Ari Requicha is a
Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at USC, where he
also directs the
Laboratory for
Molecular Robotics since 1994 and the
Programmable Automation
Laboratory since 1986. He received the Engenheiro Electrotécnico
degree from the Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal, in 1962, and
the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester in
1970. He was a college and high school Valedictorian, and is a Fellow of
the IEEE. He has been an editor for the ACM Transactions on Graphics, the
IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, and other journals, and has
served on numerous conference program committees. He has authored or
co-authored about 150 scientific papers.
He joined
USC in 1986, after thirteen years at the
University of Rochester, where most recently he was the Director of the
Production Automation Project. He also has been a lecturer in physics at
the University of Lisbon, Portugal, a lieutenant in the Portuguese Air
Force, and a research scientist with NATO's SACLANT Research Center in La
Spezia, Italy.
The theme of Requicha's
research for the last thirty years has been the development of intelligent
systems that interact with the three-dimensional world in which we live.
In the decade from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, he addressed the
problem of describing the 3-D objects that populate our physical
environment, and did much of the pioneering work on what is now called
solid modeling. Today, computer-based solid modelers have largely replaced
drafting and manual techniques as the standard means of capturing objects'
geometry in computer graphics, and in industrial computer aided design and
manufacturing.
Next, he tackled spatial
reasoning, through a blend of concepts and techniques from artificial
intelligence and geometric modeling. The main focus was on automatic
planning for manufacturing and inspection tasks. With his students, he
developed systems for recognizing manufacturing features, designing and
assembling fixtures using modular components, and planning dimensional
inspection with Coordinate Measuring Machines.
His current research is
focused on the science and engineering required to interact with the
nanometer-scale world. He directs USC's Laboratory for Molecular Robotics,
an interdisciplinary center whose ultimate goal is to control the
structure of matter at the molecular scale. The lab is now developing
systems for manipulating nanoscale objects using Scanning Probe
Microscopes (SPMs) as sensory robots. Applications in nanoelectronics,
nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) and nanobiotechnology are being
investigated. This work is evolving towards the construction and
deployment of autonomous nanorobots.
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