Chapter 1 Smart Offices and Intelligent Decision Rooms

Nowadays computing technology research is focused on the development of Smart Environments. Following that line of thought several Smart Rooms projects were developed and their appliances are very diversified. The appliances include projects in the context of workplace or everyday living, entertainment, play and education. These appliances envisage to acquire and apply knowledge about the environment state in order to reason about it so as to define a desired state for its inhabitants and perform adaptation to these desires and therefore improving their involvement and satisfaction with that environment. Such ”intelligent ” or ”smart ” environments and systems interact with human beings in a helpful, adaptive, active and unobtrusive way. They may still be pro-active, acting autonomously, anticipate the users needs, and in some circumstances they may even replace the user. Decision Making is one of the noblest activities of the human being. Most times, decisions are taken involving several persons (group decision making) in specific spaces (e.g. meeting rooms). On the other hand, the present economic scenario (e.g. increased business opportunities, intense competi-tion) needs fast decision-making to succeed. In this chapter we will focus on smart offices and intelligent meeting rooms con-text. These topics are well studied and they intend to support the Decision Makin