Professor Stephen Young

Photo of Professor Stephen Young

MS PhD FRS FREng

Life Fellow
Emeritus Professor of Information Engineering

Biography

Steve Young was Professor of Information Engineering until his retirement in 2017. He received a BA in Electrical Sciences from Cambridge University in 1973 and a PhD in Speech Processing in 1978. He held lectureships at both Manchester and Cambridge Universities before being elected to the Chair of Information Engineering at Cambridge University in 1994. He was Head of the Information Engineering Division from 2002 to 2009, Head of the School of Technology from 2002 to 2004 and he was the University’s first Senior Pro-Vice Chancellor serving from 2009 to 2015. In addition to his role in the University, he was a co-founder and Technical Director of Entropic Ltd from 1995 until 1999 when the company was acquired by Microsoft. After a short period as an Architect at Microsoft, he returned full-time to the University in January 2001. In 2013, he co-founded VocalIQ which was later acquired by Apple where he worked in the Siri Team from 2015 to 2019. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the Royal Academy of Engineering. He was awarded the CBE for services to Software Engineering in 2022.

Research

Steve's research interests lie in the area of spoken language systems and conversational AI, including speech recognition, speech synthesis and dialogue management. He is the original developer of the HTK Toolkit for building hidden Markov model-based recognition systems and he led the team that developed the HTK Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition System. He has written and edited books on software engineering and speech processing, and he has published as author and co-author, more than 400 papers in these areas. He was Editor of Computer Speech and Language from 1993 to 2004. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). He was awarded an IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award in 2004, the International Speech Communication Association Medal for Scientific Achievement in 2010, a European Association for Signal Processing Technical Achievement Award in 2013, the IEEE James L Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Field Award in 2015, the Cambridge Enterprise Lifetime Entrepreneurship Achievement Award 2021, and the IEEE Signal Processing Society Carl Friedrich Gauss Education Award in 2021.

Email