 Since the rise of the Internet, we have found ourselves living in two seemingly parallel worlds, one the familiar physical world and the other this growing world of information. But with the convergence of advanced analytics, cloud computing and the Internet of Things, these two worlds are starting to collide in powerful new ways as the Internet starts to come offline into the physical world. Technologies that we once thought of as physical tools and machines are no longer so, as a wave of information technology that started with personal computing and the Internet is breaking out into the real world of physical things. Today, information is out of its box and it's redefining our technology landscape. Technology is no longer a one-off object that performs some physical operation as we once thought of it as, as we network our worlds, placing sensors and actuators in all kinds of objects, technologies are becoming more like systems for executing on algorithms. Phones that just 10 years ago were lumps of plastic and electronics with buttons for making calls have become smart phones that are designed to simply run code. Cars are becoming smart cars, whole cities are becoming smart cities with all this technology increasingly connected up to the cloud where smart systems run analytics, crunching data, learning and feeding it back to the devices to optimize their performance. As a revolution in information technology unfolds at a fast pace, science fiction appears to be becoming science fact. Within just a couple of short decades we've gone from the PC to the Internet to mobile computing to today's world of cloud computing and smart systems. The age of smart systems is becoming a reality as ever more products and services that we use every day from search engine advertising applications to facial recognition to social media sites to smart cars, phones and electrical grids are coming to demonstrate adaptive and smart behavior. These smart systems incorporate functions of sensing, actuation and control in order to describe and analyze the situation and make decisions based upon available data in a predictive or adaptive manner thereby performing smart actions. In most cases the smartness of these systems can be traced back to autonomous operations based on closed loop control, machine learning and networking capabilities that enable the system to exhibit adaptive behavior. These smart systems will sit at the intersection of humans and our technology infrastructure as they perform basic control operations for our technology infrastructure and interact with people so as to understand their needs and perform required actions. The extraordinary capacity of this new stage in the development of information technology is the convergence of advanced analytics, cloud platforms and the Internet of Things. In every decade we have approximately 10 times as many connected devices as we did in the previous decade and this will likely continue for the foreseeable future. Everything that used to be dumb and disconnected is becoming smart and connected as devices and technologies become connected into cloud platforms. Smart systems are software entities that carry out some set of operations on behalf of the user or another program with some degree of independence or autonomy and in so doing employ some knowledge or representation of the user's goals or desires and the environment within which they act in order to achieve those goals. Such an agent is a system situated in and part of a technical or natural environment which senses any or some status of that environment and acts on it in pursuit of its own agenda. With this agenda evolving from program goals, the agent acts to change part of its environment or its status and influences what it senses. The central characteristic of these smart systems are adaptive capacity, dynamic interactivity, a degree of context awareness and learning capacities. They may adapt as information changes and its goals and requirements evolve. They may resolve ambiguity and tolerate unpredictability. They may interact easily with users so that those users can easily define their needs. They can also interact with other processes, devices and cloud services. They may understand, identify and extract contextual elements such as meaning, syntax, time, location, etc. drawing on multiple sources of information structured and unstructured. They can reason on data to create new information and use closed loop feedback to rapidly iterate and learn from the output, meaning they get smarter over time.