Steve Young (software engineer)

Young was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to software engineering.

In 2020 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)

He received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award in 2004, and the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement in 2010. He also received the European Signal Processing Society Individual Technical Achievement Award in 2013, and the IEEE James L Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award in 2015.

He is best known as the leading author of the HTK toolkit, a software package for using hidden Markov models to model time series, mainly used for speech recognition. Its first version was originally developed by Young at the Machine Intelligence Laboratory of the Cambridge University Engineering Department (CUED) in 1989. Due to the growing popularity of the toolkit worldwide, Microsoft decided to make the core HTK toolkit available again and licensed the software back to CUED after its acquisition of Entropic, the startup Steve co-founded in 1993 to distribute and maintain the HTK toolkit. The HTK book, which is the tutorial of the HTK toolkit, has received more than 7,000 citations.

Stephen John Young CBE FRS FREng (born 1951) is a British researcher, Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge and an entrepreneur. He is one of the pioneers of automated speech recognition and statistical spoken dialogue systems. He served as the Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 2009 to 2015, responsible for planning and resources. From 2015 to 2019, he held a joint appointment between his professorship at Cambridge and Apple, where he was a senior member of the Siri development team.

Young was born in Liverpool on 23 January 1951. He studied at the University of Cambridge, completing a BA in Electrical Sciences in 1973 and a PhD in speech recognition in 1978, under the supervision of Professor Frank Fallside at the Engineering Department. He held lectureships at both Manchester and Cambridge before being elected to the Chair of Information Engineering at Cambridge University in 1994.