Ouri Wolfson

University of Illinois at Chicago | UIC · Department of Computer Science

In recent years, Transportation Network Companies (TNC) such as Uber and Lyft have embraced ridesharing: a passenger who requests a ride may decide to save money in exchange for the inconvenience of sharing the ride with someone else and incurring a delay. When matching passengers, these services attempt to optimize cost savings. But a possible sce...

Transportation is an indispensable link for human progress, and essential to the development of civilizations [...]

Consciousness is key to Artificial General Intelligence. It is currently unclear what is consciousness and we expect that by the time it is understood, there will probably be millions of man-years invested in the development of AI agents. This paper addresses the following question. How should AI agents be engineered from now on, such that when it...

Synaptic dysfunction is hypothesized to be one of the earliest brain changes in Alzheimer's disease, leading to "hyperexcitability" in neuronal circuits. In this study, we evaluated a novel hyperexcitation indicator (HI) for each brain region using a hybrid resting-state structural connectome to probe connectome-level excitation-inhibition balance...

The spatial information (SI) community has an opportunity to address major societal and scientific problems including public health, climate change, air pollution, transportation, and others. Beyond the significant contributions made by the SI community, more can be done by focusing the efforts of the community, and generalizing them. Focus can be...

In this article, we survey the main achievements of moving objects with transportation modes that span the past decade. As an important kind of human behavior, transportation modes reflect characteristic movement features and enrich the mobility with informative knowledge. We make explicit comparisons with closely related work that investigates mov...

The human brain is probably the most complex object in the universe, and also one of the least understood. For example, how the brain produces the mind and consciousness is a complete mystery. Nevertheless, the brain is amenable to measurements of various kinds that produce lots of data. It is a spatial object residing in the skull; it is also temp...

The Nash embedding theorem demonstrates that any compact manifold can be isometrically embedded in a Euclidean space. Assuming the complex brain states form a high-dimensional manifold in a topological space, we propose a manifold learning framework, termed Thought Chart, to reconstruct and visualize the manifold in a low-dimensional space. Further...

In this article, we present a search problem in which mobile agents are searching for static resources. Each agent wants to obtain exactly one resource. Both agents and resources are spatially located on a road network and the movement of the agents is constrained to the road network. This problem applies to various transportation applications incl...

In this paper, we deal with the resource search problem in a probabilistic setting. In a resource search problem, there are spatially located static resources and a mobile agent. The agent looks to obtain one of the resources while minimizing the cost. This cost may consist of different types of costs the agent has to pay, from travel time to the c...

Ride sourcing services such as Uber and Lyft have become widespread in large cities for everyday mobility. When matching passengers, these services attempt to optimize cost savings at a global level. However, a possible scenario is that a passenger A is matched to passenger B even though if A were matched to passenger C, then both A and C would hav...

Understanding the modularity of fMRI-derived brain networks or 'connectomes' can inform the study of brain function organization. However, fMRI connectomes additionally involve negative edges, which may not be optimally accounted for by existing approaches to modularity that variably threshold, binarize, or arbitrarily weight these connections. Con...

This paper presents a general Electric Vehicle Routing Problem (EVRP) that finds the optimal routing strategy with minimal travel time cost and energy cost as well as number of EVs dispatched. This is the first EVRP model to consider the vehicle load effect on battery consumption. As demonstrated with a case study in Austin TX, the effect of vehicl...

Since in many cities transport infrastructure is operating at or beyond capacity, novel approaches to organize urban mobility are gaining attraction. However, assessing the benefits of a measure that has disruptive capacity in a complex system requires a carefully designed research. This paper takes a recent idea for urban mobility - flexible road...

Assuming that the topological space containing all possible brain states forms a very high-dimensional manifold, this paper proposes an unsupervised manifold learning framework to reconstruct and visualize this manifold using EEG brain connectivity data acquired from a group of healthy volunteers. Once this manifold is constructed, the temporal seq...

