CAIO research project
People
Principal Investigator
Luca Pappalardo
Senior Researcher at ISTI–CNR, Pisa, Italy
The Principal Investigator of CAIO. He coordinates the project and leads its research activities on city–AI coevolution. He previously coordinated URBAI, a PRIN project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, which served as an intellectual laboratory for many of the ideas and research directions now being developed within CAIO.
Project team
Collaborator of the PI
Dino Pedreschi
Full Professor of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Italy
His research focuses on human-centred AI, data mining and computational social science, with particular attention to the societal impact of artificial intelligence.
Visiting Professor
Kamil Smolak
Assistant Professor of Geodesy and Geoinformatics, Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences, Poland
Kamil Smolak is conducting a NAWA Bekker Fellowship at ISTI-CNR. His research focuses on understanding human mobility using large-scale digital data, with particular interest in biases and representativeness of mobility datasets, data processing methods, and the development of robust approaches for analysing and modelling human movement. He is the Principal Investigator of BURST, a two-year research project (2026–2028) funded by a Bekker NAWA fellowship. Building on themes from CAIO, BURST examines the urban impact of algorithmic routing to design recommender systems that keep cities moving without funneling crowd traffic into the same streets.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Giovanni Mauro
Postdoctoral Researcher at ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy
His research unfolds across two research lines. The first line explores the impact of recommender systems on urban environments, with a particular focus on the inequalities arising from human–algorithm co-evolution. The second focuses on developing algorithms to understand and predict human mobility, ranging from daily commuting to long-term relocation patterns like segregation and gentrification.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Nicola Pedreschi
Postdoctoral Researcher at ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy
His research focuses on using complex systems and networks science approaches to both model and measure the interplay between human mobility, socio-economic inequalities and the adoption of AI-mediators (recommender systems, LLMs) in causing urban and societal transformations.