Ari (short for Aristides) Requicha was born on March 18, 1939, in Monte Estoril, Portugal. His current research area is nanorobotics, but in the past research he focused on geometric modeling of 3–D solid objects and spatial reasoning for intelligent engineering systems.

He is currently working on robotic manipulation of nanometer-scale objects using scanning probe microscopes; nanorobot components and nanorobotic system integration; fabrication of nanostructures by robotic self-assembly; sensor/actuator networks; and applications in NEMS (nanoelectromechanical systems) and nanobiotechnology.

His long-term goals are to build, program, and deploy nanorobots and networks of nanoscale sensors/actuators for applications to the environment and health care.

Since 2003 he holds the Gordon Marshall Chair in Engineering at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, and he has been a full professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering since November 1986 and director of the Laboratory for Molecular Robotics beginning in 1994; he has been also the director of the Programmable Automation Laboratory, between 1986 and 2003

In 1962 he received his Engenheiro Electrotécnico degree from the Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon, Portugal; in 1967, he completed his M. Sc. In Electrical Engineering and in June 1970, he completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, both at the University of Rochester.

He went to the US primarily because of its superior scientific environment and the availability of opportunities to do research at the cutting edge of science and technology. He applied to US universities through the American Embassy and the Institute for International Education. Received a Fulbright travel grant and a standard teaching assistantship (which later became a research assistantship and a fellowship) from the University of Rochester, in Rochester, NY.

He is the author or co-author of about 170 scientific articles. He has also consulted for several companies and has been editor, reviewer or member of the editorial board of several scientific publications. He has served on numerous conference program committees.

After graduation in 1970, Ari Requicha was forced to leave the US because he had a J visa (exchange visa). He then worked for three years for NATO at the SACLANT center in La Spezia, Italy. He returned to the University of Rochester as a postdoc and later became a senior scientist and an associate professor there. In the last years at University of Rochester he says, “I spent a lot of my time raising money and running a fairly large research project. I got tired of this and joined USC in 1986, starting a small group that did not need as much funding and left me with time for getting closely involved in the research, which is what I enjoy doing”.

In the mid 1990s he felt that the logical continuation of his work was not likely to have a strong impact on the world, and he also got a bit bored with the areas of computational geometry and programmable automation in which he had been working for some 20 years.

He gradually moved to the emerging area of nanotechnology, because he thought it had an extraordinary potential to advance science and do good things for human kind. This was years before nanotech became fashionable and the National Nanotech Initiative was launched in the US. Ari Requicha says “It has been an exciting run, but I am back where I was in my last years in Rochester: a huge amount of my time and energy is being spent on funding, research leadership and administration.” So, as of last year, he is downsizing his group so that he can go back to doing what he really likes. He also says that contracting is not easy because the nanotech area is very interdisciplinary and requires people with different backgrounds and that this makes for large numbers of collaborators and large sums of money.

A couple of years ago he was running three fairly large projects with a combined funding of about $2M per year. This involved collaborations with half a dozen other faculty, two or three postdocs, technicians, and a dozen graduate students. Now he reduced this to a group of only three graduate students.

The US National Science Foundation has continuously funded him for the past 30 years, and he occasionally also has had funding from industry and private foundations.

His ultimate goals and the themes of his research for the last thirty-some years have been to understand intelligence and to develop 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 replaced drafting and manual techniques as the standard means of capturing objects' geometry in computer graphics, and in industrial computer aided design and manufacturing, and he believes this work had a major impact.

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. In his opinion this was elegant work but did not impact industry in a significant way.

His research since the mid 1990s has been focused on the science and engineering required to interact with the nanometer-scale world. It is at the nanoscale that life processes operate, and it is also at the nanoscale that many of the properties of matter are determined.

He is the director and one of the founders of USC's Laboratory for Molecular Robotics, an interdisciplinary center whose ultimate goal is to control the structure of matter at the molecular scale, much like we now control the bits and bytes that are the objects of information technology. The lab is developing systems for manipulating and assembling nanoscale objects using Scanning Probe Microscopes (SPMs) as sensory robots, developing components such as nanosensors and nanoactuators for the nanoscale robots of the future, and investigating algorithms for programming distributed systems composed of large numbers of nanorobots. Applications in nanoelectronics, nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) and nanobiotechnology (especially bioNEMS--medical applications of NEMS) are being investigated.

In addition, he is also interested in sensor/actuator networks and their applications in environmental monitoring and health care. “These two lines of research, nanorobotics and sensor/actuator networks, are expected to merge in the future, because networks with large numbers of physically-coupled nodes are especially attractive if the nodes are very small, and because individual nanorobots are likely to have limited capabilities, which implies that most applications will require swarms of nanorobots”, says Ari Requicha.

He is considered by many of his colleagues a pioneer in two areas: solid modeling and nanorobotics.

He has never been invited to return to Portugal. Since 2003 he has had several invitations to talk in Portugal, but before that he only recalls one such invitation, in 1992.

Besides his scientific work he is also a skilled certified diver, has been a research diver in the Marine Science Center, in Catalina since 1992 and was director of Catalina Conservancy Divers between 1996 and 2001.

AWARDS

In Portugal he received the national prize of the ministry of Education twice in High School, in the 5th and 7th years at the Liceu Pedro Nunes. Apparently he was the only student there who had ever had a mark of 20 in four different subjects simultaneously.

At the Instituto Superior Técnico he was awarded the Bandeira de Melo Prize (ex-aequo) for the highest-grade average, and the Marconi Prize for excellence in telecommunications.

He is a life fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) and a member of Sigma Xi.

He received best paper awards for a paper in the IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications journal and the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) Computers in Engineering Conference.

The USC Viterbi School of Engineering recognized him in its centenary year (2006) with its Senior Research Award.

He has given some 30 keynote and distinguished speaker lectures all over the world. And he is also one of the 280 computer scientists, worldwide, who is listed in Thomson’s ISI Web of Knowledge (2006) as a highly cited researcher for the years 1981-1999.