Heuristically adapted from methods originally developed for social networks, current network modularity approaches to account for negative BOLD-signal correlations in fMRI-derived connectomes yield variable results with suboptimal reproducibility. As an alternative, we propose a new, reproducible approach that exploits how frequent the BOLD-signal...

Getting a taxi in highly congested areas (e.g. airports, conferences) is both time consuming and expensive. Chicago Tribune reports that wait at Chicago O’Hare International airport for taxi cabs can be as long as 45 minutes [1]. In this paper we propose RSVP, a ridesharing system that uses walking and virtual pools. RSVP is aimed mainly for transp...

We consider a model in which there are spatially located static resources on a road network, and a mobile agent. The agent looks to obtain one of the resources, and has no knowledge of exact availability of the resources; only probabilistic information is available. We develop a novel and efficient algorithm that guides the agent through a road net...

There has been growing interest in correlating co-visualizing a video stream to the dynamic geospatial attributes of the moving camera. Moving videos comes from various GPS-enabled video recording devices and can be uploaded to video-sharing websites. Such public website do not presently display dynamic spatial features correlated to a video player...

Navigating large, urban transportation networks is a complicated task. A user needs to negotiate the available modes of transportation, their schedules, and how they are interconnected. In this article we present a Natural Language interface for trip planning in complex, multimodal, urban transportation networks. Our objective is to provide robust...

We proposed and developed a taxi-sharing system that accepts taxi passengers’ real-time ride requests sent from smartphones and schedules proper taxis to pick up them via ridesharing, subject to time, capacity, and monetary constraints. The monetary constraints provide incentives for both passengers and taxi drivers: passengers will not pay more co...

Safety warning applications from a vehicular ad hoc network aim to disseminate alerts about dangerous events on the road with wireless communication technology and, when necessary, warn drivers receiving such alerts. Examples include the emergency electronic brake light or the highway merge warning. A major issue with such applications is false war...

In this paper we propose a platform called Spatio-Temporal rEsources Marketplace (STEM) for users of spatio-temporal transportation resources such as electric vehicle charging stations or parking spaces. STEM exploits the gap between optimum and equilibrium in game theory in order to improve the position of users in competing for such resources, as...

Real-time information about vacant parking spaces is of paramount value in urban environments. One promising approach to obtaining such information is participatory sensing, i.e. detecting parking/unparking activities using smartphones. This paper introduces and describes multiple indicators, each of which provides an inconclusive clue for a parkin...

We propose the E-VeT system for efficient vehicular traffic management in road networks using economy-based reward/penalty schemes. In E-VeT, base stations collaboratively facilitate dynamic vehicular route assignments for reducing the traffic congestion, average time of arrival and fuel consumption. The main contributions of this work are two-fold...

Urbanization's rapid progress has modernized many people's lives but also engendered big issues, such as traffic congestion, energy consumption, and pollution. Urban computing aims to tackle these issues by using the data that has been generated in cities (e.g., traffic flow, human mobility, and geographical data). Urban computing connects urban se...

Location-based services allow users to perform geospatial recording actions, which facilitates the mining of the moving activities of human beings. This article proposes to recommend time-sensitive trip routes consisting of a sequence of locations with associated timestamps based on knowledge extracted from large-scale timestamped location sequence...

In this paper, we consider the problem of evaluating the continuous query of finding the \(k\) nearest objects with respect to a given point object \(O_{q}\) among a set of \(n\) moving point-objects. The query returns a sequence of answer-pairs, namely pairs of the form \((I,\, S)\) such that \(I\) is a time interval and \(S\) is the set of object...

In this article, the authors study querying binary large objects (blobs) such as video and voice clips in a network of vehicles communicating wirelessly. They introduce a novel paradigm, describe a set of derived query-processing strategies and compare them along three dimensions: push versus pull, whether or not a communication infrastructure is u...

VTIS is a dynamic notification system that takes in a user's route and calculates the time-delay imposed by disruptions to the normal traversal. The disruptions are calculated by using crowdsourced notifications. This is accomplished by the creation of a client side application for notification display and a server infrastructure that will process...

