Ouri Wolfson's main research interests are in big data, distributed systems, mobile/pervasive computing, smart city, and connectomics. He received his B.A. degree in mathematics, and his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. He is currently the Richard and Loan Hill Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is the founder of Mobitrac, a high-tech startup that was acquired by Fluensee Co.; and the founder and president of Pirouette Software Inc. which specializes in mobile data management. He served as a consultant to Argonne National Laboratory, US Army Research Laboratories, DARPA, and NASA. Before joining the University of Illinois he has been on the computer science faculty at the Technion and Columbia University, and a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories.
Ouri Wolfson authored over 230 publications, and holds seven patents. He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a University of Illinois Scholar for 2009. He co-authored seven award winning papers, and served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Association of Computing Machinery. Wolfson was the keynote and distinguished speaker at leading conferences and universities, most recently the The Eighth International Conference on Big Data Analytics (BDA2020) , Dec. 2020, and the International Conference on Transport and Smart Cities (ICoTS 2021) , Sept. 2021.
Ouri Wolfson is the Editor in Chief of the MDPI Journal of Future Transportation , Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers' Smart Technologies and Cities , and serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He chaired leading conferences, most recently he was the program co-chair of the 2020 Mobile Data Management (MDM) conference. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NATO, US Army, NASA, the New York State Science and Technology Foundation, Hughes Research Laboratories, Informix, Accenture, and Hitachi Co. During 2006-2015 he served as the Principal Investigator on a $3.1M NSF grant to establish a Ph.D. program in the new discipline of Computational Transportation Science.