As the Internet becomes increasingly ubiquitous, it is evolving into the medium for connecting objects that are embedded in the physical world. The coupling between such objects and a worldwide standard-based communication infrastructure constitutes the Internet of Things (IoT) and is characterized by machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. IoT has many applications including smart cities, logistics, industrial control and healthcare. Currently, IoT technologies still largely focus on the networking aspect of connecting and controlling the things. As the IoT continues to develop, further potential can be realized by a combination with related technology approaches such as Cloud computing, Big Data, and AI. In this talk, I will describe the evolution of IoT from instrumentation and interconnection to intelligence and summarize our research in the past years along this direction towards smart IoT. Smart IoT will facilitate a sustainable platform empowering advanced applications. I will focus on the current challenges and future development of smart IoT that adds intelligence to IoT leveraging big data analytics and edge computing.