Ridesharing is a promising method to address transportation problems such as traffic jams and parking. Although traditional carpooling and taxi ridesharing have been investigated by many, slugging, as a simple yet effective form of ridesharing, has not been well-studied. In this paper, we formally define the slugging problem and its generalization....

A lot of work has been devoted to collaboration among distributed computing devices. Sensor networks and crowdsourcing are prominent examples of distributed collaborative computing. Much less attention has been paid to competition among computing agents, particularly the type that we call spatio-temporal competition. In it mobile agents compete for...

Real-time parking availability information is important in urban areas, and if available could reduce congestion, pollution, and gas consumption. In this paper, we present a software solution called PhonePark for detecting the availability of on-street parking spaces. The solution uses the GPS and/or accelerometer sensors in a traveler’s mobile pho...

Real-time parking availability information is important in urban areas, and if available could reduce congestion, pollution, and gas consumption. In this paper, we present a software solution called PhonePark for detecting the availability of on-street parking spaces. The solution uses the GPS and/or accelerometer sensors in a traveler's mobile pho...

Taxi ridesharing can be of significant social and environmental benefit, e.g. by saving energy consumption and satisfying people's commute needs. Despite the great potential, taxi ridesharing, especially with dynamic queries, is not well studied. In this paper, we formally define the dynamic ridesharing problem and propose a large-scale taxi ridesh...

In this paper, we compare two methods of estimating relevance for the emergency electronic brake light application: One method uses an analytically derived formula based on the minimum safety gap that is required to avoid a collision, whereas the other method uses a machine learning approach. The application works by disseminating reports about veh...

The proliferation of mobile devices, location-based services and embedded wireless sensors has given rise to applications that seek to improve the efficiency of the transportation system. In particular, new applications are already available that help travelers to find parking in urban settings by conveying the parking slot availability near the de...

In this paper we present a model of spatially located mobile agents and static resources, in which the agents are looking to obtain one of the resources while minimizing their costs to obtain the resource. The proliferation of mobile devices, location-based services and embedded wireless sensors has given rise to applications that could help the mo...

This report of a community activity a Dagstuhl Seminar earlier in 2010 postulates the need for a computational transportation science as the science behind intelligent transportation systems. In addition to the argument for establishing a discipline we present a first research agenda for computational transportation science.

With the proliferation of location-based services, mobile devices, and embedded wireless sensors, more and more applications are being developed to improve the efficiency of the transportation system. In particular, new applications are arising to help vehicles locate open parking slots. Nevertheless, while engaged in driving, travelers are better...

Real-time street parking availability information is important in urban areas, and if available could reduce congestion, pollution, and gas consumption. In this paper, an advanced street parking system called PhonePark is presented. In the future, smart mobile phones with multiple sensors will be our main source of information both inside and outsi...

We present a methodology for the development of passive ITS safety applications that aim to disseminate reports about dangerous events on the road. Examples of such applications include the emergency electronic brake light or the highway merge warning. A major issue with such applications is the decision of when a warning should be shown. Since the...

In this paper, we present a platform for aiding in the development and evaluation of novel ITS passive safety applications. Such applications work by having vehicles detect certain events that may be dangerous to other vehicles and disseminating reports about these events using wireless communication. A vehicle receiving the report about the event...

Determining a traveler’s context from wearable computers is essential in pervasive computing and activity recognition. In this paper, we study activity recognition using mobile phones. More specifically, we propose a supervised learning scheme that uses a traveler’s GPS and accelerometer sensors on their mobile phones, and geographic knowledge of t...

Disasters, whether environmental or manmade, have catastrophic impacts that require both quick action and long-term interventions. Mitigating the effects of those disasters requires knowledge about similar events and advanced disaster planning. Major challenges in disaster planning and intervention include a lack of up-to-date information on situat...

From business to education to research, one of the most common needs in today’s world is the ability to efficiently and effectively store and organize information. In the past several decades, the amount of information required to perform even everyday tasks has dramatically increased. In addition, there has been a substantial increase in the avail...

