The smart world is set to enhance everyday things with abilities of sensation, communication, computation and intelligence so that many tasks and processes could be simplified, more efficient, and enjoyable. It consists of numerous "smart things" that can be endowed with different levels/forms of intelligence and even capable of thinking. This smart world is set to be the next important stage in human history. Research on smart world is an emerging research field covering many areas, essential problems and crucial issues in truly building the smart world that benefits humanity, and simultaneously safeguards the natural environment for sustainable development and evolution.

The IEEE Smart World Congress originated from the 2005 Workshop on Ubiquitous Smart Worlds (USW, Taipei) and the 2005 Symposium on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Smart World (UISW, Nagasaki). SmartWorld 2017 in San Francisco is the next edition after the successful SmartWorld 2016 in Toulouse France and SmartWorld 2015 in Beijing China. SmartWorld 2017 is to provide a high-profile, leading-edge platform for researchers and engineers to exchange and explore state-of-art advances and innovations in graceful integrations of Cyber, Physical, Social, and Thinking Worlds for the theme