Chris White

About

Chris White is Partner and Managing Director, Special Projects (opens in new tab). He leads research teams with world-class specialists solving highly uncertain, complex problems. His group builds technologies to benefit society, including tools for digital safety, plurality, and evidence-based policy.

Prior to Microsoft, Chris was a Program Manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he created and managed DARPA’s leading programs XDATA, Memex, and invested hundreds of millions of dollars into open-source software. He was also DARPA’s country lead in Afghanistan, leading multinational field deployments of advanced technology. He has worked with hundreds of principal investigators and faculty across many academic and technical disciplines. His work has been applied to countering human trafficking, financial fraud, and terrorism. In recognition of this work, Chris received the 2016 Presidential Award for Extraordinary Efforts to Combat Trafficking in Persons, the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service, the Department of Defense Joint Meritorious Unit Award, and a Department of Treasury Intelligence and Analysis Medallion for combatting terrorism financing.

Prior to DARPA, Chris was a fellow at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He was a Department of Homeland Security Graduate Fellow and earned a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in electrical and computer engineering, where his research focused on AI, machine learning, statistical methods for large data sets, and human language technology. He earned a BS from Oklahoma State University.

He lives near Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters.

Chris’s work has been featured in media outlets including Popular Science, CBS’s 60 Minutes, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone Magazine, TEDx, and Google’s Solve for X. For more detail about Chris’s background, listen to a Podcast (opens in new tab) on democratizing data science, or read about a Presidential Award (opens in new tab) to combat human trafficking, chief data officer activity during wartime (opens in new tab), or a special genius issue profile by Popular Science (opens in new tab).

His group’s work at Microsoft Research has included study, software engineering, and system development for nascent industry and societal areas, including:

Sociotechnical research

• Enabling evidence-based policy (opens in new tab), including a research initiative (opens in new tab) building on lessons from studies in pandemic preparedness (opens in new tab) towards societal resilience (opens in new tab)
• Advancing organizational science using network machine learning (opens in new tab) given how hybrid work (opens in new tab) is changing (opens in new tab) the future of work

Sustainability research

• Developing radical strategies for sustainability (opens in new tab), including extremely dense data storage in DNA (opens in new tab) and grid-interactive energy intelligence (opens in new tab) toward better than net zero carbon
• Working with cities (opens in new tab) to measure community-level disparities in pollution exposure (opens in new tab), starting with a large-scale pilot deployment (opens in new tab) in Chicago

Security research

• Creating new sensors (opens in new tab) to change the field for deterring and discovering advanced persistent cyber threats
• Advancing interoperability and user-controlled verifiable clinical information (opens in new tab) with foundational SMART Health Card (opens in new tab) technology, starting to enable tamper-proof health information for hundreds of millions of people
• Making our elections more secure (opens in new tab) and verifiable (opens in new tab)
• Expanding security testing (opens in new tab) from security experts to be part of every build, including cloud services (opens in new tab), now a top priority for Azure reliability

New industries research

• Creating the technical and industry momentum for Azure to empower telecom operators in the cloud (opens in new tab), enabling the launch of a new business Azure for Operators (opens in new tab)
• Enabling Holoportation and new forms of presence with shared experiences where you can feel like you’re in the same place (opens in new tab), now part of mixed reality in Microsoft Mesh (opens in new tab)
• Building low-cost, scalable, programmable AI-enabled content analysis (opens in new tab) to help recommend livestreams, as in eSports (opens in new tab), and to protect community users, becoming the foundation of Digital Safety technology at Microsoft
• Experimenting to show underwater datacenters (opens in new tab) are reliable, practical, and can be sustainably powered; awarded contributor to Microsoft becoming Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Company of the Year (opens in new tab)