Advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have remodelled the way we live and work over the last few years. The use of mobile Internet technology is already widespread, with more than 1.1 billion people constantly connected to the digital world using smartphones and tablets. The digital world everyday expands its frontiers to include not only humans, but also physical objects. Machinery, shipments, infrastructure, and devices are being equipped with networked sensors and actuators that enable them to monitor their environment, report their status, receive instructions, and even collaborate to take appropriate actions. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc., are progressively becoming the norm rather than exception as to the way through which people meet, socialize, communicate and work.

While such technologies promise to make our lives easier, they also raise significant security and safety challenges for modern societies. They can be misused by malicious individuals or groups to harm people or disrupt systems and services at unprecedented scale. For examples, social media such as Facebook and Twitter have been largely exploited by international terrorist groups to recruit thousands of people across the globe and commit terrorist attacks. Hackers have compromised the information systems of many democratic organizations in several countries and released information, including private and sensitive information, about candidates to sway the opinions of voters. The control of millions of unsecured internet routers around the globe was taken, in a recent denial of service attack, to flood a major DNS provider, leading to global internet outages.

The workshop is cross-disciplinary and aims to bring together experts, researchers and practitioners from several communities including computer science, sociology, criminology, political sciences, healthcare, security, etc., to explore the use of Information and Communication Technologies (e.g., social networks, semantics, data mining and machine learning techniques, etc.)  for protecting our citizens, society and economy as well as our infrastructures and services, our prosperity, political stability and wellbeing.