Brief Bio
Larry Heck is a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, and the Chief Scientist for the Conversational Systems Research Center (CSRC) in Microsoft Research. 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 R&D, 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. Dr. Heck received the PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1991.
Research Interests
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Spoken Language Understanding, Generation, and Dialog
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Natural Language Processing
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Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Statistical Modeling
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Inference and Reasoning
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Speech and Speaker Recognition Algorithms
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Web Search Relevance and Information Retrieval
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Online Advertising Matching Algorithms
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Acoustics: Active Noise and Vibration Control
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Mechanical Systems Monitoring
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Signal Processing Algorithms
Work Experience
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2009 - Present: Microsoft Research, Mountain View, CA
Conversational Systems Research Center
Distinguished Engineer -
2005-2009: Yahoo, Sunnyvale, CA
Head of Search and Advertising Sciences, Yahoo Labs
Vice President -
1998-2005: Nuance Communications, Menlo Park, CA
Head of Nuance Research and Development
Vice President -
1992-1998: SRI International, Menlo Park, CA
Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Lab
Acoustics and Radar Technology Lab (ARTL)
Senior Research Engineer
Education
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Georgia Institute of Technology
PhD, MS Electrical Engineering
1986 - 1991 -
Texas Tech University
BS with Honors, Electrical Engineering
1981-1986
2013
- Larry Heck, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, and Gokhan Tur, Leveraging Knowledge Graphs for Web-Scale Unsupervised Semantic Parsing, in Proceedings of Interspeech, International Speech Communication Association, August 2013
- Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Larry Heck, and Gokhan Tur, Using a Knowledge Graph and Query Click Logs for Unsupervised Learning of Relation Detection, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), May 2013
- Larry Heck, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Madhu Chinthakunta, Gokhan Tur, Rukmini Iyer, Partha Parthasarathy, and Lisa Stifelman, Conversational Web Browsing: A Contextually Adapted Spoken Dialog System, IEEE Workshop on Speech, Language and Audio in Multimedia, 2013
2012
- Larry Heck and Dilek Hakkani Tur, Exploiting the Semantic Web for Unsupervised Spoken Language Understanding, IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop, December 2012
- Larry Heck, The Conversational Web, IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, December 2012
- Elizabeth Shriberg, Andreas Stolcke, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, and Larry Heck, Learning When to Listen: Detecting System-Addressed Speech in Human-Human-Computer Dialog, in Proceedings of Interspeech, International Speech Communication Association, September 2012
- Gokhan Tur, Minwoo Jeong, Ye-Yi Wang, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, and Larry Heck, Exploiting the Semantic Web for Unsupervised Natural Language Semantic Parsing, Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), September 2012
- Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gokhan Tur, Larry Heck, Ashley Fidler, and Asli Celikyilmaz, A Discriminative Classification-Based Approach to Information State Updates for a Multi-Domain Dialog System, Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), September 2012
- Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gokhan Tur, Rukmini Iyer, and Larry Heck, Translating Natural Language Utterances to Search Queries for SLU Domain Detection Using Query Click Logs, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), March 2012
2011
- Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Larry Heck, Asli Celikyilmaz, Ashley Fidler, Dustin Hillard, Rukmini Iyer, and S. Parthasarathy, Employing Web Search Query Click Logs for Multi-Domain Spoken Language Understanding, IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop, December 2011
- Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gokhan Tur, Larry Heck, and Elizabeth Shriberg, Bootstrapping Domain Detection Using Query Click Logs for New Domains, August 2011
- Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gokhan Tur, and Larry Heck, Research Challenges and Opportunities in Mobile Applications, in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, , August 2011
- Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Larry Heck, and Gokhan Tur, Exploiting Query Click Logs for Utterance Domain Detection in Spoken Language Understanding, in Proceedings of the ICASSP, Prague, Czech Republic, May 2011
- Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Larry Heck, and S. Parthasarathy, Sentence Simplification for Spoken Language Understanding, in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, IEEE SPS, May 2011
2010
- Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, and Larry Heck, What's Left to Be Understood in ATIS?, IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies, December 2010
2008
- Keke Chen, Rongqing Lu, CK Wong, Gordon Sun, Larry Heck, and Belle Tseng, Trada: Tree Based Ranking Function Adaptation, ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2008
2004
- Larry Heck and Mark Z. Mao, Automatic Speech Recognition of Co-Channel Speech: Integrated Speaker and Speech Recognition Approach, Interspeech, 2004
2000
- Larry Heck, Yochai Konig, M. Kemal Sonmez, and Mitch Weintraub, Robustness to Telephone Handset Distortion in Speaker Recognition by Discriminative Feature Design, in Speech Communication, Elsevier, 2000
1998
- Yochai Konig, Larry Heck, Mitch Weintraub, and M. Kemal Sonmez, Nonlinear Discriminant Feature Extraction for Robust Text-Independent Speaker Recognition, in RLA2C, 1998
- Larry Heck and Yochai Konig, Discriminative Training of Minimum Cost Speaker Verification Systems, in RLA2C, 1998
Contact Info:
larry.heck@ieee.org
1288 Pear Avenue
Mountain View, CA 94043
