Ouri Wolfson's main research interests are in database systems, distributed systems, and mobile/pervasive computing. 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, where he directs the Databases and Mobile Computing Laboratory, and the newly established 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 served as a consultant to Argonne National Laboratory, to the US Army Research Laboratories, and to the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences at NASA. He is the founder of Mobitrac, a high-tech startup specializing in advanced fleet management software; it has about forty employees in Chicago and lists major companies such as Fedex among it clients. Most recently he founded Pirouette Software Inc., and currently serves as its President. The company specializes in Mobile Peer-to-Peer software for local search. 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 130 publications, and holds five patents. He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, and serves on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, the ACM/URSI/Baltzer Wireless Networks Journal, and the ACM SIGMOD Digital Review . He also served as a guest editor for several issues of the ACM/Baltzer Journal on Special Topics in Mobile Networks. He received the best paper award for "Opportunistic Resource Exchange in Inter-vehicle Ad Hoc Networks", at the 2004 Mobile Data Management Conference. He is the 2001 recipient of the UIC College of Engineering Faculty Research Award. He served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Association of Computing Machinery during 2001-2003. He participated in numerous conferences as a keynote speaker, program committee chairman or member, tutorial presenter, session chairman, and panelist. Most recently he was the keynote speaker at the 5th International Workshop on Web and Wireless Geographical Information

Systems (W2GIS 2005), the IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control (ICNSC 2004), the Second International Workshop On Databases, Information Systems and Peer-to-Peer Computing (DBISP2P 2004), and the Second International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2001). He was the program committee co-chair of the Third International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2002), the Second ACM International Workshop on Mobile Commerce (2002) , the Sixth International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2005), and the program committee vice-chair of the 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2006) . His research has been funded at a level close to ten million dollars 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 Co., Accenture Co., and Hitachi Co. Most recently, he is the Principal Investigator on a $3.1M NSF grant to establish a Ph.D. program in the new discipline of Computational Transportation Science.