Larry P. Heck
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.