We explain basic features of an emerging area called Intelligent Environments. We give a short overview on how it has developed, what is the current state of the art and what are the challenges laying ahead. The aim of the article is to make aware the Computer Science community of this new development, the differences with previous dominant paradigms and the opportunities that this area offers to the scientific community and society.

In this paper, we report findings from a systematic mapping study, conducted to review the existing literature on collaborative educational environments incorporating mixed reality technologies. There is increasing interest in mixed reality technologies in education, especially with the introduction of new OverHead Mounted Displays (OHMDs), such as HoloLensTM, Oculus RiftTM and HTC ViveTM. with the consideration of areas such as education, dynamic technology and complex environments, a research area is identified. We carried out an extensive review of the literature from 2007 to 2017, and conducted an analysis of the works on mixed reality technologies and its sub categories applied to collaborative education environments. Results highlighted the lack of research across the mixed reality spectrum, especially in the augmented virtuality sub category, as well as technical limitations such as response time in the development of mixed reality technologies for collaborative environments. Furthermore, the difficulty of teaching professionals to replicate mixed reality experiments in real environments, due to the technical skills required, was identified. The main contribution of this article is the discussion of the current works with visualisation of the present state of the area, which is aimed to encourage educators to develop mixed reality artefacts and conduct further research to support collaborative educational environments.

This paper reports on the lessons learnt during the application of a methodology to develop intelligent environments. One important feature of the methodology is that of being strongly user-centred, and the authors report on how that interaction with users took place and how it continuously shaped our project aspirations and outcomes. The methodology was applied to a project which aimed at helping people with Down’s Syndrome and those with similar conditions and needs, to be more included in society. The project was developed by a consortium of commercial, academic, and end user supporting organizations. The paper elaborates on what type of stakeholders engaging activities were considered and how these were distributed along the lifetime of the project and their impact.

Strategies to support people living with dementia are broad in scope, proposing both pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions as part of the care pathway. Assistive technologies form part of this offering as both stand-alone devices to support particular tasks and the more complex offering of the “smart home” to underpin ambient assisted living. This paper presents a technology-based system, which expands on the smart home architecture, orientated to support people with daily living. The system, NOCTURNAL, was developed by working directly with people who had dementia, and their carers using qualitative research methods. The research focused primarily on the nighttime needs of people living with dementia in real home settings. Eight people with dementia had the final prototype system installed for a three month evaluation at home. Disturbed sleep patterns, night-time wandering were a focus of this research not only in terms of detection by commercially available technology but also exploring if automated music, light and visual personalized photographs would be soothing to participants during the hours of darkness. The NOCTURNAL platform and associated services was informed by strong user engagement of people with dementia and the service providers who care for them. NOCTURNAL emerged as a holistic service offering a personalised therapeutic aspect with interactive capabilities.

Context is a useful concept somehow unconsciously used by humans in daily life problem-solving. Recently, several subareas of computer science have been increasingly trying to rely on this concept to design systems with practical use in certain predefined circumstances. The perception is that imbuing in the system certain context-awareness qualities can support intelligent decision-making in specific practical situations. Despite a significant number of implemented systems that aim at providing context-awareness, there is a lack of commonly accepted and used methodologies and tools. At the root of this, is the lack of agreement on a set of good principles or standards, which can act as a guide to the scientific community and the developers interested in this class of systems. There have been some extensive surveys on the use of context, still there is no theoretical corpus emerging that we can use to discuss the essential concepts making up the fabric of contexts and its use by system developers. Here we attempted such enterprise at a level, which is more formal than popular surveys, in a way that is not implementation dependent and in a way that highlights key concepts of relevance to developers. We reassessed first the basic concepts identifying the need to more prominently consider system beneficiaries’ satisfaction. We then transfer explicitly these values to a more formal outline of the basic componentgs and the operations which emerge as relevant. We identify and highlight the tasks of context activation, comparison, influence, construction, and interaction. We hint at how these may work in practice and explained these through examples. We show how the theory is flexible enough by generalizing it to multiusers so that optimization of global preferences and expectations is used to drive system development and system behavior.