Larry P Heck

Larry P. Heck is a Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds the Rhesa S. Farmer Advanced Computing Concepts Chair and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.

• Education:
  • BSEE, Texas Tech University (1986)
  • MSEE, Georgia Institute of Technology (1989)
  • PhD EE, Georgia Institute of Technology (1991)

His research focuses on conversational AI, dialogue systems, and machine learning applied to natural language processing and speech recognition. He pioneered early industrial applications of deep learning in speech processing and has contributed to advancements in multimodal interaction, knowledge distillation, and real-time question answering systems.

Recent publications emphasize moral reasoning in AI, multimodal dialogue, and large-scale dataset creation for conversational systems. His work bridges language modeling, sensor fusion, and ethical AI through innovations in contextual reasoning and interface masking.

• Scientific Distinctions:
  • IEEE Fellow (2020)
  • IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award
  • Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni, Georgia Tech (2017)
  • Distinguished Engineer Award, Texas Tech University (2017)
  • Fellow, National Academy of Inventors (2025)

He has secured significant funding from DARPA and NSA for speaker recognition systems and has led cutting-edge research at institutions including Microsoft, Google, and Samsung. His lab focuses on conversational systems and deep learning for speech and multimodal data.