The Internet of Things (IoT) is meant to be everywhere with projections of tens of Billions of devices within the next few years. There are a number of technical challenges that we are looking at in this new hyper connected environment around us. Our primary goals are to make this IoT infrastructure Safe, Secure, Private and Easy-to-Use. The research questions that we are looking to answer include (a) what novel forms of sensing/actuation to we need to get rich user and environmental context? (b) how can we make the (wireless) sensing substrate perpetual, robust and scalable? (c) what are the mechanisms to balance user privacy, functionality and usability? (d) how do we enable fine grained security and access control mechanisms at scale, including flexible policy specifications? (e) how do we ensure safety of operation such that nothing unexpected happens even when we don’t have control over individual IoT devices? (f) how do we store, organize and access all the sensor/actuator data to enable seamless discovery and portable IoT “App” development? (g) what new programming abstractions do we need to allow anyone to be able to “program” an IoT environment? (h) what are the compelling applications that will spur widespread adoption? We are designing, implementing and deploying our vision in the form of two open source end-to-end stacks, BuildingDepot and GioTTO, for Smart Buildings and IoT domains respectively.