Larry Paul Heck is currently the Rhesa Screven Farmer, Jr., Advanced Computing Concepts Chair, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, and professor at the

Georgia Institute of Technology The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech or The Institute, is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Established in 1885, it is part of ...

. His career spans many of the sub-disciplines of artificial intelligence, including conversational AI, speech recognition and speaker recognition,

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

, web search, online advertising and

acoustics Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician ...

. He is probably best known for his role as the founder of the Microsoft

Cortana Cortana may refer to: * ''Cortana'' (gastropod), a gastropod genus * Cortana (''Halo''), character in the ''Halo'' franchise *Cortana (virtual assistant), virtual assistant from Microsoft *Cortana, or Curtana, a ceremonial sword used in the coronat ...

Personal Assistant and his early work in

deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...

for speech processing.

Education and career

Larry Heck was born in Havre, Montana. After receiving the Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering at Texas Tech University, he was admitted to graduate school at the

in 1986. Heck received the MSEE in 1989 and the PhD in 1991 under advisor Prof. James H. McClellan. From 1992 to 1998, he was a senior research engineer at SRI International initially with the Acoustics and Radar Technology Lab (ARTL) and later with the Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Lab. Funded by the US government's NSA and DARPA, Heck led the SRI team that was the first to successfully create large-scale deep neural network (DNN)

technology in the field of speech processing and the first to deploy a major industrial application of deep learning. The deep learning technology was used to win the 1998 National Institute of Standards and Technology Speaker Recognition evaluation. From 1998 to 2005, he was vice president of R&D at Nuance Communications, where he led the company's efforts in speech recognition,

, speaker recognition, and

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...

technology. From 2005 to 2008, he was vice president of search & advertising sciences at Yahoo!, responsible for the company's search and advertising quality. In 2008, Heck worked with Yahoo! Research to combine the two organizations to form Yahoo! Labs. Beginning in 2009, he was the chief scientist of speech products at Microsoft. In this role, he established the vision, mission and long-range plan and hired the initial team to create Microsoft’s digital-personal-assistant

. Heck was named a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer in 2012 and joined Microsoft Research that same year. In 2014, he joined Google as a principal research scientist, where he founded the deep learning-based conversational AI team "Deep Dialogue". The team works on advanced research for the Google Assistant. In 2017, Heck joined Samsung as SVP and co-head of global AI Research. In 2019, he became head of Bixby (virtual assistant) North America and the CEO of Viv Labs, an independent subsidiary of Samsung.

Awards and honors

Larry Heck was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2016 ''for leadership in application of machine learning to spoken and text language processing''. Heck received the 2017 Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from the

. In the same year, he also received the Texas Tech University

Whitacre College of Engineering The Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering is the college of engineering at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. The engineering program has existed at Texas Tech University since 1925. Additionally, the Whitacre College of Engineering ...

Distinguished Engineer Award.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Heck, Larry Fellow Members of the IEEE Living people 1963 births Georgia Tech alumni Texas Tech University alumni People from Havre, Montana Natural language processing researchers