collocated with the 31st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference. The notion of social modeling emerged in the mid-nineties as a powerful conceptual approach to intricately analyze and specify complex social ecosystems, wherein strategic actors collaborate and depend on each other in order to attain their goals. The i* framework was designed precisely for this purpose, rapidly establishing itself as the de facto standard in the requirements engineering and information systems communities. The invited chapters, which were all written by highly acclaimed researchers, aim to give testimony to the impact of Eric’s work during the last 30 years of research and practice in requirements engineering (RE) and at the same time reflect on current development as well as future prospects.

The content of the book is structured into five sections, relative to the relationship of each chapter to the i* requirements modelling language. The first four sections cover retrospectives and reflections on i*, empirical research studies on i*, i* modelling language variants, and applications of i* to address open research challenges. The last section presents a chapter – written by Eric Yu himself – on a vision how i* could foster the transition towards a new RE paradigm, i.e., RE as Augmenting Aspiring Selves, a paradigm that should better fit with the needs of RE for AI-based systems.

This compiled collection of retrospective, ongoing and forward-looking scholarly essays centered on the i* framework furnishes its readers with a holistic vision of social modeling through i*, encompassing its versatile applications across different domains, challenges, and scenarios.