Emerging cyber-physical systems are distributed systems in constant interaction with their physical environments through sensing and actuation at network edges. Over the past decade, the embedded and control systems community have vigorously pursued a vision of coupled feedbackcontrolled systems with a broad range of real-life applications from transportation, smart buildings to human health. These efforts have continued to push intelligent processing to edge and near-edge devices, provide new capabilities for improved sensing with high quality timing information, and establish limits on the quality of time and its impact on the stability of control algorithms etc. It is now time to put these capabilities to use through the emerging stack of capabilities, software and systems for emerging applications such as interactive spaces, buildings, smart cities, etc. In this talk I will review our efforts related to pushing intelligent processing to edge or near-edge devices, our strategies to lighten the computational and memory demands of recognition tasks, and strategies to ensure high quality of timing information. I will focus on detailing our vision of how we can treat physical spaces and built environments as consisting of sensing, actuation, processing, and communication resources that are dynamically discovered and put to use through emerging meta-data schema and methods.