People | CMU-NCA Lab

Prof. John Paul Shen

John Paul Shen is a Professor in the ECE Department at Carnegie Mellon University. After spending 15 years in the Silicon Valley leading research labs at Intel and Nokia, he returned to CMU in fall of 2015 and is currently based at the Silicon Valley campus. He was a Nokia Fellow and the founding director of Nokia's North America Research Lab, with research teams in Palo Alto CA, Berkeley CA, Boston MA. Prior to joining Nokia in 2006, he was the Director of the Microarchitecture Research Lab at Intel, with research teams in Santa Clara CA, Portland OR, and Austin TX. Before joining Intel in 2000, He was a Professor in the ECE Department at CMU, where he had supervised over 20 PhD students, received multiple teaching awards, and published two books and well over 100 research papers. His current research interest has been strongly influenced by his time in industry and academia, and by Jim Smith.

Prof. James E. Smith

James E. Smith is Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley and Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He attended the University of Illinois, receiving his PhD in 1976. He then joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, teaching and conducting research ̶ first in fault-tolerant computing, then in computer architecture. Over the years, he has also worked in industry (Control Data, ACA, Cray Research, Google, and Intel) on a variety of computer research and development projects. Prof. Smith made a number of early contributions to the development of superscalar processors. These include basic mechanisms for dynamic branch prediction and implementing precise traps. He has also studied vector processor architectures and worked on the development of innovative microarchitecture paradigms. He received the 1999 ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award for these contributions. For the past seven years, he has been developing neuron-based computing paradigms at home along the Clark Fork near Missoula, Montana.

Prof. Quinn Jacobson

Quinn Jacobson is a Professor of the Practice at CMU's Information Networking Institute (INI) and based in CMU’s Silicon Valley campus. Quinn is creating programs to teach entrepreneurship and execution to the next generation of technical cofounders and strengthen CMU’s engagement with the startup community. His research includes high-performance distributed systems, neuromorphic computing, and domain-specific accelerators. Before joining CMU, Quinn led engineering efforts at several innovative startups in both hardware and software. Quinn founded Vibrado Technologies, a venture-backed CMU spinout that created the first truly smart apparel. Before discovering his passion for startups, Quinn worked on advanced technology development. He developed the world’s first commercially released soft core for FPGAs at Altera, architected the world’s first multi-core SPARC microprocessors at Sun Microsystems, and led the development of one of the first crowdsourced smartphone services at Nokia. Quinn holds over 70 granted U.S. patents.

Harideep Nair (PhD Student)

Harideep Nair graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay with a Dual Degree (BTech + MTech) in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Computer Science and Engineering. Right after graduation, he joined CMU in the Fall of 2018 as a PhD student in the ECE Department. Currently he is based at the Silicon Valley campus working with Prof. John Paul Shen and Prof. James E. Smith. His research interests are in modern processor design and more broadly computer architecture. Currently, his research is in the area of Neuromorphic Computing Architecture, exploring brain-inspired paradigms of computing.

Prabhu Vellaisamy (PhD Student)

Prabhu Vellaisamy joined the Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) PhD program at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Summer 2021. He earned his M.S. in ECE degree from CMU, where he worked as a Research Assistant at NCAL over Summer 2020 under the guidance of Prof. John Shen. He is pursuing his PhD under the guidance of Prof. Shawn Blanton and Prof. John Shen. His main research interests are broadly in the areas of Neuromorphic Computing, VLSI Design, and Hardware Security.

Shanmuga Venkatachalam (PhD Student)

Shanmuga is currently a PhD student in the NCAL research group advised by Prof. John Paul Shen. She is also a CMU alumna and completed her Masters degree in ECE at CMU as well. She is very passionate in exploring and building neuromorphic computing architectures and neocortical computing algorithms. She has a strong background in computer architecture and in exploring ML/DL applications. She has also worked in the industry for a while including NLP research at Samsung. Currently, she is focusing on applying her research to 6G adaptive beamforming through her internships with Ericsson.

Shreyas Chaudhari (PhD Student)

Shreyas Chaudhari joined the Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) Dept. at Carnegie Mellon in fall 2019. He is pursuing a PhD under the guidance of Prof. José Moura and Prof. John Shen. Shreyas earned his B.S. in ECE from The Ohio State University, where he conducted research at the ElectroScience Laboratory. His research interests include deep learning, statistical signal processing, and neocortex-inspired learning algorithms.

Tyler Nuanes (PhD Student)

Born in the evening of New Year’s Eve, my first great achievement in life was snagging my folks a sweet 1992 tax break. After growing up in Oklahoma, Virginia, and sweet home Alabama as an Air Force brat, I attended Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in the rust belt town Terre Haute, Indiana, where I majored in Engineering Physics, Electrical Engineering, and Optical Engineering. After graduation, I decided the midwest had far too many corn fields, so I chose to move into the desert, relocating to Albuquerque, New Mexico to work on the satellite program at Sandia National Labs. Surrounded by so many experts, I chose to pursue a PhD, eventually arriving at Carnegie Mellon University in the Electrical & Computer Department. Current research focus is on applying Machine Learning to Computational Photography.

David Barajas-Jasso (IMB Student)

David Barajas joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering program at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall of 2020. He is jointly pursuing a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree with a specialization in computer architecture. His interests include computer architecture, embedded systems, and VLSI design.

William Leyman (MS Student)

William Leyman joined the Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) Dept. at Carnegie Mellon in fall 2022. He is pursuing a Master’s Degree with a focus on computer architecture and embedded systems. He’s joined NCAL as a research assistant for Summer 2023 with possible extension into Fall 2023. William earned his B.S. in ECE with a minor in Computer Science from The University of Rochester, where he was helped a radiation oncology laboratory make custom systems for their research. His research interests include neuromorphic and general computing architecture, hardware security, and embedded system design.