Quinn Jacobson

Professor of the Practice, Information Networking Institute

Bio

Quinn Jacobson is a Professor of the Practice at the Information Networking Institute (INI) and based in CMU’s Silicon Valley campus. Quinn is helping to develop new Technical Entrepreneurship opportunities for graduate students and strengthen CMU’s engagement with the startup community. His research includes secure distributed systems and domain-specific accelerators. 

Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon University, Quinn led engineering efforts and advised a number of innovative startups, mainly in high-performance distributed software systems and domain-specific hardware accelerators. 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. His work has been presented in many diverse forums, from GEOINT to Hot Chips to the NABC Convention at the NCAA Final Four.

Education

Ph.D. Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1999.

B.S. Computer Engineering, University of California - Santa Cruz, 1994

Research

Areas of Interest: Entrepreneurship, Distributed Software Systems, Domain-Specific Accelerators, Neuromorphic Computing, Internet of things (IoT)