Aristides A.G. Requicha, holder of the Viterbi School's Gordon Marshall Chair, was honored for his career achievements May 23 at the world's largest gathering of robotics and automation researchers, a gathering hosted this year by Viterbi faculty. (see accompanying story)
Requicha is a co-recipient of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Pioneer Award, which was established in 1998. The honor is given, according to the official description, "to recognize individuals who by virtue of initiating new areas of research, development or engineering have had a significant impact on development of the robotics and/or automation fields."
The determination is based upon "the pioneering nature of the contribution, whether academic or industrial; the impact or the accumulated impact of the candidate’s contribution or contributions on the fields of robotics and/or automation."
RAS President Bruno Siciliano presents award to Requicha; RAS Awards Chair David Orin is on the right.
President Bruno Siciliano, president of IEEE RAS, made the presentation.
Requicha has worked to create new families of robotic devices on the micro and even nano scale, and is now director of the Viterbi Laboratory for Molecular Robotics as well as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology.
Viterbi School CS Chair Ramesh Govindan noted another recent honor in paying tribute to Requicha.
"Close on the heels of his recognition as a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, this award publicly recognizes what we have known all along in the CS department --- that Ari's research over the years has help push the frontiers of robotics and automation. Our department joins me in wishing Ari many more years of continued success."
Previous honors for Requicha include the USC Senior Research Award in 2006, the first-ever Pierre Bezier Award in solid modeling at the 2007 ACM Solid and Physical Modeling Symposium, as well as several best paper awards. He is currently a Co-Chair of the Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee on Micro and Nano Robotics.
He joined USC in 1986, after thirteen years at the University of Rochester, where he received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering.
