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.

Abstract
In our busy daily life, we often have the feeling of being exhausted, accompanied with a sense of performance degradation and increase of discomfort in the execution of even simple tasks. This often takes place in the workplace and in a silent way, influencing our productivity, our performance the number of errors or the quality of our production. This paper details a chair to be used in workplace environments that is sensitive to the onset of fatigue. Based on built-in accelerometers it recognizes signs of discomfort, which may be related to mental fatigue, to point out moments when an individual should consider taking a pause or a rest. This chair complements a previously developed software for the assessment of mental fatigue from the analysis of the individual's interaction with the computer. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

Abstract
The work presented focuses not only on the behavioural patterns that influence the outcome of a negotiation, but also on the discovery of ways to predict the type of conflict used in the process and the stress levels of the actors. After setting up an experimental intelligent environment provided with sensors to capture behavioural and contextual information, a set of relevant data was collected and analysed, with the underlying objective of using the behavioural patterns (obtained by statistical/probabilistic methods) as a basis to design and present plans and suggestions to the associated participants. In sooth, these proposals may influence in a positive way the course and outcome of a negotiation task in many aspects. This work highlights the importance of knowledge in negotiation, as in other social forms of interaction, providing also some new insights for informed decision support in situations in which uncertainty and conflict may be present. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.

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