The transportation mode such as walking, cycling or on a train denotes an important characteristic of the mobile user's context. In this paper, we propose an approach to inferring a user's mode of transportation based on the GPS sensor on her mobile device and knowledge of the underlying transportation network. The transportation network informatio...

With the proliferation of location-based services, mobile devices, and embedded wireless sensors, more and more applications are being developed to improve the efficiency of the transportation system. In particular, new applications are arising to help vehicles locate open parking spaces. Nevertheless, while engaged in driving, travelers are better...

Trust management is a fundamental and critical aspect of any serious application in ITS. However, only a few studies have addressed this important problem. In this paper, we present a survey on trust management for ITS. We first describe the properties of trust, trust metrics and potential attacks against trust management schemes. Existing related...

In this paper, we compare two methods of estimating relevance for the emergency electronic brake light application. One uses an analytically derived formula based on the minimal safety gap required to avoid a collision. The other method uses a machine learning approach. The application works by disseminating reports about vehicles that are performi...

A driver should constantly keep an eye on vehicles closest to her/his location in order to avoid collisions. Unfortunately, the driver often does not see closest vehicles due to obstacles (other vehicles, trees, buildings, etc). In this paper, we introduce a novel type of query called a continuous range k- nearest neighbor (CRNN) query in vehicular...

This workshop report sets out to define Computational Transportation Science as the science behind intelligent transportation systems. In particular it develops a first research agenda for this science, illustrating its unique challenges and putting them to public debate.

This report of a community activity, a Dagstuhl Seminar earlier in 2010, postulates the need for a computational transportation science, as the science behind intelligent transportation systems. In addition to the argument for establishing a discipline, we present a first research agenda for computational transportation science.

We consider the problem of evaluating the continuous query of finding the k nearest objects with respect to a given moving point-object Oq among a set of n moving point-objects. The query returns a sequence of answer-pairs, namely pairs of the form (I, S) such that I is a time interval and S is the set of objects that are closest to Oq during I. Ex...

In this paper we provide an architecture for Tactical Information Middleware for bandwidth constrained information management. We propose the ideas of rank-based data dissemination, and the use of a tactical information management query language. These ideas will deal with dynamic changes in bandwidth and explore opportunistic data dissemination. T...

With the rapid advancement of positioning and tracking capabilities (mobile phones, on-board navigation systems) location based services are rapidly increasing. Privacy in location based systems is addressed in many papers. Our work is focused on the trusted third party privacy framework that utilizes the concept of k-anonymity with or without l-di...

Social-networking sites have become an integral part of many users’ daily internet routine. Commercial enterprises have been quick to recognize this and are subsequently creating profiles for many of their products and services. Commercial enterprises use social network profiles to target and interact with potential customers as well as to provide...

In this chapter, we introduce the mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) database by discussing its definition, historical background and scientific fundamentals. Existing related projects are presented and classified into two main categories, pedestrian and vehicular projects based on their target users. Two main paradigms (i.e., report pulling and report...

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) is a promising approach to the dissemination of spatio-temporal information such as the current traffic condition of a road segment or the availability of a parking space. Due to the constraint of the communication bandwidth, only a limited number of information items may be transmitted upon a vehicle-to-vehicle c...

In this paper we discuss a method for under-standing ambiguous language in natural lan-guage interfaces for mobile devices. We ap-proach the problem by modeling the user and system with semantic web ontologies that are informed by a context-aware computing plat-form. The semantic model is then used to interpret ambiguous language based on the user'...

In this paper, we present a novel method to efficiently process top-k spatial queries with conjunctive Boolean constraints on textual content. Our method combines an R-tree with an inverted index by the inclusion of spatial references in posting lists. The result is a disk-resident, dual-index data structure that is used to proactively prune the s...

In this paper we describe applications, research issues, and approaches related to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). More specifically, we focus on spatio-temporal databases in urban transportation. We address the issues of trip planning and navigation, abstraction of concepts from spatio-temporal sensor data, mobile peer-to-peer data manag...