Brief Bio

Larry Heck is a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, and the Chief Scientist for the Conversational Systems Research Center (CSRC) in Microsoft Research. As Chief Scientist, he is responsible for the deciding the CSRC's long-term vision, direction, and research program. 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

• Spoken Language Understanding, Generation, and Dialog
• Natural Language Processing
• Machine Learning and Statistical Modeling
• Inference and Reasoning
• Web Search Relevance
• Online Advertising Matching Algorithms
• Information Retrieval
• Speech and Speaker Recognition Algorithms
• Acoustics: Active Noise and Vibration Control
• Mechanical Systems Monitoring
• Signal Processing Algorithms

Work Experience

• 2009 - Present:  Microsoft, Mountain View, CA
  Conversational Systems Lab
  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

• Georgia Institute of Technology
  PhD, MS Electrical Engineering
  1986 - 1991
• Texas Tech University
  BS with Honors, Electrical Engineering
  1981-1986

Recent Presentations

•  Larry Heck, The Conversational Web, Keynote Presentation at the IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies (SLT), December 2012, Miami, Florida

Recent Publications

2012

• Larry Heck, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Exploiting the Semantic Web for Unsupervised Spoken Language Understanding, In the proceedings of SLT-2012, IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies, Miami, FL, December 2012.
• Gokhan Tur, Minwoo Jeong, Ye-Yi Wang, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Larry Heck, Exploiting the Semantic Web for Unsupervised Natural Language Semantic Parsing, In the Proceedings of the Interspeech 2012, Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Portland, OR, September, 2012.
• Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Larry Heck, Ashley Fidler, Asli Celikyilmaz, A Discriminative Classification-Based Approach to Information State Updates for a Multi-Domain Dialog System, In the Proceedings of the Interspeech 2012, Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Portland, OR, September, 2012.
• Elizabeth Shriberg, Andreas Stolcke, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Larry Heck, Learning When to Listen: Detection System-Addressed Speech in Human-Human-Computer Dialog, In the Proceedings of the Interspeech 2012, International Speech Communication Association, Portland, OR, September, 2012.
• Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Rukmini Iyer, Larry Heck, Translating Natural Language Utterances to Search Queries for SLU Domain Detection Using Query Click Logs, In the Proceedings of the ICASSP 2012, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Kyoto, Japan, March 2012.

2011

• Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Larry Heck, Asli Celikyilmaz, Ashley Fidler, Dustin Hillard, Rukmini Iyer, S. Parthasarathy. Employing Web Search Query Click Logs for Multi-Domain Spoken Language Understanding. In the Proceedings of the ASRU-2011, 12th biannual IEEE workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, Waikoloa, HI, December, 2011.
• Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Larry Heck, Elizabeth Shriberg, Bootstrapping Domain Detection Using Query Click Logs for New Domains. In the Proceedings of the Interspeech'11, Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Florence, Italy, August, 2011.
• Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Larry Heck, Research Challenges and Opportunities in Mobile Applications, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Vol. 28, No. 4, August 2011.
• Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Larry Heck, S. Parthasarathy, Sentence Simplification for Spoken Language Understanding. In the proceedings of ICASSP 2011, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Prague, Czech Republic, May 2011.
• Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Larry Heck, Gokhan Tur, Exploiting Web Search Query Click Logs for Utterance Domain Detection in Spoken Language Understanding. In the proceedings of ICASSP 2011, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Prague, Czech Republic, May 2011.
• Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Larry Heck, What's Left to Be Understood in ATIS? In the proceedings of SLT-2010, IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies, Berkeley, CA, December 2010.