Abstract
Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and its related fields emerged some years ago with the exciting promise of pervasive intelligence, magic interaction mechanisms, and everywhere availability. This promise would be materialized in homes that knew all about our habits and preferences, proactive workplaces to support people’s work or personal digital assistants to improve our daily living in all aspects possible. This somewhat utopian vision, expected by many to have already taken place, remains unaccomplished and far from it. Many challenges still lay ahead which delayed and continue to delay the expected technological unravelling. In this paper we focus on the immense technological challenges of designing and implementing AmI Systems. Specifically, we propose a technological approach that will contribute to overcome some of these challenges by making developed AmI solutions more modular, interoperable, and extensible. This will result especially advantageous for large development teams or teams that span multiple institutions. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.

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Abstract
Traditionally, the Teacher-Student relationship is a close one. The student spends several hours of a day in the presence of the teacher and can talk, express doubts and pose questions. These doubts, or the general feeling towards the object of learning, are not only expressed explicitly but also implicitly. Indeed, the teacher is constantly, even if in an unconscious way, reading the state of the student in search for sings of doubt, frustration, stress or fatigue. This information is then used by the teacher to adapt their methods or to personalize their approach in function of each student. These aspects, intuitively central in education, become less efficient when learning takes place in a Virtual Environment. Indeed, the growth of online courses, in which the student and the teacher often never even meet, make learning more difficult for a number of reasons. In this paper we analyse these reasons and put forward an approach for inferring the student's state that aims to minimize the effects of the absence of the teacher.

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Contextual factors allow us to fully grasp an event, situation, communication process or action. Frequently, the context in which an event takes place provides more valuable information than the event itself. This chapter addresses context and its importance from a general perspective and in the particular domain of conflict resolution. It describes many different contextual dimensions such as the verbal, social or cultural, pointing out the importance of each one to understand individuals’ actions. It then moves on to the address the recent field of Context-aware Computing: the vision of computers that are sensible to contextual cues, harness it and use such information to provide better services. Several context-aware solutions are described in this chapter that point out the range of application domains. However, no such application exists in the domain of conflict resolution. While the next chapters are dedicated do describing the components of such an application, this chapter ends with the enumeration of several contextual dimensions that are of relevance to fully describe a conflict and its resolution process.

Abstract
Each one of us has a particular way to behave before a conflict. We can assume a cooperative and collaborative attitude or we can behave in a more selfish or competitive way. Given our personality traits or our past experiences, each one has a tendency to behave more towards one or the other. Nonetheless, there are also external factors that influence our conflict handling style including the individuals we are conflicting with, our level of stress or fatigue, the level of escalation of the conflict or even the context or the setting in which it is being settled. Undeniably, the personal conflict resolution style of the parties is preponderant for the outcome of the conflict resolution process. The mediator, while knowing the style of each party, may better conduct the process, namely by pointing out and changing unrealistic, selfish or overly competitive behaviors. Traditionally, the mediator makes use of questionnaires to assess the conflict resolution style of the parties. In this chapter we detail a new view on the problem in which this knowledge is built in real-time, in a non-invasive way, based on the behavior evidenced by the parties during the conflict resolution process. The level of escalation of the conflict is also analyzed similarly, through the non-invasive analysis of the level of stress of the parties during the actual negotiation process. The relationship between stress and the personal conflict handling style is also studied.

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