Scale-FreeBack has been designed from the observation that systems have become far more complex than the analytical tools available for managing them. Complex systems have many components, communicate with each other, have self-decision-making mechanisms, share an enormous amount of information, and form networks. Research in control systems has challenged some of these features, but not in a very concerted way.  Examples are intelligent traffic systems benefiting from many technical innovations; mobile phones, radars, cameras and magnetometers can be used to measure traffic flow and provide large sets of valuable data.  Vehicles can communicate with the network infrastructure, as well as each other. However, these huge technological advances have not been used to the full so far:  traffic lights are far from functioning optimally and traffic management systems do not always prevent the occurrence of congestions. Scale-FreeBack is a project with ambitious and innovative theoretical goals, which were adopted in view of the new opportunities presented by the latest large-scale sensing technologies.