Larry P. Heck is a Professor with a joint appointment in the Schools of Electrical and Computer Engineering and 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. 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 National Academy of Inventors and the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni at Georgia Tech, and received the Distinguished Engineer Award from Texas Tech University. He was a Senior Research Engineer with SRI (1992-98), VP of R&D at Nuance (1998-2005), VP 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), CEO of Viv Labs and SVP at Samsung (2017-2021).
- Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1991
- M.S., Electrical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1989
- B.S., Electrical Engineering, Texas Tech University, 1986
Heck's research interests focus on next-generation virtual assistants. His AI Virtual Assistant (AVA) Lab is currently revisiting assumptions regarding every aspect of modern AVAs - human-computer interaction design, single vs multimodal interactions, situated interactions over screens and mixed reality (AR/VR), task-oriented conversations to open-domain chit-chat to both, explicit to implicit (commonsense) knowledge-driven conversations, and higher level inference and reasoning.
Heck’s teaching interests center on conversational/dialogue systems, Natural Language Processing, machine learning, and the broad area of artificial intelligence. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on these subjects.
- IEEE Fellow
- 2020 IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Best Paper Award
- Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni, Georgia Tech College of Engineering, 2017
- Distinguished Engineer Award, Texas Tech University Whitacre College of Engineering, 2017
- Benjamin Reichman, Adar Avsian, Larry Heck, Emotions Where Art Thou: Understanding and Characterizing the Emotional Latent Space of Large Language Models, ICLR, 2026.
- Tyler Lizzo, Larry Heck, Unlearn: efficient removal of knowledge in large language models, Findings of ACL: NAACL 2025.
- Larry Heck, Simon Heck, Anirudh Sundar, mForms: Multimodal Form Filling with Question Answering, LREC-COLING, 2024.
- Anirudh Sundar, Jin Xu, William Gay, Christopher Richardson, Larry Heck, cPAPERS: A Dataset of Situated and Multimodal Interactive Conversations in Scientific Papers, NeurIPS, 2024.
- Benjamin Reichman, Larry Heck, Dense passage retrieval: Is it retrieving?, Findings of ACL: EMNLP 2024.