Darren Edge

À propos

Darren Edge is a Senior Director in Microsoft Research Special Projects (opens in new tab), where he builds technologies and partnerships to tackle some of the most challenging problems affecting people and society. He currently leads research projects in the area of Intelligence Analysis and Human Rights Technology (opens in new tab), as well as Microsoft’s participation in the Tech Against Trafficking (TAT) (opens in new tab) coalition working to combat human trafficking with technology.

Darren’s research focus is creating interactive software that empowers domain experts who are not data scientists to view, explore, and make sense of data in ways that inform evidence-based action. Using an activity-based design approach, he takes technologies with the potential to transform real-world data work (including methods from generative AI, graph statistics, differential privacy, and causal inference) and makes them available for real-world use.

Current research projects include:

• GraphRAG for scalable question-answering over private datasets (project page (opens in new tab), python library (opens in new tab), solution accelerator (opens in new tab), preprint (opens in new tab), announcement blog (opens in new tab), release blog (opens in new tab), The Stack article (opens in new tab)), together with LazyGraphRAG (announcement blog (opens in new tab)), which achieves GraphRAG answer quality at vector RAG costs (~700 times lower cost)
• Intelligence Toolkit for creating AI intelligence reports from real-world data sources (GitHub repo (opens in new tab), release blog (opens in new tab))

Previously, Darren’s research has aimed to transform a wide range of human activities, including achieving Societal Resilience (opens in new tab), making sense of media and organizations, combating corruption, cybercrime, and misinformation, preparing for presentations and second language conversations, combining exercise, play, and social interaction through exertion games, and managing work tasks through peripheral, tangible, and embodied forms of interaction. He has published broadly in these areas and contributed to a variety of Microsoft products.

Darren holds a BA and PhD from the University of Cambridge. He returned to Cambridge in 2016 following eight years as an HCI researcher at Microsoft Research Asia.