Luca Pappalardo is a senior researcher at the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), an associate professor at Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, and a member of SoBigData.eu, the European research infrastructure on big data analytics and social mining. With a degree in Computer Science, Luca started exploring massive datasets of human movements, publishing several papers on human mobility analysis and modelling. In a natural evolution of his research trajectory, Luca shifted focus to the pressing issue of urban congestion, pioneering efforts centered on designing innovative routing strategies that balance individual travel optimization with the collective well-being of a city. Luca is now broadening his scope to address the profound impact of AI on complex systems in realms like social media, conversational systems, online retail and, of course, urban environments. His overarching goal is to design next-generation algorithms that balance the individual needs of users with broader collective objectives using tools at the intersection of computer science, network science, and computational social science.