Distinguished Engineer Citations

Distinguished Engineer

2017

Degree

Electrical Engineering - 1986

Citation

At Time of Nomination in 2017

Dr. Larry Heck, is a director of research in the Google Research and Machine Intelligence group. In this role, he leads an advanced dialogue research effort for the Google Assistant. From 2009-­2014, he was the chief scientist of the Microsoft Speech products team and later a Distinguished Engineer in Microsoft Research. In 2009, he co­-founded the initiative that led to Microsoft's Cortana personal assistant. From 2005 to 2009, he was vice president of Search & Advertising Sciences at Yahoo!, responsible for the creation, development, and deployment of the algorithms powering Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Sponsored Search, Yahoo! Content Match, and Yahoo! display advertising. From 1998 to 2005, he was with Nuance Communications and served as vice president of Research and Development, responsible for natural language processing, speech recognition, voice authentication, and text-to-speech synthesis technology. He began his career as a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute (1992-1998), initially in the field of acoustics and later in speech research with the Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory. Heck received the Bachelor of Science in electirical engineering in 1986 from Texas Tech University and the Masters of Science and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1989 and 1991, respectively. He is a Fellow of the IEEE with over 100 scientific publications and holds over 50 United States patents.