Dr. Ouri Wolfson
Ouri Wolfson, Ph.D. is the President and Chief Scientific Officer at Pirouette Software Consulting and Richard and Loan Hill Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with over 35 years of experience in database systems, distributed computing, and mobile computing technologies.
Ouri is known for his pioneering research in moving object databases and mobile peer-to-peer networks, having authored over 240 publications with eight award-winning papers, holding seven patents, and accumulating more than 17,000 citations on Google Scholar with an h-index of 61.
As a recognized leader in his field, he holds Fellow distinctions from five prestigious organizations: the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), and the International Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance (AIIA). He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the MDPI Journal of Future Transportation and is Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers’ Smart Technologies and Cities. Read Future Transportation — An Open Access Journal.
Ouri’s groundbreaking research has produced seminal works in spatio-temporal databases and mobile computing infrastructure. His collaborative research includes coauthoring the Report on the NSF Workshop on an Infrastructure for Mobile and Wireless Systems. He has made fundamental contributions to uncertainty management in mobile systems, including his work on Querying the Uncertain Position of Moving Objects. His research on Spatio-temporal Data Reduction with Deterministic Error Bounds has advanced the field of mobile data management.
He has contributed to establishing the university as a leading center for database management and information retrieval research. His work on Modeling Moving Objects for Location Based Services has become foundational in the development of modern location-aware applications. Additionally, he has served on editorial boards for publications including IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Springer’s Wireless Networks Journal. Transportation Letters: The International Journal of Transportation Research, and the Journal of Spatial Information Science.
His work has been supported by the New York State Science and Technology Foundation, Hughes Research Laboratories, IBM Informix, and Hitachi, demonstrating the commercial relevance of his research innovations. In addition to his role as general chair of ACM GIS 2009, he served as general co-chair of the 2013 Mobile Data Management (MDM) conference, further establishing his leadership in the mobile computing community.
His international recognition includes delivering a keynote address at the 2012 International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM) and Peking University (2012), eight years before his visiting professorship there.
Since founding Pirouette Software Consulting in September 2006, Ouri has led the company’s development of smart-city AI products and mobile data management solutions. The company specializes in conscious smart-city technologies that collaborate to interact more empathetically, ethically, and intuitively with stakeholders.
Earlier, he founded Mobitrac in February 2000, a venture-funded startup that was listed in the top 50 startups in Chicagoland and was successfully acquired by Fluensee in November 2005. His entrepreneurial ventures have focused on developing innovative mobile peer-to-peer search systems, including the MOBI-DIK project, which was funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation.
Read STTR Phase I: Feasibility of Mobile Peer-to-Peer Search on Hand-held Devices and MOBI-DIC: MOBIle DIssemination of loCal information in Peer-to-Peer Wireless Networks.
As the Richard and Loan Hill Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 1991, Ouri has made significant contributions to computational transportation science. Between 2006 and 2015, he served as Principal Investigator on a $3.1 million NSF grant to establish a Ph.D. program in Computational Transportation Science, demonstrating his leadership in creating new interdisciplinary fields.
He also holds an Affiliate Professor position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and directed the Mobile Information Systems Research Center from 2000 to 2021. His research has attracted over $15 million in funding from prestigious organizations, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NATO, the US Army, and NASA.
Ouri earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in 1984 and his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from New York University in 1981. His early career included serving as a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1981 to 1985, followed by faculty positions at the Technion, Columbia University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, before joining UIC.
Throughout his distinguished career, Ouri has served in numerous editorial and leadership roles in the academic community. He is currently a Partner Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S) and was a Visiting Professor at Peking University in 2020, a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia in 2012, a Visiting Professor at George Mason University from 2020 to 2022, and the University of Melbourne in 2015.
He has chaired numerous leading conferences, including serving as General Chair of the 17th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS 2009) and program co-chair of the 2020 Mobile Data Management (MDM) conference.
Ouri has delivered keynote addresses at major international conferences, including The Eighth International Conference on Big Data Analytics (BDA2020) in December 2020 and the International Conference on Transport and Smart Cities (ICoTS 2021) in September 2021. He served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Association of Computing Machinery from 2001 to 2003 and was named a University of Illinois Scholar in 2009. His consulting expertise has been sought by leading organizations, including Argonne National Laboratory, US Army Research Laboratories, British Telecommunications, SAP America, and Accenture.
Ouri’s research contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including best paper awards for Uncertain Range Queries for Necklaces at the 2010 Mobile Data Management Conference, Opportunistic Resource Exchange in Inter-vehicle Ad Hoc Networks at the 2004 Mobile Data Management Conference, and Communication Reduction for Floating Car Data-Based Traffic Information Systems at the 2010 GeoProcessing Conference.
He received the UIC College of Engineering Faculty Research Award in 2001 and was inducted as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in January 2012 for “contributions to mobile data management,” and as a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA) in April 2024. Read Querying the Uncertain Position of Moving Objects and Algorithmic issues in modeling motion.
Ouri resides in Chicago, Illinois, where he continues to advance research in big data, AI, mobile computing, smart city technologies, and intelligent transportation systems. His current work focuses on sustainable mobility, air quality modeling, and the development of distributed software platforms for drone swarm management and synchronization.
Watch Ouri Wolfson — How to Determine if an AI Agent is Conscious?
Read talk: Wolfson on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 1pm Fri 12/2, ITE 227.
Visit his LinkedIn profile, Google Scholar page, his Academic page, and his Personal Homepage. Follow him on ResearchGate.