Larry P. Heck

Larry P. Heck is a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology with joint appointments in the Schools of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Interactive Computing. He holds the Rhesa S. Farmer Distinguished Chair of Advanced Computing Concepts and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. His career spans academia, industry, and research leadership, with notable roles at Microsoft, Google, Samsung, and SRI International.

• BSEE, Texas Tech University (1986)
• MSEE, Georgia Institute of Technology (1989)
• PhD in Electrical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology (1991)

His research focuses on Artificial Intelligence, particularly in Conversational Systems, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing. Key subfields include dialogue systems, speech/speaker recognition, multimodal interaction, and large language model (LLM) governance. Recent publications emphasize dataset creation, intent modeling, reinforcement learning, and ethical AI practices.

Scientific awards include IEEE Fellow, National Academy of Inventors Fellow (2025), and multiple accolades from Texas Tech and Georgia Tech. He has led groundbreaking work in deep learning for speech processing and holds over 50 U.S. patents.