Technology now offers the possibility of delivering a vast range of low-cost people-centric services to citizens. Internet of Things (IoT) supporting technologies are becoming robust, viable and cheaper.

Several challenges persist in what concerns wireless sensor networks, the Internet of Things, and the use of these technologies in human-centric environments.

Programmable networks or Software Defined Networking (SDN) offers new opportunities to manage computer networks: Make networks smart, introduce new service faster.

How do science and movies get along? Is it true that, most of the times, truth is stranger than fiction?

In this thesis, signal propagation variations that are experience over the frequency resources of IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are studied.

Modern wearable devices allow monitoring vital parameters such as heart or respiratory rates, electrocardiogram, photo-plethysmographic or even video signals, and are being massively commercialized in the consumer electronics market.

The availability of data on digital traces is growing to unprecedented sizes, but inferring actionable knowledge from large-scale data is far from being trivial.

While substantial effort has been devoted to understand fraudulent activity in traditional online advertising (search and banner), more recent forms such as video ads have received little attention.

Mobile robots collaborate in order to solve efficiently the central problems in algorithmics of distributed computing like searching/exploration, rendez-vous or pattern formation.

The Internet is an evolving ecosystem where a multitude of interconnected networks, or Autonomous Systems (ASes), support global connectivity of end users.