Larry P. Heck

Georgia Institute of Technology

Spring2023.jpg

Larry P. Heck is a Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Interactive Computing 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. His 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. cTBLS ’23
    cTBLS: Augmenting Large Language Models for Conversational Tables
    Sundar, Anirudh, and Heck, Larry
    arXiv:2303.12024 2023
  2. AAAI ’23
    Commonsense Reasoning for Conversational AI: A Survey of the State of the Art
    Richardson, Christopher, and Heck, Larry
    In Workshop on Knowledge Augmented Methods for NLP (KnowledgeNLP-AAAI’23) Feb 2023
  3. ACLConvAI ’22
    Multimodal Conversational AI: A Survey of Datasets and Approaches
    Sundar, Anirudh, and Heck, Larry
    In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI May 2022
  4. CHI ’21
    Empowering Dyads of Older Adults With Mild Cognitive Impairment And Their Care Partners Using Conversational Agents
    Zubatiy, Tamara, Vickers, Kayci L, Mathur, Niharika, and Mynatt, Elizabeth D
    In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems May 2021
  5. ACM HCI ’21
    Pivoting an MCI Empowerment Program to Online Engagement
    Mynatt, Elizabeth D., Vickers, Kayci, LaForce, Salimah, Farmer, Sarah K., Johnson, Jeremy M., Doiron, Matthew, Ramesh, Aparna, Fain, Walter Bradley, Zubatiy, Tamara, and Rodriguez, Amy D.
    Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. Jan 2022