Heck, Xia Elected to National Academy of Inventors

ECE, BME researchers honored for their innovations in AI speech processing and nanomaterials for medicine and electronics.

By: Joshua Stewart (jstewart@gatech.edu)

Tuesday, 10 December 2024

Blank Space (small)
(text and background only visible when logged in)

The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) is adding two more Georgia Tech researchers to its roster of innovators: Larry Heck and Younan Xia.

Heck is an artificial intelligence and speech recognition pacesetter who helped create virtual assistants for Microsoft, Samsung, Google, and Amazon. Xia is a nanomaterials pioneer whose inventions include silver nanowires commercialized for use in touchscreen displays, flexible electronics, and photovoltaics.

Election to NAI is the highest professional distinction specifically awarded to inventors. Founded in 2012, the NAI Fellows program has recognized 22 Georgia Tech innovators — 12 in just the last five years. Xia and Heck join a 2025 class of 170 new fellows representing university, government, and nonprofit organizations worldwide.

Blank Space (medium)
(text and background only visible when logged in)

Larry Heck

Professor and Rhesa Screven Farmer Jr. Advanced Computing Concepts Chair
Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
School of Interactive Computing
Co-Director, Machine Learning Center

Heck is a two-time graduate of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) — master’s in 1989 and Ph.D. in 1991 — and returned to campus in 2021 after decades in industry. He led Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant for North America and helped develop the technologies underlying Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa. He also cofounded Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistant in 2009.

A fellow of IEEE, Heck holds more than 50 patents.

“From my early patents in the 1990s, my inventions were typically preceded by years of scientific research involving iterative exploration, ideation, and experimentation,” Heck said. “To be inducted into the National Academy of Inventors is a great honor and a wonderful recognition of my years of pursuing scientific knowledge and innovation through research.”

Heck focuses on deep learning and artificial intelligence, natural language processing, speech recognition, and conversational systems. He’s working to develop AI virtual assistants that would be collaborators with human users that extend our capabilities and supercharge creativity and productivity.

Heck started his career as a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute. His team created the first successful large-scale deep neural network for speech processing and deploy a major industrial application of deep learning.

Blank Space (small)
(text and background only visible when logged in)

Younan Xia

Professor and Brock Family Chair
Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Nanomedicine
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
School of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Xia’s research group has invented a variety of nanoscale materials with well-controlled size, shape, and other properties for medical, electronic, and photonic applications. Xia created silver nanowires and polymer nanofibers that have been used for manufacturing flexible, transparent, conductive coatings — enabling technologies like touchscreens, solar panels, and other flexible electronics. The materials also have found commercial application in wound management.

“I am glad to be recognized for the innovations coming my group,” Xia said. “Over the past 25-plus years, my group has invented a large number of new nanomaterials with diverse but controlled properties. While our primary focus has been on the fundamental side, we have also diligently explored these nanomaterials for an array of applications.”

Xia is working to build the scientific base for large-scale production of customized nanomaterials for regenerative medicine, advanced diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other diseases, tissue engineering, and smart delivery of on-demand and site-specific therapies. His team’s work on nanomaterials also could advance sustainability by improving performance of fuel cells and catalytic converters.

Xia has collaborated on more than 900 publications and patents, with more than 200,000 citations. He is a fellow of the American Chemical Society, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the Materials Research Society. A Georgia Tech faculty member since 2012, Xia is the inaugural editor-in-chief of the journal Materials and Interfaces.