Over the past 25 years, Jami Shah has made numerous significant contributions to CAD/CAM technologies and their diffusion into industrial practice. These contributions are both direct, in the form of archival research publications, as well as indirect, in the form of ASU Design Automation Lab’s large numbers of graduates who hold key positions in all major CAD companies today. When he began his academic career in the mid-1980s, solid model based CAD systems had begun to emerge, but solid modelers were non-intuitive to use and design changes could not be propagated automatically. The development of parametric and feature based CAD/CAM, which he pioneered for many years,have revolutionized CAD systems. One of the most visible of these efforts was a project sponsored by the CAM-I consortium, consisting mostly of automotive and aerospace industries. The purpose of the project was to demonstrate to CAD industry and users alike, the power of parameterics. The culmination of his efforts was a CAM-I sponsored industry showcase, and later a professional textbook to archive the fundamentals of parametric and feature based CAD/CAM. His specific technical contributions include one of earliest Design by Feature systems (prior to such capabilities in any commercial parametric CAD), robust algorithms to overcome feature interaction problems in automatic feature recognition, and the specification & recognition of user defined features on the fly.
He is continuing work in the development of geometric algorithms for tolerance analysis, reverse engineering and functional modeling. Jami Shah is a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department, and Director of Design Automation Lab at Arizona State University. He is an ASME fellow and the founding Chief Editor of the Journal of Computing & Information Science in Engineering (JCISE).