Alumnus Receives ASME CIE Lifetime Achievement Award

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Ohio State alumnus (PhD ME '84) and professor of mechanical engineering at Arizona State University (ASU) Jami Shah has been presented a lifetime achievement award by the ASME Computers and Information in Engineering (CIE) Division. Shah began his career as a manufacturing engineer in the steel industry, followed by project engineering, involving design and construction of chemical processing machines and equipment. After entering his PhD engineering program at Ohio State, he did some early development of FEA algorithms for nonlinear buckling problems, as well as, for automated mesh generation. While working at GE R&D he started examining ways to automate process planning based on common geometric features found in turbine engines part families. On his return to academia, Parametric and Feature based CAD/CAM became the main focus of his research. For the next 15 years, with support from government agencies (NSF, DARPA), industry (GE, TI, ICI, Boeing) and consortiums (CAM-I, USCAR), his research became well known for its pioneering work in parametric CAD, feature recognition methods and feature based process planning. He conducted collaborative studies with USCAR for feature based design of automotive power train components. Of notable mention are self-organizing programs for recognizing user defined features “on the fly”, the N-rep language and handling of freeform features. Many of his former students went on to implement parametric technologies in commercial CAD systems.

After maturation of parametric CAD, he became interested in technologies to deploy CAD in conceptual design. This work continues currently along two parallel tracks: Machine Informatics and Cognitive Informatics. The former involves the development of ontologies for function, behavior and artifacts. The latter involves understanding design thinking so Conceptual CAD systems can partner with designers in concept generation and evaluation. He has partnered with Cognitive Scientists in conducting theoretical and empirical studies of design thinking through a series of NSF EDI and Creative-IT grants. Significant contributions from this research include effectiveness metrics for design ideation, standardized tests of design skills and holistic computer tools for concept generation.

On the detailed design side, his work includes network metrics and algorithms for design complexity, product architecture based adaptability metrics for space satellites and mathematical models of geometric tolerances. The ASU T-map model, developed in collaboration with his colleague Joe Davidson, is the only mathematical model that is fully consistent with ASME Y14.5 GDT standard – it is a revolutionary approach to Computer aided Tolerance analysis.

He is the author of two books, 220+ refereed papers, co-inventor of two US patents, Fellow of ASME and the founding Chief Editor of ASME Transactions, JCISE.
Category: Alumni