Larry Heck

Larry Heck
Born Larry Paul Heck
(1963-09-21) September 21, 1963
Havre, Montana, U.S.
Nationality American
Alma mater Georgia Institute of Technology,
Texas Tech University
Scientific career
Institutions Samsung
Google
Microsoft
Yahoo!
Nuance Communications
Stanford Research Institute
Thesis A Subspace Approach to the Automatic Design of Pattern Recognition Systems for Mechanical System Monitoring (1991)
Doctoral advisor Prof. James H. McClellan

Larry Paul Heck is Senior Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Research at Samsung. His career spans many of the sub-disciplines of Artificial Intelligence including speech and speaker recognition, natural language processing, dialogue systems, web search, online advertising and acoustics. He is probably best known for his role as co-founder of the Microsoft Cortana Personal Assistant and his early work in deep learning for speech processing.

Education and career

Larry Heck was born in Havre, Montana in 1963. After receiving the Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering at Texas Tech University, he was admitted to graduate school at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1986. His PhD advisor was Prof. James H. McClellan. Heck received the MSEE in 1989 and the PhD in 1991.[1] Funded by the US government's NSA and DARPA, Heck led a team at SRI International that was the first to successfully create large-scale deep neural network (DNN) deep learning technology in the field of speech processing.[2] The DNN work 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. From 2005 to 2009, he was Vice President of Search & Advertising Sciences at Yahoo! where he co-founded the Yahoo! Labs organization. Later, he was the Chief Scientist of Speech Products at Microsoft where he and Zig Serafin (GM) established the vision, mission, and long-range plan for Microsoft’s digital-personal-assistant technology. This technology was eventually launched as the Cortana personal assistant.[3]

Awards and honors

Larry Heck was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2016[4] 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 Georgia Institute of Technology. In the same year, he also received the Texas Tech University Whitacre College of Engineering Distinguished Engineer Award. He holds 60+ United States patents and has 150+ scientific publications.

References

  1. ↑ Larry Heck at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ↑ Heck, L.; Konig, Y.; Sonmez, M.; Weintraub, M. (2000). "Robustness to Telephone Handset Distortion in Speaker Recognition by Discriminative Feature Design". Speech Communication. 31 (2): 181–192. doi:10.1016/s0167-6393(99)00077-1.
  3. ↑ Microsoft Research (April 17, 2014). "Anticipating More from Cortana". Microsoft Research blogs. Archived from the original on March 3, 2016.
  4. ↑ "2016 elevated fellow" (PDF). IEEE Fellows Directory.



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