Speaker:  Ouri Wolfson, University of Illinois at Chicago
 
Title: Crowdsourcing and Spatio-temporal Competition in Vehicular Parking

 Abstract:
I will briefly describe the IGERT interdisciplinary PhD program in Computational Transportation Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The program lies at the intersection of Computer Science and Transportation. Then I will focus on the problem of spatio-temporal resource matching and its application to vehicular parking. Spatio-temporal resource matching consists of two sub-problems: the location-detection of spatial resources, and the competition among mobile agents for capturing them. I will describe a crowdsourcing approach for the first, and a game theoretic approach for the second. I will discuss the implementation of the results in a new smartphone app that helps drivers locate open street-parking slots and capture them in competitive scenarios. In this sense, the app extends the car-navigation-system concept to parking.

 Bio:
Ouri Wolfson, Ph.D., is 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 venture-funded high-tech startup that was acquired by Fluensee Co. in 2006, and of Pirouette Software. Wolfson authored over 190 publications, and holds seven patents. He is a Fellow of the ACM, AAAS, IEEE, and a University of Illinois Scholar. He co-authored four award winning papers. Wolfson’s main research interests are in database systems, distributed systems, and mobile/pervasive computing.