Larry Heck is a professor with joint appointments in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Interactive Computing. He is the Co-Head of the Artificial Intelligence Hub at Georgia Tech, the Rhesa S. Farmer, Jr. Advanced Computing Concepts Chair, and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.

Dr. Heck earned his BS in Electrical Engineering from Texas Tech in 1986, and MS and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1991. He spent 30 years in industry research before returning to Georgia Tech as a professor in 2021. 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). He is an IEEE Fellow, a member of the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni at Georgia Tech and the recipient of the Distinguished Engineer Award from the Texas Tech University.

Heck's research focuses on machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, conversational systems, and speech/speaker recognition. He is the director of the AI Virtual Assistant (AVA) Lab, which is building the next generation of AI assistants.