Larry P. Heck

Georgia Institute of Technology

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Larry Heck is a Professor with a joint appointment in ECE and Interactive Computing, Chief Scientist of Tech AI, and Executive Director of the Machine Learning Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds the Rhesa S. Farmer Distinguished Chair of Advanced Computing Concepts and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. He received the BSEE from Texas Tech University (1986), and MSEE and PhD EE from the Georgia Institute of Technology (1989,1991). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni at Georgia Tech and received the Distinguished Engineer Award from the Texas Tech University Whitacre College of Engineering. He was a Senior Research Engineer with SRI (1992-98), Vice President of R&D at Nuance (1998-2005), Vice President of Search and Advertising Sciences at Yahoo! (2005-2009), Chief Scientist of the Microsoft Speech products and Distinguished Engineer in Microsoft Research (2009-2014), Principal Scientist with Google Research (2014-2017), and CEO of Viv Labs and Senior Vice President at Samsung (2017-2021). His research interests are on next-generation Virtual Assistants, Conversational AI including Large Language Models (LLMs) and Response Generation, and Natural Language and Speech Processing with the long-term goal of creating an autonomous digital human that can freely communicate with humans in open, mixed-reality domains.

highlighted publications

  1. arXiv ’24
    UNLEARN: Efficient Removal of Knowledge in Large Language Models
    Lizzo, T, and Heck, L
    arXiv:2408.04140 2024
  2. arXiv ’24
    gtbls: Generating tables from text by conditional question answering
    Sundar, AS, Richardson, C, and Heck, L
    arXiv:2403.14457 2024
  3. arXiv ’24
    iTBLS: A Dataset of Interactive Conversations Over Tabular Information
    Sundar, AS, Richardson, C, Gay, W, and Heck, L
    arXiv:2404.12580 2024
  4. arXiv ’24
    cPAPERS: A Dataset of Situated and Multimodal Interactive Conversations in Scientific Papers
    Sundar, AS, Xu, Jin, Gay, William, Richardson, Christopher, and Heck, Larry
    arXiv:2406.08398 2024
  5. LREC ’24
    mForms: Multimodal Form Filling with Question Answering
    Heck, L, Heck, S, and Sundar, AS
    Proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING) 2024
  6. arXiv ’24
    Are Human Conversations Special? A Large Language Model Perspective
    Jawale, T, Animesh, C, Vallath, S, Talamadupula, K, and Heck, L
    arXiv:2403.05045 2024
  7. arXiv ’24
    Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Is Dense Passage Retrieval Retrieving?
    Reichman, B, and Heck, L
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.11035 2024
  8. CSCW ’23
    I don’t know how to help with that"-Learning from Limitations of Modern Conversational Agent Systems in Caregiving Networks
    Zubatiy, T, Mathur, N, Heck, L, Vickers, KL, Rozga, A, and Mynatt, ED
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW) 2023
  9. SIGDIAL ’23
    Syndicom: Improving Conversational Commonsense with Error-Injection and Natural Language Feedback
    Richardson, C, Sundar, AS, and Heck, L
    Proceedings of SIGDIAL (Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue) 2023
  10. ICCV ’23
    Cross-Modal Dense Passage Retrieval for Outside Knowledge Visual Question Answering
    Reichman, B, and Heck, L
    Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops 2023
  11. ACL ’23
    cTBLS: Augmenting Large Language Models for Conversational Tables
    Sundar, AS, and Heck, L
    5th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2023
  12. ICASSP ’23
    Outside Knowledge Visual Question Answering Version 2.0
    al., B Reichman
    IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2023
  13. AAAI ’23
    Commonsense Reasoning for Conversational AI: A Survey of the State of the Art
    Richardson, Christopher, and Heck, Larry
    Workshop on Knowledge Augmented Methods for NLP (KnowledgeNLP-AAAI’23) 2023
  14. ACL ’22
    Multimodal Conversational AI: A Survey of Datasets and Approaches
    Sundar, Anirudh, and Heck, Larry
    Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2022