Prof. Darren Cosker
Principal Scientist Manager
About
I am a Principal Scientist Manager at Microsoft’s Mixed Reality and AI Lab (Cambridge) (opens in new tab), where I lead a team developing innovative new features for products in the Mixed Reality space – such as Avatars for Microsoft Teams and Mesh. My work primarily focuses on using AI to understand humans – their movements, behaviour, pose from multi-modal inputs (audio, video, HMDs) – and uses this to drive representations of them in mixed reality via their avatar. As of today (June, 2024) we have shipped our technology into Avatars in Teams, and Mesh, bringing them to life using your voice to drive their movements in realtime.
I am also a part time (Full) Professor in Computer Science at the University of Bath (since 2017), and previously held peronal research fellowships from the Royal Academy of Engineering, 2007-2012 and Royal Society Industry Fellowship (with DNEG – previously called Double Negative Visual Effects), 2012-2016.
I was also the founding Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Motion, Entertainment Research and Applications (CAMERA) (opens in new tab) – which I established in 2015 growing the centre from 0 to over 50 academics, scientists and engineers – and stepped down in 2021 to join Microsoft.
I’m interested in problems that cut across disciplines – computer vision, graphics, AI – to generate impact. Past applications of my work have been in areas such as human motion analysis, recognition and synthesis, but I’m interested in any problem that involves understanding and modeling humans. Applications have in the past been across creative industries (video games, visual effects, immersive experiences – e.g. at CAMERA we worked on some great projects with the BBC and Aardman – ‘Is Anna OK?’ (opens in new tab) and ’11:11 Memories Retold’ (opens in new tab)), healthcare (e.g. AI to manage disease) and sport (e.g. markerless biomechanical analysis.
You can find out more about my research from my Google Scholar Page (opens in new tab) and University Home Page (opens in new tab).