Abstract:
I will describe our NSF-sponsored IGERT PhD program in Computational Transportation Science. Computational transportation scientists will develop the next generation of intelligent transportation systems, aimed at addressing inefficiencies that cause excessive environmental pollution, fuel consumption, risk to public safety, and congestion. The trainees investigate information technologies in which millions of sensors, mobile devices such as PDA's, in-vehicle computers, and computers in the static infrastructure are integrated into a collaborative environment. Basic research in information management, communications, software architectures, modeling tools, human factors, traffic prediction, and transportation planning is being conducted to found the new discipline of Computational Transportation Science (CTS).

Biography:
Ouri Wolfson's main research interests are in database systems, distributed systems, and mobile/pervasive computing. He received 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, where he directs the Mobile Information Systems Research Center. He is also 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 company that had about forty employees before being acquired. Most recently he founded Pirouette Software Inc., and currently serves as its President. Before joining the University of Illinois he has been on the computer science faculty at the Technion and Columbia University, and he has been a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories.

Ouri Wolfson authored over 150 publications, and holds six patents. He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, and serves on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and the Springer's Wireless Networks Journal. He received the best paper award for "Opportunistic Resource Exchange in Inter-vehicle Ad Hoc Networks", at the 2004 Mobile Data Management Conference.